Connections with 200-level Lit Courses

The material below provides basic information about the teaching of literature and writing in all our Department's introductory literature courses. Please read this overview before making up your syllabus. The Department also now has a website, e200, designed specifically for instructors of our 200 level courses:

http://www.gmu.edu/departments/english/e-200

 

Site password:  Because e200 is an arena for candid observations about what has and hasn't worked in our classrooms, the site is password protected. To get the userid and password, contact the Coordinator for the ENGL200-level literature courses, Eric Anderson.  We ask that you share these passwords only with other experienced, new, or prospective instructors of our courses.

On the e200 site, you will find not only sample syllabi but also sample assignments and assessment tools; brief reflective essays exploring the uses and value of particular teaching practices, texts, and media; observations about our students as learners; bibliographic suggestions on or related to pedagogy; and an updated list of events on and off campus, a few of which you may wish to urge or require the students to attend.

 

Goals of ENGL200-Level Literature Courses


ENGL201, ENGL202, ENGL203, and ENGL204 all have a basic dual mission: to promote careful reading and clear writing. These objectives should be of equal importance and receive equal attention when designing syllabi, allocating classroom time, devising learning activities, and evaluating students' performances.

These courses are also an introduction to characteristic ways of thinking in the humanities. They should encourage the joys of reading and analysis as well as a recognition of how literature presents the great debates of past and present cultures.

 

CLASSROOM PRACTICES

The Interactive Classroom
Because the English Department has succeeded in keeping class size small enough to enable discussion, we have worked to de-center the classroom, to move away from over dependence on the standard lecture and to encourage more interactive discussion and group work. We consider in-class exchanges—instructor-to-student and student-to-student—as an invaluable part of the ENGL200-level experience. We want to cultivate our students' ability to speak out and to listen, to share their ideas, to engage in the give and take of intellectual life.

Making Objectives Explicit
To balance the free-flowing character of the interactive classroom, we are mindful of the need to clarify the objectives of both the course and specific sessions. Tell students at the outset that ENGL200-level courses aim to develop their interpretive and analytical skills. Name, describe, and demonstrate specific skills as often as possible. For example, has the goal of a specific class discussion been the discovery and effective application of a certain kind of metaphor? Or the identification of a certain kind of narrative structure? Or construction of a relationship between text and political context? What will the students be responsible for? What should they be sure to include in their notes? Let them know. Remember too that important goals of a class session need to be restated and reinforced at the close of the period.

Teaching Literary Terminology
Most students are unfamiliar with key literary terms, so plan to teach some. Take time to define the terms and to help students to discover and demonstrate their uses. Reinforce this learning on subsequent occasions. You may want to highlight them with supplementary hand-outs and put them in quizzes and on exams.

Acknowledging Diverse Literary Approaches
Ours is not a field with much consensus. We bring different theoretical assumptions and literary methodologies to our teaching. When relevant, you should call attention to your own and acknowledge the existence of alternative assumptions and methods. But please keep in mind that the ENGL200-level courses are not surveys of literary theories.

Class Participation
George Mason University does not have a policy making attendance mandatory, so we cannot require students to attend class. We need to anticipate and actively counter absenteeism, which tends to worsen over the semester as students' stresses accumulate. To reinforce the value of in-class work, you can and should grade some of it. Many instructors devote 10% of a final grade to class participation. We recommend quizzes or other graded in-class writings to ensure an adequate level of attendance.

Course Readings
Syllabi found on e200 will give you a sense of what books and literary works other instructors of these courses have used. The website also includes advice from other instructors about specific literary works that have worked well or bombed in their courses and reviews of various anthologies used in 200-level courses. Sample anthologies are available in the University Writing Center (Robinson A114) and English Department's lounge, and you are welcome to consult or borrow them.

Though you are not required to assign an anthology, price considerations and the range of works in such texts lead us to recommend their use. In choosing books and specific literary works, we aim for cultural diversity. An ENGL200-level course should acknowledge both our multi-cultural canon and our multi-cultural student body by including works whose authors vary in gender, ethnicity, race, and even nationality. Indeed, in ENGL201 and ENGL202 we urge instructors to provide selections of world literature in English and not just of the British and American traditions.

Amount of Reading
Each instructor must determine the right balance between reading/analysis and writing. You can also vary the pace, and thus improve reading performance, by developing a mix of short and long works. Point out to students that short readings one week will provide additional time for the completion of a long reading assignment in the next week. Remind them well in advance when approaching a long or complex text and help them to budget their time.

TEACHING WRITING

Amount
The minimum requirement in all ENGL200-level literature courses is 3,500 words for which students receive feedback and grades. But students' written work will probably exceed this minimum, given the revision process and the combination of formal essays and briefer, less formal writing assignments that these courses generally include.

Types of Assignments and Rationales
In these courses students learn to write analytical essays that demonstrate their skills in reading and interpreting. By the end of the term, they should be able to develop and state a thesis about a literary work and to provide substantial textual evidence in support of it. They should also know how to document their citations using MLA style. It is useful to remember that students enrolling in the ENLG200 level courses will have already taken a course or demonstrated proficiency in composition (at George Mason, ENGL100/101). You will want, then, to help students to sustain and hone basic writing skills to which they have already been introduced. We are preparing our students for participation in communities of readers and writers, both within George Mason and outside in the work force, that value clear, cogent, and grammatically correct writing.

Instructors vary in the number and length of the analytical essays they assign. But because practice and your feedback are essential to students' improvement, we recommend four 3-4 page papers. Because the Department is committed to the process approach to writing instruction, we also suggest that some of these essays be peer reviewed: students would read and respond to drafts in small groups and, after this consultation, revise their own papers further before turning them in.

Students should be given other opportunities to write as well. We recommend assigning some in-class essays. These may be graded as timed writing, with less emphasis given to revision and proofreading than in take-home assignments. They provide an important additional way to evaluate your students' development and help them to learn to write under pressure. Examinations that require substantial essays may serve the same purpose.

In addition, you might assign briefer, more informal writing both in and out of class as an aid to learning about literature. Such activity might consist of short, focused essays on a text, produced in class or as homework due on the day that the text is to be discussed; reading response journals; contributions to an online class discussion such as those provided through WebCT and TownHall; parodies and other, serious efforts to imitate assigned readings; and summary pieces at the end of a class.

Topics
Although topics vary certainly, from course to course and within any one course, there are prevalent types. Some instructors ask their students to write papers analyzing the effects of a literary technique--such as irony or a third-person omniscient narrator-- in a particular text. Others assign papers on a theme of the course or on the social world represented by a fiction. They may prompt students to consider a feature of a single text or to compare that feature in two or three texts. These assignments are all pertinent because they require students to explain, analyze, and evaluate texts and to support these efforts with evidence.

Plagiarism
Keep in mind that writing assignments on traditional topics (particularly themes or characters) and on standard texts, increase the opportunity for plagiarism. There is less likelihood of plagiarism when papers are peer reviewed or you are following students' processes of writing in other ways. Please make your students aware of the English Department's Statement on Plagiarism. Several plagiarism-related links are also available on our website.

Feedback on Essays
We recommend the following practices:

Grading Papers
Evaluation should take into account the quality of both the writing and the literary analysis. These concerns are of equal importance in ENGL200-level courses. It is tempting to reward perceptive analytical insights, but remember to factor into your grade the level of the writing that conveys them. Moreover, although student effort is an important consideration, our final responsibility is to pass only those students who have mastered ENGL200-level writing and interpretive skills.