This semester, I am teaching a selection of Dickinson poems in both my 12th-grade AP Lit class, and my 9th-grade American Lit survey. The way that I'm teaching these poems differs across the two grade levels, but it's been a lot of fun to direct my pedagogy of the same texts to two different audiences!

For the younger students, the emphasis is on close reading.  I usually ask questions such as the following:

Warm up questions:

1. I'll ask them which poem they want to start with, out of the 3-5 that we read for that day. Why did you want to start with this poem? Why does it strike you as interesting.
2. What are interesting features that you notice about the poem, such as diction, syntax, punctuation, capitalization, etc. 

Tougher questions:

1. Do you see a turning point or a volta in this poem (often indicated by a conjunction like "yet" or "but")? What kind of "thesis" or argument does the speaker make before the volta, and does the speaker amplify, qualify, contradict, or otherwise nuance this claim after the volta?
2. We go over the parts of a metaphor according to I.A. Richards: the vehicle (what bestows meaning) and the tenor (what receives meaning). Remember that a metaphor (or an implicit metaphor) is a type of argument. What does it mean to say that "my life" is "a loaded gun," for example? What are the qualities of the vehicle (here, "gun") that are transferred over to the tenor (here, "life")?

Those are my general strategies, and from there I will add additional questions based on the content of the poem. 

For the older students, the emphasis is on learning some major trends in Dickinson criticism alongside close reading. We spend four class periods on Dickinson, and the theme of each class is as follows: 

Day one: Text as performance (manuscript studies) and religious antinomianism.
We read the following poems to discuss this topic: 1 (Valentine week), 258 (There's a certain Slant of light), 712 (Because I could not stop for Death), 632 (The Brain—is wider than the Sky), and 1651 (A Word made Flesh is seldom).  Then, one my students presents the article below, according to the requirements of the homework presentation assignment.

Gilliland, Don. “Textual Scruples and Dickinson's 'Uncertain Certainty.'” The Emily Dickinson Journal 18.2 (2009): 38-62.

Day two: Mourning and eroticism
We read the following poems to discuss this topic: 341 (After great pain, a formal feeling comes), 216 (Safe in their Alabaster Chambers), and 640 (I cannot live with You). Again, a student then takes the reins to present the following critical article:
 
Diehl, Johanna. “The Poetics of Loss: Erotic Melancholia in Agamben and Dickinson.” American Imago 66.3 (2009): 369-381.

Day three: Madness and/or oppression
We read the following poems to discuss this topic:  280 (I felt a Funeral, in my Brain), 465 (I heard a Fly buzz – when I died), and 670 (One need not be a Chamber – to be Haunted). There usually isn't much need to assign a critical article for that. They almost always have a lot to say about the poems on their own, especially "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain."

Day four: The Civil War
To my mind, this is an invaluable addition to any discussion of Emily Dickinson. Students tend to have a lot of preconceived notions about her as a half-mad hermit, and a reclusive shut-in; however, she was actively engaged in the world around her, even if she did not leave her home very frequently. Putting her poetry in context with the historical moment in which she was writing is a great way to challenge notions that students have about 1) the boundaries between public and private speech, and 2) the way that women reacted to and engaged with the topic of war. 

We read 754 (My Life had stood, a Loaded Gun), 1732 (My life closed twice before its close), and 518 (When I was small, a Woman died). The last one in particular is associated with Dickinson's "war poetry." To this end, one of my students presents on the following article:

Friedlander, Benjamin. “Emily Dickinson and the Battle of Ball's Bluff.” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 124.5 (2009): 1582-1599.

The following is an assignment I've adapted from my dissertation director, Margie Ferguson. I give this assignment to my students in AP Lit, but it would be easily adaptable to a small undergraduate classroom, a discussion section, or even a graduate seminar!

First I look through the MLA database for accessible critical articles about the primary texts that we're reading. Then I have students sign up for individual articles. 

Here is the handout I give them, explaining the requirements for the presentation.

Grade the Reading Assignment
For this "Grade the Reading" exercise, give a letter grade to the essay you are presenting for your homework assignment.  Write down short answers to the following questions, which will help me and your classmates understand your overall judgment of the essay.  

1. Summarize the author's main argument. Do you think it is coherent? Is it persuasive? It can be hard to succinctly summarize a scholarly article, but try to do so in under 10 minutes.
2. Does the article give you interesting new ways to think about the subject of the article?
3. Does it give you interesting new ways to think about things beyond the subject of the article, like your own way of approaching literature?
4. What questions still remain after you have finished reading? These could be questions you would like to ask the author if you could, or questions for your classmates about the ideas presented in the article.

The great thing about this assignment is that tricky third question. This has been an amazing way to get students to articulate basic literary theory even if they haven't yet developed the vocabulary for it.

My students have been able to articulate pretty clear definitions of theory such as deconstruction ("this article seems to be more interested in the gaps in meaning, the way that our constructions seem to fall apart, rather than trying building up one, definitive meaning"), psychoanalytic theory ("the author of this article has no problem using Freud to talk about Shakespeare because of the way that Freud justified his theories by looking to literature for certain hidden but 'universal' truths that last over time"), and new historicism ("the scholar's anecdotal examples from history tell us as much about our present time as they do about the time when the primary text was written").

It's a fun, sneaky way to get some literary theory into the classroom without any grumbling from the peanut gallery!

This is the seventh and last post in a series. To start from the beginning, click here.

I think that digitization can and should transform how our students write about images as much as it has transformed how they read images. This last post in the series is especially focused on how I want to develop this assignment in the future, in part because of my experience grading my students’ analyses of the images. 

When I assigned the papers for this assignment, I did so like we almost always do in traditional classrooms: students submitted directly to me, and I graded in isolation. I found myself wishing that the students were reading each other’s papers, because they often differed in terms of how they thought an artist was interpreting the text and whether the artist was interpreting in a way that seemed appropriate to the play given the actual language of The Tempest. Because the papers were focused on a limited collection of images, the papers all spoke to each other in interesting ways—the papers seemed to be a conversation, really, rather than a dialogue between an individual student and a single reader, i.e., the teacher. 

This made me think about the core humanist principle that underpins our profession: reading is a social activity. When we read and write, we contribute to a scholarly dialogue through conferences and peer-reviewed publication. We read each other’s work and we situate our own responses in relationship to each other. If digital technology allows students remote access to images and classrooms, it should also allow students access to a modified form of the scholarly community that we all enjoy, and which enriches our intellectual life. Here and elsewhere, my thinking on this subject has been profoundly influenced by Katherine Rowe.

Using the Digital Humanities in the classroom allows for a model of reading that is based on co-authorship and turns students into co-producers of dialogue or discourse rather than as individual consumers of knowledge or text.  Rather than presenting the “Jane Eyre” model of reading (wherein readers withdraw to read in seclusion), teachers can use digital formats to offer students a gateway to social experiences, so that they come to see reading and writing as forms of social experience in their own right.

As Jeffrey Schnapp argues, this requires teachers to “design” knowledge through experimenting with the traditional forms of the essay:

To some degree, this means that we need to design or use already existing platforms to allow students to share and read each other’s work in interesting new ways.  My aim is to create a writing assignment that is polyvocal so that students can see interpretation at work, with scholars and with each other.   

My plan for next semester is to use tumblr as a platform to publish a class “Ariel Project,” since tumblr allows for both images and text to be shared.  I will submit to the class tumblr paragraphs from scholarly essays related to Ariel, and students will submit self-selected paragraphs from their own essays and images related to the painting that they have chosen (there are higher resolution versions readily available for all of the paintings archived at Shakespeare Illustrated; these higher-resolution images can be manipulated by zooming in on pertinent details and cropping out extraneous details). 

I will ask students to post their submissions and read each other’s paragraphs after they have turned in their final papers to me. Then, I will dedicate the next meeting after the paper is due to an in-class conference. Students who write about the same image will be respondents to each other, drawing attention to how their classmates combined interpretations of text and image in ways that surprised them. My aim is to show students their work alongside others, so that they can start thinking of themselves as experts in training, scholars of Shakespeare and of visual rhetoric who have a voice to contribute to the conversation.

Although I have outlined detailed plans for a very specific lesson plan and writing assignment for only one of Shakespeare’s plays, I believe that the core concept of the assignment can be extrapolated outward to Shakespeare’s other plays and to classrooms outside of advanced high school courses.  Even larger lecture classes could employ a class tumblr, and the in-class conferences could be conducted in the discussion sections.  I think that this assignment is actually ideal for an undergraduate classroom, since it is at this stage of their education that students first begin to situate their close-readings in relation to scholars through conducting MLA research. Thinking of a painting or an engraving as an interpretation of a text and then situating their own arguments about Shakespeare’s play in relationship to that other “scholar’s” (i.e., the artist’s) interpretation will help students to transition away from isolated close-readings to research-based papers. The Digital Humanities offer us a way to empower our students so that they can become producers of discourse who act collaboratively in a social reading practice.