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[[This blog was original posted on January 23, 2013.]]
I’ve previously discussed on this blog ideas about the ambiguity and open-endedness of interpretation. Today I’m thinking specifically about how making connections across texts is central to the work of the literature classroom.
This is something, I think, that students often need to be given permission to do. I’m not sure if it’s a matter of fear that they’ll have the “wrong” answer, or if it’s simply a matter of not remembering things, but I’ve found that my students need some prodding to answer the question: “Does this text remind you of anything else we’ve read this semester?” While I certainly include that question among their reading journal assignments, I’ve also found that a bit more direct intervention is important.
Certainly, we can do our own modeling of making connections, announcing when we see a connection with something else in the text. (In fact, one of the things I love about teaching an intro to lit course is that I read things that are normally outside of my immediate area of expertise, and thus I begin to see connections I might otherwise have missed.)
But we can also create a situation where students are required to make those connections on their own.
I’ve found the following exercise to be helpful.
Sample questions (and these are drawn from various sources, including, most recently Judith Stanford’s Responding to Literature. I’ve been asking some of these questions for so long at this point, that I’ve lost track of which ones were inspired by what sources):
Directions for the group: Answer each question for each poem, keeping in mind where the poems have commonalities and where they have serious contrast:
Once my students have worked together — and after I’ve talked with each group — we come back together as a class to discuss individual poems and how each poet portrays death. When we deal with themes in literature such as mortality, love, learning, or any other big concept, we encourage students to deepen their understanding of the literature they read, and to connect these themes with their own lives and experiences.
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