This is the first essay in my new series on teaching for the Kenyon Review, Adventures in Pedagogy. Each year that I teach college English, film, composition, and creative writing, my desire to anatomize the kaleidoscopic pedagogical process grows. To this end, I asked two very impressive professors—Dr. Elisabeth Frost who teaches at Fordham and Dr. Nicholas Birns who teaches at NYU—to share a recent class assignment that yielded exciting results.
While Birns and Frost take different approaches to student engagement, their assignments echo one another in compelling ways. Frost asks her students to literally pound the pavement as newly minted flâneurs and flâneuses, who have just read such writers as Baudelaire and Lauren Elkin (author of Flâneuse), while Birns asks his students to perform a more figurative mapping of textual terrain.
Furthermore, Frost asks that her students assume the flâneur role from day one, including with her book list for class the following note:
Your first assignment is to check out one of the only independent bookstores remaining in New York City, Book Culture. After picking up your books, do some browsing. Then walk half a block to Amsterdam and visit St. John the Divine and see one of the world’s largest churches (and the largest cathedral in the world). After that, head toward 110th and have a cappuccino at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, a NYC intellectual hub for the Beats, among others.
For her class assignment, Frost asks students to use Frank O’Hara’s poem that chronicles his wanderings from MOMA to Times Square and back, “A Step Away From Them,” as a touchstone while they “follow O’Hara’s route except that you should not walk straight down Sixth Avenue, but rather take at least two round-the-block detours via side streets. Take notes and take photos along the way. You are doing field work.”
Frost also asks that her students think on these questions as they wander:
What is it that you find yourself feeling—physically, emotionally—as you take your walk? From your walk, what do you learn about New York City? Consider the people you see or encounter—do they seem to be tourists, commuters, or what? Note details: How fast/slow are people walking and with what apparent attitudes or moods? What catches your attention in the architecture, buildings, or advertisements that you come across? What is the relationship between sidewalk and street—pedestrians and cars (or other vehicles)? What happens as the neighborhood shifts from MoMA to Times Square? Is there anything left of the landmarks that O’Hara describes? What might Frank O’Hara think of either area today? Is this “his” city, still?
In a way that will stand out to other teachers, here Frost asks that her students “close-read” their city, posing the very questions that will cause it to open before them in new ways, as a text does under just such a close reading.
For his part, in order to make his students see the text anew, Birns takes the tricky route of employing the newer mindset of the digital humanities to old-school modes of interacting with text. Birns believes that digital humanities techniques, such as word clouds, Ngrams, and topic modeling, are valuable in that “they approach the material from a nonhuman point of agency, which, inevitably, is a bit schematic at times but has the virtue of looking at potentially too familiar material through a different lens.”
With this in mind, he gives the following exercise:
What I like to do in class is to reverse-engineer this and have the students, with nothing but book and paper, do this themselves. This can occur in different ways. Students can underline words they notice occurring with frequency, and write on patterns they discern. Or each student can mark or note their favorite passages, or things they notice in the course of reading. Thus each student makes their own map of the book, which does not presume an overall reading of the book, but is not totally subjective either, as it is guided by the scheme of having to find a given amount of data in the book.
When we consider Frost’s assignment and Birns’s assignments together, the kind of journey Birns asks his students to take, this mapping out of text, engages in an intriguing dialogue with the trajectory of Frost’s wandering students. Birns intends for this methodical mapping to bring out the lyrical quality of a text, just as Frost hopes that her assigned form of flânerie, using a given text as a touchstone, will summon the lyrical quality of a city.
Thanks for reading this first essay in the Adventures in Pedagogy series. I’m hoping to build a collection of useful information for teachers, so I’m including some helpful pedagogy resources below–and I’m always looking for new ones, so feel free to reach out with any suggestions in the comments!
Pedagogical Resources:
The Chronicle of Higher Education: Pedagogy Unbound
The New York Times Learning Network
Academy of American Poets: Teach This Poem
The Derek Bok Center For Teaching and Learning at Harvard
Northwestern Searle Center For Advancing Learning and Teaching
University of Michigan Center For Research on Learning and Teaching