NOBODY LIKES A TOURIST

Our goal should be to promote understanding rather than to simply provoke interest or empathy, of course, and I would argue that the one can naturally develop from the other. Seeing the bloodstained notes Whitman made at the bedsides of wounded soldiers, students can come away not only with a deeper personal connection to his writing but also with new questions about the sources and evolution of his poems.

What you see below are five representations of basically the same event. On the top left you will find a typed transcription of the Whitman verse called "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim." This version was published in the 1865 and 1867 editions of Drumtaps. The image on the top right shows the same poem as it appears in the anthology I use in my American literature course. Immediately below that, you will find the digitized image of a page from Whitman's notebooks available at the American Memory site of the Library of Congress.

A SIGHT IN CAMP IN THE DAYBREAK GRAY AND DIM   A sight in camp in the daybreak gray and dim, As from my tent I emerge so early sleepless, As slow I walk in the cool fresh air the path near by the hospital tent, Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying, Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket, Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all. Curious I halt and silent stand, Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest the first just lift the blanket; Who are you elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-gray'd hair, and flesh all sunken about the eyes? Who are you my dear comrade? Then to the second I step--and who are you my child and darling? Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming? Then to the third--a face nor child nor old, very calm, as of beautiful yellow-white ivory; Young man I think I know you--I think this face is the face of Christ himself, Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.

The very sight of the notes, written as battlefield operations were taking place nearby, forces us to take Whitman's descriptions seriously. Indeed, the sight of these notes had much the same effect on Whitman himself, who wrote in the opening pages of Specimen Days:

But these pages offer more than testimony to the experiences that grant Whitman's poems authenticity, for by reading the notebooks we can witness the evolution of many of his poems. For example, yet another treatment of the same material; the poem below appeared in the 1910 (deathbed) edition of The Leaves of Grass. The pages from the notebooks in combination with the two versions of the poem make it possible to gain some insight into how Whitman's mind and writing worked as he moved from field notes to a published poem and then a second version of the poem drawing on the same materials.

 

Using Resources to Teach the Normality of Hypertextuality

As should be evident from this example, the notebooks alone offer a powerful resource for teaching Whitman. But the case of Whitman also offers a wonderful example of the range of resources that can be found on the web and the way they can contribute to a new understanding of significant texts and historical moments. There is a dizzying array of other materials to help contextualize Whitman's work.. The Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive at the University of Virginia includes "Biographical material", "Whitman's Works," "Manuscripts," "Notebooks and Letters," and even "Reviews of Whitman's Works." (NOTHING gives students a greater sense of freedom to think for themselves than the realization that today's monuments were once merely the butt of criticism more harsh than that received by most students from their teachers.)

The very name chosen by UV to describe the Whitman project, "a Hypertext Archive," appropriately directs our attention to one of the great truths about teaching, learning, and technology. Each text, figure, idea, or event is a hypertext and has been a hypertext since before there was such a word to describe the phenomenon.. What technology offers is the opportunity to recognize, exploit, and explore the hypertextuality of works in order to develop new levels of understanding. Now it is easier to make students understand the hypertextuality of a great work of literature or a historic document because some of the links between that text and the world beyond its margins can be graphically represented by hyperlinks and explored with the simple click of a mouse button. It takes only a relatively short step, then, for a student to identify the way the work links to yet another resource, even though no hyperlink advertises the connection through a brighty colored underlined key word. As students move from following links to making them in their own minds, in class discussions, in their papers, or on their own web pages--they are moving from tourism to exploration.

Academics have always explored the ways things link to one another; this is an essential part of reserach. Scholars studying Uncle Tom's Cabin, for example, share a common interest in the text but follow individual trails that radiate outwards in countless directions. In the days when student research was necessarily based solely on the resources available on the shelve of the college library, very few such paths would have been available to undergraduates writing about that same novel. Students could have assembled some biographical information about Stowe, and they could probably have pulled together some basic information about abolitionism. With a little work, they could have located some articles in which Stowe scholars recounted the results of their research. Today, by typing in the key phrase "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in the search engine of their choice, students can find the very materials and topics that scholars use to produce those articles. . Here are examples of the kinds of results a student might get on his or her first page of "hits":

Using just a few of the first ten listing from two searches, we have already located several versions of the text, several discussions of dramatizations, information on the serialized newspaper version that preceeded the book, biographical information on Stowe and her family, illustrations from early editions of the novel, photographs, information about the novel's publishing history, and some of Stowe's correspondence. (Remember, these were just a few initial results from two very basic sources.) In fact, students can make significant steps towards setting up their individual investigations simply by taking advantage of the University of Virginia's excellent site on: Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture.

While students are visiting the University of Virginia project, they can also find wonderful examples of the way academic thinking and writing are supposed to work. Essays such as "Uncle Tom's Cabin and Slavery," produced by Stephen Railton, and "Grow'd Again: Articulation and History of Topsy," by Jim O'Loughlin model the ways that scholars raise questions, frame arguments, employ evidence, and draw conclusions. These articles also demonstrate the way that a researcher can draw from a variety of resources to build an argument that is deep, yet focused. I have spent too many hours in my life reading "research" papers that can be described as quote one + quote 2 + quote 3 = quote 1 + quote 2+ quote 3. This is the final act of the play which opens with the student going to the library, taking three books off the shelf, taking one point or quotation from each book and writing an essay in which s/he summarizes the three points. I can, in fact, remember sitting on my dorm room floor, the three books fanned around me, trying to imagine an escape from the grip they seemed to have on my thinking about the novel I was analyzing. I also remember riding in an elevator with a fellow student who was puzzled that her professor had noticed and objected to the fact that she had composed her paper by using the first paragraph of each chapter of an anthology of essays on the subject. True, she knew that she had crossed the plagiarism line, but she thought what she had produced must have looked like real scholarship. Students need us to do more than offer resources, they need us to teach them how scholarship looks and works. Technology can help us solve this problem.

I'll let you in on a dirty little secret. I've never taught Uncle Tom's Cabin before and there are two good reasons why. First, I couldn't imagine how to teach it in a way that would allow the text to come alive for my students. Second, I couldn't imagine how to make it come alive when I read it myself. The same web-based resources that have now sparked my own interest in the novel are the ones I will use to inspire in my students a hunger to know more about Stowe's classic.

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Promoting Individual Inquiry and Collaboration:

Separate Paths that Cross and Meet at the Top

 

By now you may have noticed the obvious hole in my argument. Although I started out by admitting that there are always more topics to teach than time to teach them in, I have arguing since that point on behalf of a number of proposals which will clearly require more time from us rather than less. If we're going to have students read Uncle Tom's Cabin and dramatizations of the novel and treatments for juvenile literature and documents on slavery and Stowe's letters, aren't we really talking about the infinitely expanding syllabus?

In this case the problem is the solution. It takes more time for a student to inquire into a subject than to listen to someone else describe it. However, if a course is constructed as a collaborative inquiry, everyone does not have to investigate everything. Instead, each student (or team of students) can investigate one dimension of a topic and report the findings back to the class as a whole. Writing teachers long ago came to the conclusion that students needed to write more than any one teacher could possibly read. As a result they moved from being the grammar wardens and punctuation police to serving as mentors to developing writers.

This move towards fostering individual inquiry has the added advantage of enabling students to locate questions that connect to their own interests or curiosity in some way. In one particularly gruesome semester, I had a small class that included a senior who was the president of the English Honor Society, and a freshman with very weak basic skills who accidentally wandered into the course and did not realize her error until after the end of the add/drop period. After an initial period of tears (on the part of the freshman) and fears (on both our parts), the semester finally settled into a routine after students chose their projects. The highly academic senior ultimately produced a report on the way that groups women artists in the late nineteenth century could sometimes use their informal communities as a way of coping with the obstacles faced by working women.. To develop her project the student drew upon evidence provided by a collection of letters in the Way-Champlain papers in the manuscript holding of the American Antiquarian Society, a published biography of the Way sisters entitled Sisters of the Brush, and a number of other library and web-based resources. It was gratifying to read an undergraduate essay that might easily compete with the work produced in graduate courses. I will admit that I hesitated briefly before opening the pages of the project produced by the struggling freshman, but her essay also made a useful point. Fascinated by the dating rituals of the young women who were her own age in the mid-nineteenth century , she had immersed herself in conduct literature for young women in the nineteenth century and produced a solid discussion of conventions of polite conversation and behavior in that period.

Of course , even if you succeed in instigating students to pursue independent inquiries, a class can only function as a "collaborative inquiry" if the syllabus is designed to raise a significant question and then offer a series of texts and assignments that will lead to a sustained reflection on the question. Real scholarly thinking requires continuous thought over a long period of time. Anyone who has written a book, an article, or for that matter, a good assignment knows that the process always takes longer than seems reasonably justifiable--even to the author. I have never yet met an academic in the midst of a project who wasn't complaining about the geological slowness of the process. Just as we think we've finished, we notice a flaw in our argument or come across a remarkable but thesis-changing piece of evidence.

Unfortunately, time for sustained reflection is a luxury we rarely provide for our students, and understandably so. We need to "get in" a certain number of papers in a certain amout of time. We need the papers done in time to turn in grade warnings or mid-semester grades. We also have to deal with what I call the "chapter nineteen problem": the need to cover all of the chapters before the one at which the next course will pick up. Admittedly, all of those papers and tests connect to the same general subject, but they often are on entirely different aspects of the discipline.

This is why when I plan a course, I begin by framing a central question. Here, for example, the way I posed the course question for students in my Fall, 1999, Major American Writer's course:

 

After framing the question, I choose topics and texts that offer opportunities to follow up on that question. Next, I construct classroom activities, assignments, and major projects that offer students the opportunity gradually to build an answer to the question over the course of the semester. And in the process of building my assignments, I develop resource archives that students can use as starting points for their own research. Here is the front page of the archive, to view the resources, syllabi, or assignments from last year's course, click on the image.

 

Over the course of the coming semester my students will be investigating the evolution of an American national identity by researching and reflecting on the kinds of beliefs, values, and behavior celebrated in American literature. To this end, we will be paying particular attention to the way autobiographies, conduct manuals, and novels about individuals in the process of "getting ahead." Franklin's Autobiography will provide one useful starting point for our investigations, later we will compare Franklin's advice with the counsel provided by various types of advice literature and by Frederick Douglass's works. At the end of the semester, students will do a major project focusing on Edith Wharton's House of Mirth and late nineteenth and early twentieth century codes of etiquette. If you're interested in a closer look at the assignment, resources, and goals of that assignment, visit:

(For another package of questions and resources, see "Contextualizing Frederick Douglass.")

A faculty member who chooses to use technology to teach students how to engage in academic inquiry and place texts in contexts must take on at least three important roles. As a mentor, the teacher must respond to the needs and inquiries of each student or group by offering suggestions about methods and resources and interpretations. The teacher must also serve as the moderator for the course inquiry by setting timelines and goals, raising questions for general discussion, scheduling frequent opportunities for progress reports, and creating an ongoing discussion which promotes collaboration and synthesis. Ideally, each student or small group of students should be developing an area of expertise while pursuing an individual line of inquiry. Class discussions and other forms of communication should allow students to share questions, hypotheses, and resources. Class discussions should also allow students to collaborate in piecing together a sense of the topic that goes beyond the confines of their individual projects.

In fact, this is how work gets done in the academic "real world." I've done little more than borrow for my classroom the model I learned as a researcher at the American Antiquarian Society. When a new research fellow arrives at the AAS, he or she is brought around the library and introduced to the staff members, the fellows, and many of the readers so that people have an opportunity to share initial information about their projects and interests. The fellow will also have a chance sometime in the first few weeks to make a brief presentation before the staff and readers, outlining his or her questions and hypotheses, and the kinds of resources s/he is hoping to find in the course of the fellowship. In the discussion which follows that presentation, people join together to offer suggestions and additional questions. The personal introductions, and the staff talk, along with brown-bag lunch colloquiums and the contributions and encouragement of staff members foster the development of a conversation between the individual fellow and the other members of the AAS community that will continue at least throughout his or her period of residence, and often over the course of a lifetime. There are many afternoons in the reading room when you can watch a reader, excited over a new find, call researchers and librarians over to his or her table to share the material, the idea, and the moment.

My own participation in that community has helped me understand that no one of us, no matter how gifted, will ever be able to pursue research into all of the issues that matter in our disciplines or even our specialties. Paradoxically, however, this experience has also made me aware of the way in which these focused inquiries are part of the larger collaborative project of scholarship. Each time I learn something of the work of a new fellow, my understanding of my own projects expands. Although I've spent much of my time in the last few years studying the evolution of the preaching styles, reform interests, and professional lives of Boston's mid-nineteenth century Unitarian ministers, my own thinking about American literature and culture has been deepened by conversations with academics studying the place of sensational literature in the lives of young men, the diaries of Caroline Dall, the changing meaning of the witchcraft trials, American orientalism, representations of Native Americans in local histories, and even the history of hygiene. My intellectual life would be limited indeed if I could not see beyond the Unitarian ministers who presently populate my mind and continue to think about how they connect to the complex landscape of American history, culture, and literature.

And this is what I want for my students. I want them to experience the excitement of individual inquiry, the sense of self-respect that comes with the development of expertise, the intellectual stimulation that arises from exchanging information and viewpoints with other academics, and the kind of rich understanding that results when you can see your own conclusions as part of a much bigger picture.

Why, after all, do some people continue to hike when you can take trains, cars, or even helicopters to the top of the mountain these days? Because it's exciting to choose your own path to the top. Because it's satisfying to understand the view you see from the top since you have a working knowledge of that landscape so it's not just a pretty picture. Because despite the many challenges and hardships, you have a sense of self-respect because of the many challenges and hardships. As you grunt as you stretch to climb up to to the next rock, you pity the people in the car you hear whizzing by in the distance.

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The Toll Hiking Takes on the Teacher

or

"Boy, My Feet Hurt But I've Got a Great Appetite"

A colleague once asked me what she could do to make a first, small step into teaching inquiry. Unfortunately, the only honest answer is "Watch out, the first step's a doozy." I once heard computers described as a hole in your desk you throw money into. My own formulations is different: it's the hole in my desk I throw my life into. It takes time to find resources. It takes time to think through the implications of teaching in a wholly new way. And it takes a remarkable amount of time to put it all together into a functioning web-site. (I am writing this on a morning when I ran a check on a relatively small new site I am developing in collaboration with a colleague. I have just printed out an 85 page report listing linking errors. But school begins next week . . . ) So, yes, my feet hurt because when I make my students hike, I have to hike before them--and with them--and behind them.

And yet, since I first began teaching with technology I have found the benefits irresistible. As a faculty member with a 4/3 load at a college that makes leaching its first priority, I have always found it difficult to find time to do any research over the course of the school year. Now I find myself doing ongoing research, both in libraries and on-line, in order to provide my students with resources on upcoming topics. Because I am advising them on how to proceed with their own inquiries, I also regularly find myself talking about my own research projects, and that keeps my own questions in the forefront of my consciousness. Directing student projects has also had the effect of making me more conscious of my methods, and thus better able to improve them. As an added bonus, even though I still worry about having the time to grade papers, I actually look forward to reading them.

In fact, the thing I find most startling about using technology to teach for inquiry is the fact that I continue to benefit from the products of my students' investigations. I know that teachers are always supposed to say "I learn more from my students than they do from me," but I fear that is rarely true if we are really talking about our disciplines rather than our understanding of human nature or of the nature of learning. The freshmen in last year's Major American Writers course, on the other hand, directed my attention to material and questions that I might otherwise never have noticed. I can still remember the day a young woman came up to me after class and said: "You'll have to be sure to read An Indian Teacher Among Indians by Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin) because it makes great reading and connects to the same questions we've been discussing. I had put a link to that text on our on-line syllabus because we were reading Impressions of an Indian Girlhood by the same author, but I had never read work my student recommended. When I followed in her "footsteps," I encountered a text that has contributed to my understanding of some of the tensions between tradition and "progress" that seem characteristic of the American identity regardless of time, place, class, or ethnic group. I am looking forward to learning more from the new crop of freshmen in my course this fall.

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Getting There Fast By Going Slow What Thoreau Might Have Said About Teaching with Technology (But Didn't)

You have to have a lot of nerve to claim Thoreau as your patron saint while preaching the virtues of technology. But Thoreau's argument was not with technology but with how it was used. Listen closely to his complaint:

Too often computers become "pretty toys which distract our attention from serious things." If we use class time simply to show students one dazzling site after another, letting them "ooh" and "aah" as colors burst and fade across the screen and three-D titles rotate, we have once more reduced them to the business of simply admiring the view. If we simply assign students to "collect as many links as possible" rather than asking our classes to analyze, evaluate, and apply the evidence they collect, we are merely offering them an "improved means to an unimproved end." These approaches to technology don't move students off the bus and onto the mountain, they just add an attractive tint to the windows. As the caption of the drawing below asks:

While teaching with technology may seem to some to represent a move from academics to pointing and clicking, used wisely technology can create a better environment for old-fashioned hard work What I am advocating is the use of technology as a means of moving more slowly rather than more rapidly, in the classroom. Instead of covering more ground, I would like my students to travel the landscape of history, culture, and literature with greater care and attention. Each student can choose his or her own route to explore as we go, as long as our paths keep connecting and we all meet at the top. Although the time needed to pursue individual research topics means that my students may sometimes investigate fewer topics than they might in a traditional survey-style course, this causes me no worry. Together, the members of a single class can make up a formidable community of scholars who can collaborate in constructing an understanding of American literature that has both depth and breadth. By the end of the semester my students have pursued their own inquiries rather than listening to me talk of my own. I don't need to build my students' "self-esteem" because they have earned something much better: self-respect.