literature – Page 2 – Allan Johnson, PhD

7 Questions to Help Students Use and Understand Secondary Sources

Posted on July 7, 2013 by Allan Johnson in Teaching

May 2009: Academic Writing & ESL Resources Display — (Photo credit: tclibrary)

The university-level study of English is paradoxically both an individual and collaborative effort, with students developing their own analytical skills while simultaneously learning to think in collaborative ways with tutors and fellow students. What this paradox demonstrates, of course, is that communicating with those around you plays a significant role in the development of ideas, including communicating with the critical body of material surrounding the topic (even if the line of communication is, in this case, distinctly one-way).

Academic writing, even at the most introductory level, is not created in a vacuum. Indeed, any piece of writing that students produce will be be a conglomeration of voices—some contemporary, some more distant—and their success in that writing will be dependent upon how well they harness this mass.

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Alan Hollinghurst and Some Archeological Digging

Posted on June 15, 2013July 7, 2013 by Allan Johnson in Observations

It’s not very often that my research requires me to get involved with something as interesting as archeology, but in tying up some last pieces for my new book The Vitality of Influence: Alan Hollinghurst and a History of Image (Palgrave Macmillan, early 2014) I have found myself tracking down archeological digs in some surprising places.

At the centre of Hollinghurst’s 1988 début The Swimming-Pool Library is the grand home of Lord Charles Nantwich, which is somewhat awkwardly hanging on in the City of London as the last reminder of a very different time. One of the most fascinating features of Charles’s house is that it is covering the remains of a Roman bath, which serves as one of the points of reference for the novel’s paradoxical title.

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“How Do You Consume Your Media?” It’s Time to Get Serious

Posted on March 15, 2013July 7, 2013 by Allan Johnson in Teaching

This week I reminded my students that if they are serious about getting a good job in writing or communications then they need to get serious about their media consumption. That means: a daily newspaper with an international focus, a weekly news magazine, and two to three high-quality monthly magazines. ‘But that doesn’t require you to read everything cover-to-cover’, I assured 22 horrified faces. Rather, a good media consumption strategy gives you the framework to dip in and out of the most important events in the world, and allows you to feel connected to ideas bigger than yourself. During interviews for the jobs that students with an English Studies degree will go into–marketing, journalism, PR, publishing, teaching, to name merely a few–the question of ‘how do you consume your media?’ is becoming an increasingly common starting point. And the response needs to be a bit more developed than ‘oh, I read Heat every Tuesday.’

It is advice that I give to students every year, but with the recent announcement that later this summer Google will be dropping Google Reader–their pleasingly functional and well-connected RSS reading platform–I began to think once again about how I consume my media. I will be the first to admit that my methods of media consumption have been, until recently, what might be called… shady. I’m of the generation of Napster and torrents, after all. I’m part of the first generation of people who had computers in their bedrooms as children, paving the way for a bit of illegal downloading beginning with the era of Sugar Ray and Savage Garden and moving onward. When a good friend of mine introduced me to the world of illegal .epub files for my Kindle, I was hooked. But putting aside all the economic and moral arguments against illegal file sharing–and I do have a profound respect for musicians and writers, and believe they are owed fair compensation for their work–I have my own personal reasons for recently taking my media consumption more seriously. And by that, I mean, exchanging cold, hard (digital) cash for the pleasure of consuming.

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Making the Most Out of Experiential Learning: 5 Things That Work for Me

Posted on November 10, 2012July 7, 2013 by Allan Johnson in Teaching

Over the past several years I have experimented with experiential learning in my teaching: how it’s presented, how it’s managed, and how it’s evaluated. This semester I have rolled out a full-scale experiential learning component for my module on the Twentieth-Century British Novel–and this has only come after a great deal of trial and error. For this part of the module assessment, students are required to write an essay reflecting on one of the several experiential learning activities taking place over the course of the semester. In this essay they must first identify how they understood one specific aspect of a text we studied before the experiential learning activity, and then how their understanding of that aspect changed or was modified after the activity. This type of critical analysis demands a great deal of self-reflexivity from students, but I have been extremely pleased with how the work has gone so far. In previous years, students haven’t so easily taken to the challenges of self-reflexive thinking, but there have been five key lessons that I have learned along the way:

1) Explicitly introduce the goals of experiential learning

It is often students–rather than faculty boards or senior colleagues–who are most resistant to innovation in learning and teaching. Students generally begin university with a clear preconception of what learning will entail (e.g. read book, listen to lecture, discuss in seminar, write essay), and breaking from this anticipated course of learning can quickly create confusion or concern. This confusion is an issue that I address head-on. When introducing experiential learning assignments or activities, I very explicitly explain the goals and objectives. ‘We are working on recognizing that the literature we study doesn’t exist in a vacuum–it is still being molded and changed by our perceptions of the world around us. As we begin to recognize how our daily lives impact upon our understanding of literature, we not only become stronger readers of literature, but stronger readers of everything that surrounds us.’ This big-picture overview really does help students to understand how experiential learning fits into their programme as a whole, and what they might hope to get out of it.

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