Above: Students in an Honors section of Later British Literature (1780 to present) preparing to conduct a press conference for Mary Seacole of The Wonderful Adventures of Mary Seacole in Many Lands (1857). Not pictured are at least five other equally photogenic and wonderful students.
Curiouser and Curiouser
My pathway of interdisciplinary intellectual discovery was, as Alice says in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) ever “curiouser and curiouser.” Engaging this spirit of cultivated curiosity has become the foundation for my teaching philosophy. For students to feel truly inquisitive about the humanities, I must provide them a space that is free for exploration, I must scaffold their learning so that they understand the many avenues of investigation available to them, and I facilitate connections between our learning and the world beyond the classroom. All of this work is oriented towards lofty ideals about lifelong learning that do tend to produce students who are motivated to pursue their interests in the humanities. However, these philosophies are also rooted in concrete pedagogies of kindness and fairness that help all students succeed in my classroom to become “curiouser and curiouser” no matter their interests or prior knowledge before entering my classroom.
Humane Policies
Providing a space that is free for exploration is about recognizing that all students come to the classroom with different embodied experiences. Some students come to the classroom with incredibly pressing concerns that make learning challenging: systemic issues, outside employment, and harassment are just some of the obstacles that my students face. As a result, I recognize how embodied existence can encourage flexible and kind classroom policies. Not all students have access to the same tools and resources, which makes thoughtful pedagogy and mentoring an essential part of any flexible and kind classroom. My policies are carefully designed based on current research to not put undue burden on my students with differences outside of the “norm.” For example, I use a self-scheduling policy where my students are able to choose their own deadline within a four-day period. This policy has virtually eliminated requests for extensions. I have a long history of teaching first-generation college students from various backgrounds, many of whom work full time. While my courses remain rigorous and challenging, my policies are humane and recognize that not every student enters the university environment with the same privileges.
Follow Where Curiosity Leads
In building interdisciplinary classes, my students often see that literature has the possibility to connect us to our passions, no matter what they are. Not interested in the writings of Charles Dickens? Well, what about the history of Victorian London? Or what about the developing technology that ravaged the environment? What about the progression of women’s rights? Or the theories of Charles Darwin that were transforming how people understood the natural world? In my courses, I provide as many options as possible for students to pursue their interests. For example, I will often end each day with a written reflection asking students where they want the class’s conversation to go next. While I am there as a guide, providing students with context relevant to the course’s topic, they know that they are free to wander off the beaten path when curiosity strikes.
Support and Structure
While student choice is important to me, students need scaffolding to help them relate their interests back to course goals. For example, to introduce students to poetry about nature, I assigned students a project to write their own narrative poem with a rationale. To prepare for this assignment, students spent weeks workshopping their ideas in small groups, practicing techniques like repetition (modeled by Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market), framing devices (modeled by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner), and imagery (modeled by Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head). After a discussion of the poetry and what its techniques added to their experience of the poem, students would work on blog posts where they practiced those same techniques and then came together in small groups to discuss the process. By the end of an average class, students walked away with portions of their narrative poem complete, brainstorming for their rationales ready to draft, and a fuller understanding of the poetry we studied. In crafting this project, students had many opportunities to pursue their own interests (and to see how other students were following their own curiosity down different pathways), but they also had the structure necessary to be successful in my goals for the course.
Meta-cognition
Part of imparting the importance of the humanities to non-majors (and enticing majors and minors to the discipline of English) is emphasizing the transferability of the courses I teach. One of the most effective ways to do this is through metacognition. For a class about science and literature, students were asked to reflect on how they had evolved during the course: What value does science add to the humanities? What value do the humanities add to the sciences? What will I take away from this class to use in my future courses or professional life? In a presentation to their classmates, these questions were answered thoughtfully by my students who were excited to make connections between literature and their own lives. Many students reported feeling surprised that their interest in STEM could find such expression in the humanities. Other students were excited to learn that English courses could relate so well to their job interests. One nursing major remarked excitedly her plan to take another course on literature and the environment, because “thinking about biology in our book [The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells] made my biology classes make so much more sense.” While not all students who enter my class will be converted into majors, by mentoring my students and encouraging them to make explicit connections between our work and their future goals, many of my students go on to enroll in future English courses or even minor in English.
The rabbit hole of intellectual curiosity can be thrilling, but academia is not always a Wonderland. It can be difficult to navigate without a mentor. It is my privilege to constantly seek new ways to facilitate curiosity and inquiry within the Humanities classroom through concrete pedagogical strategies and a supportive, flexible classroom.
Kristen Figgins, Ph.D. 