I attended a class of General Education Literature taught by Sarah Barringer in 201 BCSB at 2:00-3:15 p.m. on February 13, 2024. Of the 24 students enrolled, 22 were present for this engaging session, centering on the assigned reading of the middle part of Beowulf. Sarah’s objectives for this class were to get the students to understand a text from a significantly earlier period, engage with it, and see the potential relevance for their lives and the present day. In this she was clearly successful, with students engaged throughout the 75 minutes, apparently keeping up with the reading, and keen to comment, raise questions, and ponder the material.
This was a carefully planned class session with many intriguing elements designed to draw in student participation. The broad outline of the session was presented on the digital screen, along with a handwritten list of key questions unfurled on a whiteboard. Sarah presented at the start the outline of the class, including encouragement for extensive participation.
Particularly striking was the conduct of the broad ranging discussion. Here, students articulated their questions in relation to the reading – many at the level of the plot, but quite a few rising to more complex levels of engagement with context, values, and world view – all pursued with a game-playing twist. The speaker was whoever held a soft toy (a whale), who would make their observation and then look around the class, throwing the soft toy to whoever caught their eye to go next. The teacher at the front of the class busily wrote down the questions on the computer, which were then thrown up on the projector. This proved a successful strategy. Well over half the class made observations, all following the protocol of the soft toy but effectively self-organizing, without the teacher ever needing to adjudicate or call upon anyone, while the students could see that they were being heard by the presence of their question in the document developing on the screen.
Another participatory tactic was even more striking to me. The teacher followed the first main discussion section with a period of reflective silence. This was in the plan for the day originally projected on the screen and proved to be what it said. After the whale discussion, Sarah called for two minutes of silence, pens down, keyboards refrained from, as students digested their thoughts so far and prepared themselves for another discussion. The students took it seriously. The break (90 seconds or so) was clearly challenging for a couple of students (tempted by their laptops and visibly trying to resist). After the break, class resumed with another discussion organized by the passing of the soft toy. Again, more than half the class joined in. That said, the shape of the discussion and the range of participants didn’t change much from earlier. In other words, the silence exercise didn’t lead to a substantially different dynamic, and yet it seemed to me an intriguing way of encouraging reflection and setting up the potential for a change. (In subsequent discussion, Sarah explained that the idea came from students in the class who felt intimidated by entering into discussion and thought this would give them more of an opportunity to marshal their thoughts.)
Small group discussion followed, and then, in another strategy to maintain a dynamic classroom, Sarah rearranged the groups to correlate with students’ majors and had students in similar majors discuss how Beowulf relates to their majors, and how the techniques of their major allows them to ask questions of the text. Students could use this prompt as a way of building up their next reading response or creative scholarship activity, and those around me immediately set to the task in an impressively collaborative way.
As class time came to an end, Sarah gave the students a quick summary of what had been covered and what to anticipate. While clearly a useful element of any session, I would add a caution here that students are fidgeting to gather up and leave in the final minute of a class, so placing such a wrap up a little earlier is wise, even if it makes for an anticlimactic final moments.
The fight with Grendel’s Mother was at the heart of the day’s reading, and I saw students get enlightened about plot details, about how to construct the monstrous and the uncanny, and think about issues of power and patriarchy with some application to the present day in a class session that had engaged students who might not have expected to see much of interest in Beowulf. Sarah is clearly an effective teacher, thoughtfully crafting a non-teacher-centric class environment that successfully draws students in to the reading of literature.