A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

304 ❘
Teaching in the disciplines
strategies. Students have responded particularly well, for example, when they
have been asked in advance to read Eavan Boland’s passionate arguments about
women in Irish writing ‘against the grain’, reflecting on rather than acquiescing
to the poet’s arguments in Object Lessons (London: Vintage, 2000). These exercises
help students navigate their way through unfamiliar texts. They are in turn built
into a course which is divided into three sections. The sections encourage the
students to think of the course in terms of plateaux and progress so that they can
develop a sense of achievement and development as the course proceeds.
In lectures and seminars, comparisons with texts students are already familiar
with, through prior or synchronous modules, is helpful. If they are using Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick’s ideas about sexuality elsewhere, they can be invited to
summarise their understanding of their ideas for the benefit of other students. As
in all seminars, students rely on the known to get to the unknown, but it is
important for the tutor not to be the only guide in this process: the sole authority
on interpretation when other direct sources of commentary on the texts in
question are not available. Locating the students as fellow critics through the use
of primary sources in the seminar can help you concentrate on developing
students’ independence. For instance, Bunreacht na hÉireann, the Irish
Constitution, is available online and students can be asked to read it as a paratext
for Colm Tóibín’s The Heather Blazing, which focuses on a Supreme Court judge
and his rulings on it. Short essays on Irish culture, like those to be found in the
Attic Press series of ‘LIP pamphlets’, can form the basis for staged debates in the
classroom, with groups of students adopting the position of one of the authors of
the secondary texts. The advantage of this kind of approach is that it stages critical
strategies for students and allows them to rehearse their critical voices before
they have to prepare their readings of the fiction they have studied. Simple
strategies, such as asking students to produce questions rather than answers in
seminars, and asking them to answer each other’s questions in small groups can
help to raise students’ awareness of the critical skills they already possess and
those they need to develop.
I find it is crucial to stress that learning how to operate as an independent critic
is as much the focus of a module as the fiction we are studying itself. This dual
focus on the fiction and the student-critics is enabled in part by the theoretical
issues with which my module of contemporary Irish fiction is concerned. The
students are being asked to reflect on the different ways in which Irish authors
draw on and move away from discourses associated with Irish nationalism. As
students make their first attempt to respond to texts independently they are
reflecting critically on how, and with what effects, the authors they are studying
and they themselves are moving away from what John McGahern calls ‘those
small blessed ordinary handrails of speech’ (1990: 52).
(Dr Siobhán Holland, English Subject Centre,
Royal Holloway University of London)