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Other books on teaching English

Reviewed by Karen Schoenberger

Critique of Response and Analyis: Teaching Literature in Junior and Senior High School, by Robert E. Probst

“The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think - rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with the thoughts of other men.” – John Dewey (qtd.in Hahn)

Throughout an episode of the smart and quirky 1990’s television show, Northern Exposure, two cranky, corduroy-jacketed English professors heatedly argue about the obscure, deconstructed meaning of the familiar poem, “Casey at the Bat.” It takes the small town of Cicely, Alaska’s young disc jockey (and trusted town philosopher) to settle the intellectual war: he takes both professors, still hopelessly sparring, to the baseball field where, pitching and reciting lines about the ill-fated Mighty Casey, he effectively strikes both of them out. He then declares, disgustedly, that the poem is about nothing more than “that feeling right there” – pointing to both professors’ guts – that feeling of abject dejection of the last- hope, struck-out batter. Both pedants are finally struck speechless.

The scene is funny. It is also cathartic because most viewers have been students of English in this country and probably know all too well pompous windbag teachers like the ones portrayed in the show. Who couldn’t identify with the experience of classroom studies of literature being dusty and remote – available only to the teacher and the erudite few? In his book, Response and Analysis: Teaching Literature in Junior and Senior High School, Robert E. Probst argues against the model of teachers as authoritarian disseminators of pearls of accepted literary wisdom to their passive students. He says that, “Literature is not the private domain of an intellectual elite. It is instead the reservoir of all mankind’s concerns” (7). Probst pulls the literary text out of the grasp of scholars, historians and critics, and places it squarely in the hands of the student.

For secondary school English teachers, one of the most revealing and sobering points of Probst’s book comes on the first page: “Most secondary school students will not become professional literary scholars” (3). The idealistic and enthusiastic English teacher must accept that most students will not share their passion and zeal for literature. The question for teachers, then, is who is the secondary literature student, and what and how do we hope to teach him?

Probst relies heavily on the pioneering work of Louise M. Rosenblatt to understand the student as a reader and meaning-maker of literature. Rosenblatt, with works from the late 1930’s on, provides Probst’s foundation saying that, “Terms such as the reader, the student, the literary work, [. . .] are somewhat misleading, though convenient, fictions. There is no such thing as a generic reader or a generic literary work; there are only the potential millions of individual readers of the potential millions of individual literary works. A novel or poem or play remains merely ink spots on paper until a reader transforms them into a set of meaningful symbols” (Rosenblatt 24). For Rosenblatt and Probst, the literature class is based upon a student-centered learning environment where the student interacts with literature personally – responding, analyzing and making meaning in a transactional process. Their approach locates the teacher in a much different role than a dispenser of knowledge who helps students find a correct meaning in the text. The teacher becomes a counselor of sorts helping the students to navigate their own thinking, make their own meaning.

Both Probst and Rosenblatt ground their work in reader-response critical theory which is oppositional to New Critic theory. New Critics assume that there is one perfect reading of a work with other responses or readings “[. . .] lying on a continuum at a greater or lesser distance from [that] hypothetical perfect reading” (Probst 14). The New Critic view implies a perfect reader too: “[. . .] presumably the one most experienced and best able to suppress his individuality in the interest of objective, uncontaminated reading” (Probst 14). Meaning, then, is isolated in the text.

Probst points out that the implication for teaching and curriculum development from the New Critics’ perspective is that literature is a body of knowledge – accepted meanings, literary facts and terms, and historical information – that a teacher imparts to a submissive student. Probst warns, correctly, that, “Programs developed to teach a body of information tend, unfortunately, to attempt to create literary historians and critics before they create readers” (9). Probst acknowledges that facts about literature and its historical value may be considered and even important, but he relocates their significance behind the reader and what the reader brings to the discussion.

Probst explains that reader-response theory moves the focus of meaning from the text to the reader. The reader creates meaning from the text by interacting with it personally. Authorial intent, biographical facts, form and other literary points of interest may be important, but they are only pieces of a bigger mosaic of meaning created ultimately by the reader. Probst springs from the reader-response platform to offer a response-based method of teaching literature. He says, “The task in teaching literature is to help students to think, not to tell them what to think” (16). By an interactive process of reading, responding and analyzing responses, students create and recreate –experience - literature.

Probst’s response-based teaching enlivens the classroom with text, reader, other readers and other texts all playing roles in making the students’ experience with literature broader and more enriching. He devotes an entire section of his tripartite book to understanding the young reader, offering advice and suggestions to teachers about how to best bring out authentic and thoughtful responses from students. He gives some helpful examples with specific pieces of writing to illustrate how a student-centered, response-based learning experience might flow. Particularly useful is the “crude checklist” or catalogue of the range of possible student responses from personal to topical, interpretive, formal and broader literary concerns (56-63). He makes clear, though, that these categories, like all attempts to organize thought in the literature class, are overlapping and roughly drawn. He says “[. . .] the range of response is, of course, infinite” (56). Yet, he provides the teacher with many possible ways to stimulate the student within the ranges, and he identifies problems teachers should consider with each type of response. The ultimate success of the method, however, will be determined by the teacher’s ability to formulate the best probing questions for the individual student and class as a whole to keep the process of inquiry active. Key, too, is that the literature itself is or becomes personally significant to the student.

If a student does not care about their work, all hope is lost for the teacher. Probst devotes the second section of his book to making literature personally meaningful to the student, using the student as a guide for informing the curriculum. Here again, he adroitly uses examples of genres and elements such as plot, conflict, theme, even bad poetry as entry points to discussing literature. Perhaps the greatest contribution he makes to the idea of student-centered literature studies are his chapters about the growing and important body of literature written specifically for adolescents as well as the use of visual literature, film and television, in the classroom. He provides an extended bibliography for adolescent literature which he divides into themes (arbitrarily drawn, of course) that are likely to interest adolescents. He is not timid either: two themes he emphasizes that are of particular interest to adolescents are sex and violence, warning that teachers are not to teach about sex and violence, but about literature that deals with sex and violence.

Moving from the reader/student to the literature itself naturally brings Probst to the third section of his book: the literature program. He looks to history to point out that literature, as a discipline, does not have a clearly defined role like math and science do. As mentioned previously, the tendency to view literature as a body of knowledge is “[. . .] more likely to be like a walk through a graveyard than an encounter with the minds of great writers and thinkers. Unless the students see them [the great literary works] as exchanges with another mind about significant issues, the great works will be little more than great burdens” (205). Throughout his book, he has proven himself to be an ardent advocate for the student, but he calls for a balance in literature curriculum design warning that, “Student-centered curricula tend to focus too intently on the students, while discipline-centered curricula overemphasize the subject matter. But if we look instead at the nature of the transaction between reader and text, between individual and culture, we might achieve a literature program combining the best elements of the various approaches to curriculum design” (209). His ideal process of literature curriculum design is reflexive, calling for continual appraisal and evolution, and “[. . .] growing as the students and teachers change, responding to developments in literary theory and educational research” (217).

Current and prospective English teachers will appreciate Probst’s book not just for the many worthwhile teaching suggestions he makes, but because the book is extremely well-written. As a previous secondary school English teacher and a university professor of English education, he is a gifted and eloquent writer, gliding easily between the abstract and theoretical to the practical. His style is thought-provoking. Sentences like, “Literature has been in trouble ever since Plato banned the poets from his ideal society” (195) or “Film and television are forms of literature” (171) are examples of effective hooks he uses to engage his reader, and they are peppered throughout the book. He is also thorough, providing well-reasoned epistemological foundations for his practical applications. His “Works Cited” lists along with several genre bibliographies provide an invaluable source for further reading.

One of Probst’s strengths is his ability to self-appraise. Yet, it is also his weakness. He consistently reasons through ideas that might work, many good ones at that, but cautions that there are no hard and fast rules. Just as he urges teachers to encourage students to be comfortable with ambiguity, he reminds teachers that teaching has many ambiguities too. Yet, with grading, for instance, he acknowledges that some evaluation is necessary – crucial even – but doesn’t seem to get much beyond how difficult it is to do. Occasionally, his qualifying remarks about difficulty and ambiguity are distracting and disappointing, serving to make a promising spark fizzle. To his credit, though, his intellectual, experienced and self-reflective style lends him an authoritative voice that the reader looks to and trusts for solid advice.

Much of Probst’s critique of literature pedagogy is also echoed in current discussion of other areas of English education in this country. Traditional methods of teaching grammar, punctuation and spelling – that is, as a body of decontextualized “facts” – are coming under fire and being proven highly “[. . .] ineffective in improving students’ writing or speaking” (Andrews 86). Like memorized “facts” about literature, memorized “facts” about often arbitrarily drawn rules regarding syntax do not supply real learning events for the student. Just as the reader is ignored, so is the writer. The student does not learn how to think or write in either instance. Probst’s call for the reader to interact with and make meaning from the work applies to teaching the writer/student writing and its components as well.

It is clear that, as Probst so thoroughly asserts, education must be a continual appraisal and balancing of student, teacher, curriculum and culture. It should be organic. Old methods must make room for new ones. Teachers must be adaptable, not clinging to what Scholes describes as “[. . .] a myth of pedagogy that was believed because it gratified the pedagogues who believed in it” (qtd. in Probst 236). Otherwise, Mighty Casey and two clichéd English professors aren’t the only losers. We all are.

Works Cited

Andrews, Larry. Language Exploration & Awareness: A Resource Book for Teachers. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1998.

Hahn, Duane Alan. Random terrain – Quotes on Teaching and Learning. 27 October. 2005. <www.randomterrain.com/quotes/teaching.html>.

Probst, Robert E. Response and Analysis: Teaching Literature in Junior and Senior High School. New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook, 1988.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. Literature as Exploration. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995.

“The Graduate.” Northern Exposure. CBS. 18 March. 1995.