I had two terms that I wanted to discuss with my students regarding "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." I wanted to talk about the pastoral literature and the Irish Literary Revival. At first, I just wanted to teach them the term, and then ask how the terms were applied in each case. (It wasn't until well into the planning stages that it occurred to me how these two terms were potentially related.) I was trying to think about applying Harold Bloom's taxonomy [the revised version]; I wanted to amp up the class by doing something different. I usually start with the verbs in the owl diagram (see my previous blog post here: http://paedagogusperplexus.blogspot.ca/2014/11/verbage-using-more-verbs-in-lesson.html) and this time I started thinking about "teaching": how could I get my students to teach each other? So here's what I came up with:
Student Teaching Exercise:
Learning Objectives:
By having students learn the term and then try to teach it to the rest of the class, I'm engaging a few different learning styles: social, visual, oral, and aural.
Instructions:
I have a class of 25 students and 2 terms: do I split them into two? This makes for ungainly "groups" and fewer people talking within them. More groups creates more opportunities for people to speak in the small group setting.
As a drawback, it means that the students hear one term three times and the other term twice, sometimes with some repetition. Is it repetitive? Turns out, it's just repetitive for me, as the students found that hearing the term that they didn't study more than once was actually good for them.
Each group had a handout with the following on it:
a) a page-length definition of the term.
As noted in the slide above, they must summarize the information. I used definitions from Encyclopedia Britannica and cited the sources.
b) An incomplete thesis statement.
(Eg. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" contains examples of pastoral literature, which is important because ________. They're practicing the "because" part of their thesis statement; once you've seen that a pattern exists in the text, why does it matter? In this case, I've given them the pattern. They have to decide what the pattern means).
c) space for quotations or information from the poem
(Eg. Irish Literary Revival was hard here, but one of the things that they could mention is the lyrical quality or the form, which is unlike any of the English (ie British) poetry they've seen so far, which indicates Yeats' departure from the British canon).
d) a template for how I wanted them to present their findings.
Practice organizing and practice preparing answers for an audience!
In the summary part of the class, we discussed what they learned from the other groups. It was difficult, but as they learn to trust each other a bit more in the class, this kind of thing will become easier.
Some key points that we came up with:
* the pastoral is a mode that has been popular throughout the body of western literature; beginning with Hesiod, it begins its heyday in the 16th Century. As we pointed out, Yeats is writing in the 19th Century, which means that he's reviving it for some reason.
* with some prompting, we discover that Yeats is probably reviving the pastoral as a modernist commentary.
* the Irish Literary Revival is a result of the Irish being culturally oppressed by the British; it is part of the Irish Renaissance. Yeats is referring to an Irish place, and he's using a form and lyric style that departs from traditional English (and British) literature. ||| There's a more complex argument that the lyrical quality is reminiscent of Irish folk song, but I didn't expect us to get that far.
* The two terms tie together because the pastoral mode in an Irish context hearkens to historical Irish people: the relationship between Irish folk music, folktales, and the land are inextricably linked, so by using the pastoral mode, Yeats is participating in the renaissance, also.
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