Inquiry II Seminar

Blair, this is definitely a topic that is of major interest to me and perhaps many other English teachers as well.

I also believe that short stories have just as much educational value as the other literary genres, especially due to its brevity and ability to be explored in depth through various literary elements. I especially love how short stories often contain powerful commentaries on human nature or the human condition – topics that can spark meaningful and evocative conversations.

I will be teaching stories during my long practicum as well. Which stories will you be teaching?

I look forward to hearing about your findings!

The only question I had after reading your inquiry was what exactly you mean by ‘superficial’? It might help to provide some examples of what you mean by this; focusing simply on literary devices?
I look forward to hearing your presentation to see what approaches you have found and believe will be effective in your classroom!

This is a very interesting topic Blair. Teaching short stories is definitely a major focus in English classes. I am actually going to be teaching short stories in a transitional EAL class, so I’m sure your research will be a great help to me.

Looking forward to hear your presentation!

Short stories are by far one of my favorite types of literature. I think when taught well, they can be extremely useful in an educational setting. They are so brief and so expansive at the same time! While I will not be teaching any short stories on this upcoming practicum, I am really interested to hear your findings.

I agree with Corinna’s question about defining superficiality. I am not quite sure what that looks like in the classroom, but I am sure you will elaborate on this in your presentation/paper.

Also, it has already been asked what stories are you teaching, but I also wonder if you are planning to teach these stories within any sort of framework? Canadian? Theme-based? A general mixture?

Again, I am looking forward to hearing what you have to say on this topic.

Blair,

This is a clearly articulated, worthwhile project. At first it seems what you’ve set out may be beyond the scope of this Inquiry project: “I intend to explore the range of approaches to teaching short stories, both traditional and contemporary, that have been used to foster the development of specific skills, paying specific attention to which skills are favored by each particular approach.” I see you narrow it to three approaches, however, in the methods section, which seems manageable. I suppose the question I would have is what constitutes a unique approach? In teaching the short story it seems one usually observes a range of methods employed in combination, some of which are not particular to the short story. Is an “approach” a single activity or a set of activities tied by, perhaps, a guiding theoretical perspective?

We can chat more about this in our meeting tomorrow.

Teresa

Blair, I think this is an interesting area to explore. I was wondering whether the research you will be looking at will be from an international or Canadian context.

I look forward to hearing about the pedagogical approaches you choose to address that will help us be more successful in teaching short stories.

Hi Blair,

I said I’d forward a reference in relation to the practice of grading:

BEGIN EXCERPT

In point of fact, the first instance of grading students’ papers occurred at Cambridge University in 1792 at the suggestion of a tutor named William Farish. No one knows much about William Farish; not more than a handful have ever heard of him. And yet his idea that a quantitative value should be assigned to human thoughts was a major step toward constructing a mathematical concept of reality. If a number can be given to the quality of a thought, then a number can be given to the qualities of mercy, love, hate, beauty, creativity, intelligence, even sanity itself. When Galileo said that the language of nature is written in mathematics, he did not mean to include human feeling or accomplishment or insight. But most of us are now inclined to make these inclusions. Our psychologists, sociologists, and educators find it quite impossible to do their work without numbers. They believe that without numbers they cannot acquire or express authentic knowledge.

I shall not argue here that this is a stupid or dangerous idea, only that it is peculiar. What is even more peculiar is that so many of us do not find the idea peculiar. To say that someone should be doing better work because he has an IQ of 134, or that someone is a 7.2 on a sensitivity scale, or that this man’s essay on the rise of capitalism is an A- and that man’s is a C+ would have sounded like gibberish to Galileo or Shakespeare or Thomas Jefferson. If it makes sense to us, that is because our minds have been conditioned by the technology of numbers so that we see the world differently than they did. Our understanding of what is real is different. Which is another way of saying that embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another. (Postman, 1982, p. 13)

END EXCERPT

Reference

Postman, N. (1993). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. Vintage.

Blair,

This is such a worthwhile topic to explore! I have been realizing over the last few months that, while short stories have been part of all of my English classes in high school, I barely remember any of the ones I read. I’m not sure if this is because we tend to spend less time on short stories and therefore they are less memorable or because they were taught in such a forgettable, mundane way that I wasn’t engaged with the material at all. It is very sad!

I hope you can find some excellent and innovative approaches to teaching short stories. I think that you are right and that they are not given the credit they deserve.

It would be interesting as well if you found out some reasons why there is less focus on short stories and more on novels in most English classes. (just a suggestion 🙂

Inquire on!
Dayonne

Hi Blair,

I also said I’d pass along a reference from Canadian short story writer and novelist, Greg Hollingshead. As I noted yesterday, I think it is dangerous to define short stories in terms of formal properties such as word length. Certainly we cannot say short stories are, say, less than 2000 words — that doesn’t bear out in practice and is a reductive means of genre identification. Here is what Hollingshead says:

“The primary difference between the short story and the novel is not word length. A novel is not a short story that kept going, though every short story writer dreams of writing such a story. Neither is a novel a string of stories with discursive and other connective tissue and padding. One of the first things the writer learns is how amazingly little room there is in a good novel for extraneousness, or noise. The primary difference between the short story and the novel is not length but the larger, more conceptual weight of meaning that the longer narrative must carry on its back from page to page, scene to scene. It’s not baggy wordage that causes the diffusiveness of the novel, it’s this long-distance haul of meaning. In a good short story the meaning is not so abstractable, so portable, as it must be in a novel, but is rather more tightly and ineffably embodied in the formal details of the text. A scene in a short story–and there may be only one–operates with a centripetal force of concentration. But a scene in a novel spins off a good deal of its energy looking not only backward and forward in the text but also sideways, outside the text, toward the material world, to that set of common assumptions considered ordinary life. That energy is centrifugal, opening out, not constantly seeking to revolve upon its own still centre.” (Hollingshead, 1999)

In a later interview in which he speaks about how novels and short stories are experienced from the writer’s perspective, Hollingshed observes, “I have a notion that the novel—vs. the short story–is an older person’s form: more prosaic, more quotidian, more interested in how lives unfold over time rather than crystallize in a moment.”

Perhaps these references, from a key Canadian writer, will be helpful as you progress with your work.

yrs,

Teresa

———
References

Hollingshed, G. (1999). Short Story vs Novel. University of Toronto Quarterly, 68(4), 878-79. Available: http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/gregh/essays-storynovel.htm

Travassos, G. (2003). Interview with Greg Hollingshead. MOTE Magazine. Available: http://moregoatthangoose.com/interviews/hollingshead.htm

Blair,

If you take a look at my bookshelf, it’s filled with anthologies of short stories. It’s my favourite form of writing, because there is true beauty in the art of saying more with less.

I agree that short stories shouldn’t simply serve as a brief reprieve from a novel study in a classroom. They should have a meaningful purpose in the curriculum. Not only is the consumption of short stories an important act, but I think the production of short stories by students is equally important. It allows them to write more succinctly, and expands their vocabulary to find just the right word to sum up an entire thought.

I will also be using short stories in my in-class presentation, and I came across this article while researching academic literature. Feel free to use it if you see any value in it.

Mitchell, Diana. Using Short Story Collections to Enrich the English Classroom. 86 Vol. , 1997. Print.

re: Corinna (Jan. 8)

The question about superficiality is a fair one, and forced me to look at exactly what I meant by that statement. In the term “superficially accessible”, I meant that a) decoding is not as big of an issue as in, say, Shakespeare or poetry, b) the length of the text is not taxing, and c) when it is unencumbered in the above ways, narrative structure is something that we all have some experience with.

But I think what you probably meant was, what does superficial mean in the phrase, “pushing past a superficial level of understanding of texts”. I am re-thinking my phrasing in that sentence, because it is too vague, but what I had in mind when I wrote it was limiting the study of the texts to rote recall –which is a valid exercise for checking homework or reading comprehension skills–or to prescribed interpretations about texts, characters, symbolism, etc. Instead of teaching the content of the texts alone, I see short stories as a great opportunity to work on other sets of skills, including social / historical/ cultural / emotional awareness, information literacy, writing, and (for EL learners) language acquisition.
Thanks for the comment. Made me think. 🙂

re: ehayman (Jan. 9)
I’m teaching a collection of stories by Canadian authors from an anthology called, “Tigers of the Snow”. Stories are divided by conflict type, internal/external. I don’t think I’m going to present them that way though, as the conflict type is not the most central idea to my unit plan. Good opportunity to teach information literacy though (students benefit from understanding how information is provided by publisher)
Cheers

re: kiranaujlay (Jan. 13)

Thanks for the link. I’m checking it out now.

re: TMD (Jan. 11)

Thank you! Hollingshead has an interesting take on the short story genre.

Blair,
I’m looking forward to your presentation.

I started thinking more about short stories last term when we looked at Madeleine Thien’s Simple Recipes excerpt in class. Even though we worked with that text as though it was a short story, it was actually only an excerpt, one chapter out of one of her novel.

Perhaps that is another interesting angle to explore: in the case that there is not enough instructional time to cover an entire novel, examining key chapters for valuable thematic or literary devices can prove to be an exceptionally worthwhile exercise.

I also liked what Kiran said about the production of short stories by students as being equally important to their consumption. There certainly is something exceptionally striking about such concise and powerful writing. I still have profound memories of short stories I encountered only once or twice (several by Alice Munro, for example).

Blair, I think this is a great idea to explore. Short stories, in my own experiences being taught them in English, are difficult to remember and distinguish once you’ve studied them. I believe this is because many teachers tend to teach a short story unit where various stories are introduced, read, and discussed, each in the same structure. Through your inquiry project, I hope to see some of the ways short stories can be taught differently, and hopefully that will help students see the value in each story as separate and unique from the others, each having something different to offer.

Rita