Fostering Professional Ethics and Identity: A “Literary Advocacy” Presentation Assignment
Posted: October 10, 2024
Tanya Long Bennett is a Professor of English.
In the spring 2024 English Senior Seminar in Literature (a capstone course), each student was assigned to give a brief “Literary Advocacy” presentation for their classmates and professor. The Big Question meant to guide us through the semester was, “What is our responsibility as literary advocates?” As a class, students represented a wide range of career goals (high school teacher, librarian, fiction writer, bookstore owner, literary agent, etc.), and this question was an effective catalyst for helping them form and articulate their values as budding professionals. While the major capstone project for the course was a scholarly research paper, the less weighty “Literary Advocacy” presentation assignment asked students to select any literary work they liked and argue for its importance. In justifying their choice, they were required to address specific questions: What are the primary factors that make this an important text? Why do you feel that people should read and understand this text? What arguments would you make to defend the text if opponents tried to censor it or urged a focus on other texts instead?
Some students chose globally renowned works like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, but others chose lesser-known young adult novels that had impacted them profoundly as teens or binge-worthy contemporary fantasy novels. In addressing the question of why they would fight to publish that novel, or teach it, or put it on a library or bookstore shelf, they realized and expressed what it was about the book that had profoundly impacted them: It brought them to a new understanding of the effects of war; it reminded them how important it is to be true to oneself; it helped them to imagine a better world; it bestowed upon them a new awareness of identity. Several presentations responded strongly to the issue of book censoring, and in solidarity, the class passionately argued against it. As their Socratic facilitator, I did my best to stay neutral, which I was ultimately glad of, for it enabled energetic and organic discussions to spring up and recur.
The fruits of this assignment confirmed for me the value of:
- The Capstone Course, a High Impact Practice (HIP) that “requires students nearing the end of their college years to create a project of some sort that integrates and applies what they’ve learned” (AAC&U, High Impact Practices, https://www.aacu.org/trending-topics/high-impact), and
- The Essential Outcomes that HIPs target (AAC&U, Essential Outcomes, (https://www.aacu.org/trending-topics/essential-learning-outcomes), including
- Intellectual and Practical Skills
- Personal and Social Responsibility
- Integrative and Applied Learning.
The major research projects that students completed at the end of the semester were, I believe, richer due to the insights generated through these Literary Advocacy presentations. As each student delved deeply into a narrow research question regarding a serious literary work, tested their hypothesis, and built a case for their findings, the values they’d articulated in defending their favorite novels infused their scholarly papers. They began to understand what is meant by “significance of research findings,” and expressed in their capstone papers how the insights they’d discovered could improve society and make the world a better place. At their best, “small” assignments like this one not only scaffold a course’s “big” assignment, but they also contribute to programmatic and institutional effectiveness. The key to generating this kind of pedagogical integrity is committing to tried and true High Impact Practices like the Capstone Course and continuing to hone those practices in context of collaboratively determined outcomes like those laid out by AAC&U.
