Encore. The Book Club As a Pedagogical Tool
A repost from my old blog on a successful educational activity, with some updates
The massive pedagogical transitions that the pandemic forced in education has elicited many discussions regarding the role of technology in the classroom, the best use of Learning Management Systems, and the ability to deliver our subject matters in online and hybrid environments. It is at the same time true that, after COVID-19 sent many many universities online, there is a wide consensus in many schools that in-person and residential education continues to be the preferred model for traditional college students. One should recognize that many of the phenomena that have become magnified in the course of the pandemic belong to processes that have been unfolding for years. In the case of humanities education, the students demonstrate an increasing lack of ability to read books and other forms of lengthy writing, a perfect storm resulting from the gutting of humanities education in the name of STEM-centric and vocational agendas, the attacks against the humanities on political grounds and the rapid changes in the attention economy elicited by social media. One could moralize a lot about this, but I believe that there is a matter-of-fact problem in regards to providing humanities formation both using new technologies and cognitive conditions as our allies, and in understanding the ways in which we can continue to deliver traditional forms of literary education against the grain of current challenges.
In the past few semesters I have attested the somewhat unexpected success of a pedagogical exercise that I developed in response to the isolating effects of online education: a book club. This is a bit of a counterintuitive exercise, as it pushes forward a traditional skill, book reading, that is increasingly scarce in education and that oftentimes feels contrary to the educational needs of students who are distracted, struggling and better suited to active than to passive forms of learning. And yet, as I have unfolded this exercise in my classes, I have learned a lot about my teaching, and the possibilities of teaching through books. I hope these notes help other professors and colleagues in thinking through these problems.
Every fall semester, I teach a course entitled Latin America: Nation, Ethnicity and Social Conflict, which serves as gateway for majors and minors in Latin American Studies, and often has students from the program in Global Studies, students looking to learn about the region before study abroad and Latinx students seeking to learn about their heritage. The class has 65 students or so per year, which makes it challenging in terms of truly addressing the diversity of students while creating manageable grading loads. During the fall of 2020, I introduced the book club in its fully developed form for the first time. I gave students books for their choosing, and each book could be chosen by no more than five students. But I believe that in the Fall of 2021 this exercise worked better after providing clearer guidelines based on the previous year. The picture above shows the books in this exercise for the Fall of 2021.
I used a series of criteria flexibly. Due to the variety of prior knowledge in the students, I decided trade books were better (academic books may be too complex). They had to be fairly recent (only Grandin's is older than five years). I should have read them in full before and enjoyed them (I am now buying this kind of book on the regular to have options for the future). The books should somehow connect with topics studied in class (sometimes specific regions, other times conceptual questions). It is absolutely possible to swap these for academic books or for works of literature. In 2023 I provided five novels as options. But I am not sure this was a good idea because many students in the class lack training in reading literature and the course does not really provide a good framing. I have also pursued in the Fall of 2023 a version of the exercise with films, for an introduction to Mexican Studies, and the results were equally satisfactory.
This assignment requires each student to read their assigned book, which they chose at least five weeks in advance of the first deadline. This led to two assignments. First, I asked them to record a one-hour conversation with their group on Zoom and post it into Canvas. More recently, some groups have also opted to meet in person and use a phone to record the conversation, which works very well. They were explicitly instructed in three significant ways: 1. This is not a class presentation and they could not divide the book up. Rather all of them had to read the book in full. 2. They could coordinate topics of conversation in advance, but the conversation had to be naturally flowing, rather than taking individual turns. Any prep other than reading the book and taking notes was discouraged. 3. All of them had to speak a roughly equivalent number of minutes, as the groups were graded collectively. This yields videos of roughly one hour to one hour and twenty minutes. After they turn this in, I asked them to write a short (3-5 pages) final paper with no secondary bibliography reflecting on their individual experience reading the book.
The reason why I arrived at this assignment has to do with a variety of concerns I have had in educating students in a class like this. The class is not in a literature program and thusly it is not always the expectation of students to read books. As a stalwart for book reading, I have taught this class in the past requiring full books, but over time this has become impossible. Students who have gone through reforms such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, coming ever more from educational systems that appear to center STEM in a way that seriously undermines humanities education, and the clear effects that social media has had in their attention span have affected their reading ability. So the class these days is taught with articles the first part of the semester, and gradually transitions to documentaries (which is a factor of the availability of quality materials, but does help students continue to be plugged into the class after midterms). I also know that, even though our institutional guidelines suggest 9 hours of homework a week for a 3-credit class, students are overcommitted. In my elite institution, this means students drown themselves in extracurriculars, which means they often do their homework really late at night. And, of course, in most institutions (just like some of my own students), a good group of students often works to make ends meet, making book reading impossible in a regular basis.
In this landscape, book reading has become very challenging as a class requirement. The reality is that many underclassmen did not acquire the skill of reading a book critically and productively in their K-12 years, which is something that is not their fault, but rather a damaging omission inflicted on them. The book club is designed to allow the students to learn to read books building on the knowledge they develop over the semester, and in dialogue with their classmates.
I was very happy with the results. Except for one student who was not participative in the conversation and made up in a paper, and a couple of students who were unable to participate for health reasons, the rate of compliance as nearly absolute Students who do not speak in class unfold themselves in wonderful ways when talking with their classmates. And it has become the case that students unanimously express their liking of this activity both when I ask them in a class session I devote to self-reflection, and in the anonymous student evaluations. I would unhesitatingly say that this is the exercise that has yielded the best, most even output from students in a class in my twenty years of teaching at the university level.
There were many things that I have noticed watching the videos. Students with Latin American and Latinx heritage often chose books close to their national culture. This meant that they both were a resource for their classmates in explaining to them their experiences, while at the same time clearly enjoying the opportunity to discuss it with new audiences. I also noted that students who had been intimidated by class participation in person were very comfortable talking to students in this setting (I would note that one of the requests I received for future teaching was using small groups more in class, undoubtedly a consequence of this exercise). The level of detail in which they read the book was truly stunning, nearly all students were able to point to specific pages in the book. They also were able to correct doubts and misunderstandings with each other.
As for the papers, I encouraged them to do a few things other classes do not. I encourage first-person writing, personal opinions and being critical of the books. This created really pleasurable papers to read. I did not get the noncommittal and even robotic writing that students can produce whenever they are perfunctorily completing assignments. As far as I could gather, personal writing and requiring concrete citations of the book pulled students away from using AI (although I am not altogether sure this holds in all cases). A lot of the papers were very successful in bringing relevant materials from early in the semester to match their writing. Some papers were very moving in terms of students reflecting on questions about their identity and their understanding of political issues in their community.
There were many positive elements that I attested. Many students expressed shock and outrage regarding the fact that they did not learn Latin American history or even a basic history of US involvement in Latin America. Others found it productive to confront their heritages with their reading, or to reassess their experience in Latin America through their books. Many were able to move beyond simplistic ideas about the identity of the author and their purported privilege, to really understand what the book contributed to the understanding of Latin America, even when the author was not Latin American. A few of the students come to me at the end of the semester to ask for reading recommendations for the break.
There are a variety of permutations I have imagined of this exercise, and that I hope to implement in future courses. I think the exercise can be done with the purpose of multiplying knowledge in a class. For example, divide a smaller class in four groups and ask them to present their books in class so the rest of the class can get a sense of four books rather than just one (it would be conceivable to ask the class to read excerpts of the three books on which they are not presenting). I intend to do this in an upcoming class on Mexican visual culture, assigning each group an art catalog to present to the class. I also think that one can develop an exercise in which the rest of the class watches the conversations of groups and comments on them. It would be imaginable to form groups, provide them some guidelines and ask them to pick books without a pre-determined choice from the instructor. In second-language classrooms, one could request more successive outputs: conversations with groups, followed by presentations for the class, followed by writing assignment. The written assignment can be designed to be in specific formats such as a magazine article. Students could also make more creative things: book trailers, multimedia engagements of the books, further research departing from the book. I gave the students in my film class the choice of recording themselves talking instead of writing a paper, or even do a film essay if they have the ability to do so, and the results were delightful, and much more pleasurable to grade than a pile of Word documents.
At the end of the day, I am happy that the book club provides me a pathway to teach students to value book reading, and to read books with care. I hope this is impactful to some of them, particularly as many of them are stolen from the opportunity to read books by our increasingly anti-intellectual education systems.