Appleman Chapter 8

In the concluding chapter of Critical Encounters, Deborah Appleman does a decently successful job of reiterating all of her previous points and reemphasizing the ones that she feels are most important to her teaching pedagogy. The activity that she describes in the beginning of this chapter has students encountering and interacting with every theory that they've learned about during their year in the teacher's classroom. The "Theory Relay" allows students the opportunity to critically encounter the literature, the world, and each other by looking at literature texts through the lens of various literary theories, no matter how "messy" or "unpredictable" those encounters may be (page 138). "High school English teachers are under pressure to teach their students to read literature in ways that lead to more flexible formulations of meaning, in ways that are more relevant to their contemporary lives," (page 139). Doesn't this sound a lot like the progressive education techniques our ED teachers seem to embrace so dearly? I admit that through my reading of this book, I have come to accept the idea that teaching literary theory in an English classroom can go a long way in helping students develop their own personal strategies for interacting with texts. The passage on page 139 goes on to say that, "New forms of literary theory have useful applications in high school English classrooms and they support effective teaching practices in three different ways... [1] literary theory has implications for how people read... [2] literary theory has implications for what is read... [3] literary theory simulates the production of ideas and discourages reductive thinking." Knowing and understanding these three useful applications of literary theory can help me, as a future English teacher, to encourage my students to use and apply these practices in their everyday encounters with literature texts. Emphasizing the importance of using multiple perspectives when searching for meaning in a text can help the students become more informed learners and, as a result, also help eliminate biases and stereotypes that still exist in our society today. Encouraging our students to interact with, and affect change within, the world around them should be one of the most important goals that we have as teachers. We know that students subconsciously use literary theories as they encounter texts, but "letting them in on the secret" can be a seriously effective way to teach literature. As one of the last students in this book is quoted on page 146, "[y]es, we can use [literary theories] in the world, and I think that's why we are taught that we've used these lenses all along. We actually have a name for it now."