The Reader’s Apprentice, for me, was the most fascinating of the week’s readings. After reading this article, I was honestly so surprised at how…obvious Linkon’s points were about treating students as apprentices in the classroom. In other words, it should go without saying that students who have come to college without ever doing real library research or being asked to think independently about a piece of literature should need some hands-on, meticulous, step-by-step guidance on how to actually do those things. And yet (and I can only speak from my own experience) literature classes continue to be taught under the assumption that students have already acquired these skills in previous courses. (Side note: I have never taught before, so I appreciate articles that can apply abstract pedagogical theory to real-life successful classroom examples, as Linkon does in The Readers Apprentice).           

Linkon draws upon the study we read last week on experts versus novices to conclude that students should be treated as apprentices in the literature classroom. In this kind of classroom, the teacher (assumingly an “expert reader”) guides his novice learners through a set of meticulous assignments designed to help his students become expert readers as well. In my undergraduate studies, every English major in my program was required to take a 200 level course that was an “introduction” to literary scholarship and criticism. This course was designed to prepare students for the kind of work they would be asked to do in upper level English courses. After reading The Readers Apprentice, I realize that this class didn’t come close to teaching me the kind of critical thinking, writing, and researching skills that I would like to think most English Majors should acquire in their undergraduate coursework. If I’m being honest, I never encountered the kinds of assignments Linkon describes in her classroom until I began my graduate studies in English here at Mason (and more specifically, in my English 701 class). In English 701, for example, we were asked to complete weekly assignments that took us step-by-step through the kinds of library research we would be doing in the course (and even more importantly, our class met in the library a few times so that we could get a feel for actually conducting library research). Never once in my undergraduate English studies did a teacher devote class time to explaining library research, let alone allow us to meet in the library to go through the process with our teacher as a guide. In addition, I was never explicitly taught the idea that texts are “grounded in their cultural contexts” and that to really understand a text, one must understand the cultural context, until English 701 (252). Asking students to conduct research on the history of the time period of the text should be a must in undergraduate literature classrooms as well. While I am so glad to have received this kind of instruction in my graduate studies, it seems a crime that such fundamental ideas and skills were never taught to me in undergrad.

While Linkon suggests that her class should be taught at the 300 or 400 level, I would like to see Linkon’s class taught as a required 100 or 200 level undergraduate course. Perhaps it could be a required class that all English majors had to take and a prerequisite to any literature courses. In this classroom, I envision a lot of hands-on assignments that guide students through the process of critical analysis. I envision a lot of research assignments that require students to practice using the library. I envision incorporating discussions on history as well. The point, as Linkon’s class shows, is to give students the skills to become themselves experts in reading. And for the typical novice English student, wouldn’t he be best served by taking this class as soon as possible in his undergrad curriculum?