Some Thoughts on Not Teaching “Another Boring English Class”
When I taught at Florida State, I had students tell me they were glad my class wasn’t “another boring English class.” I was ecstatic, as that is my main goal—not to teach boring classes.
The expectation from students, in my experience, is that they will only write essays. One nursing student wondered why she even had to take English.
That is a shame, but it isn’t the students’ fault for thinking in those ways when English Composition is still largely centered on writing essays, the five-paragraph ones being mostly useless.
Don’t get me wrong: essay writing is important and needed. But we, English professors, need to teach more genres, particularly non-text-based ones—and teach them through the lens of rhetoric.
Students—indeed, all of us, including many nonhuman animals—use different forms of rhetoric daily.
They already have a lot of the rhetorical knowledge they need to be successful, and at the beginning of my classes, I simply put names to those things they use or encounter daily, such as exigence, audience, genre, purpose, conventions, style, discourse community, and others.
Teaching in this way makes English courses more applicable to the many careers out there, as students will need to know how to adapt their rhetoric to different genres (most of my students will not go on to write essays every day at work).
One of the most successful projects I assign is a podcast with promotional materials, which students create in Canva.
The project, however, is not about creating a normal podcast—students have to speak from the perspectives of nonhuman things, and we listen to a few episodes of Everything Is Alive for analysis and inspiration.
At first, they think I’m off my rocker (which is true), but they soon come around to it, particularly when I explain that the project has a serious (philosophical and political) side.
In her well-known book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Bennett states:
“The political project of the book is, to put it most ambitiously, to encourage more intelligent and sustainable engagements with vibrant matter and lively things. A guiding question: How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies?
“By ‘vitality’ I mean the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own.
“My aspiration is to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due” (viii).
Of course, personification is used in these projects, making it imaginative and fun. Yet the main aim is to have students think more critically about the many nonhuman things that surround them daily—their relationships to those things, the effect those things have on the world, and the interconnectedness of life.
As Timothy Morton states in The Ecological Thought, “The ecological crisis makes us aware of how interdependent everything is. This has resulted in a creepy sensation that there is literally no world anymore. We have gained Google Earth but lost the world. ‘World’ means a location, a background against which our actions become significant” (30).
My aim is grand, but that is because I take teaching English seriously.
I want to follow in the footsteps of other English scholars, such as George Kennedy, Krista Ratcliff, Ian Bogost, and many others, by opening the field of rhetoric and composition to reflect how complex, interesting (that is, not boring!), and critical its existence is on this planet.
—Iain Grinbergs
Photo credit: TRAX
