I've been thinking about what kinds of reading assignments I want to give my students, and, while I'm coming up with some ideas, I'm also having a bit of difficulty. The difficulty is primarily because of my focus on big political issues; unfortunately, if something has happened recently, there generally isn't a whole lot of quality poetry/fiction to draw from--or at least not a whole lot that I am familiar with. Fortunately (at least from the perspective of having to figure out what to assign my students), some of these issues are timeless--like war-- and some of them have been big issues for a long time--like immigration. I'm planning on having my students read a fair number of nonfiction works that explicitly make arguments, so finding those won't be too problematic. The bigger problem is finding poetry/fiction. While I'm making progress, I'd appreciate suggestions...
Many of the literary works I've found that I want to use are poems. Because many students may have limited experience with poetry, I may ask them to write "translations," as Bean calls them. I've had to do this in literature classes, and I think it could be really useful to help them to go through, line by line, rather than just skimming. I may assign this either as an in-class activity or as homework; either way, I'd plan on spending some class time going over their translations to guide a discussion about the poems.
Another activity I'd like to use is to "Help students see that all texts are trying to change their view of something" (Bean 142). Especially with poetry, they may have trouble discerning the argument. Because of this, and because I want them to engage with these arguments in their writing, I plan to have them respond to the questions Bean suggests about what the the author assumed their prior beliefs to be and what change the author wanted to make in their beliefs, as well as why this change did or did not occur. I would probably have the students do this as homework, but, again, I would probably use this to drive discussion as a class or in small groups.
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I think it's a good idea to assign reading other than just argumentative essays. Poetry is a good idea, as a short poem can be examined during class time line by line to analyze the effect the author's words are creating. Plays could be used as well-- I'm considering using Antigone, or at least portions of it, after last week's reading. Fiction may be more difficult to integrate into a one-day exercise, but, as we all know from working in the writing lab, many instructors use works of fiction as a subject for compositions.
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