The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers

For most of my career, I've struggled with how engage students in reading. I don't mean to say I failed, but I went through asking student questions to direct them to important parts of the text and teaching AP Lit strategies like TPCASTT and DIDLS. I was always driven by students getting a valid reading of the text. As Blau says in the book, everything I did made ME a better reader.My students are now different. Most don't read at all outside of class. In other subjects, they don't read so much as search for the answers they need to complete a worksheet. They lack experience in transacting with the text in a way that leads to them making meaning. I had started to figure this out in the last couple of years. Thus reading The Literature Workshop was discovery that someone had already been down the path I had recently started on. It's a pleasure to know you're not alone.The Literature Workshop is not a step-by-step curriculum. There are lessons I took from the book and used with my 11th graders, but the value, for me at least, was the direction it pointed me in. This books is less a road map than a map of the terrain we should travel.

This is a really great book for college literature professors. Although this is an earlier edition, it still has a lot of the most important aspects. I compared it with the most recent edition (13th I believe) and did find some large sections that had been added, but they aren't the most important sections by any means. Great alternative to the more expensive newer options.

I'm a graduate student and I've worked as a TA for several years now. Reading this book was a revelation. It's astonishing how long I was allowed to teach without ever being required to sit down and think through the theory behind what I was doing, and what we wanted our students to get out of the process. For me, the moment when I started writing exclamation points in the margins was when Blau describes his revelation that, as a grad student preparing for section, he was doing all the active, valuable learning himself by coming up with compelling and comprehensive analyses of texts...while his students were expected to just sit there and consume the results.I highly recommend this book to anyone in a graduate program in literature. Even if you don't 100% agree with the way he structures classes and assignments (his projects lean a little heavily on what, as an undergrad, I would have interpreted as 'busy work') he structures his arguments in a way that creates a framework for you to construct your own teaching philosophy. If you have ever felt at sea while teaching literature, or gotten cold feet in front of a classroom wondering what the *point* of all of this was...this book is for you.

This book has changed and will shape the way I instruct for the rest of my life. I've seen Sheridan speak at UCI, and plan to see him again this December. Some pass it off as idealistic and a bit radical, but why pass off the radical when our kids are not learning from what's been passed down as instructional tradition. Blau lays out common misconceptions about reading, writing, and interpretation. I've attempted to implement his suggestions in a high school setting, tweaking them accordingly, and I've found them to prove impressively successful.The book reads quite interestingly, compared to other books. I suggest reading it in the summer, when you're not rushed. Seems like a lot to handle, but take your time and reread the parts you know are good, but are hard to grip.This sort of thinking is going to transform teaching within the next 20 years. People will be pointing back to Blau in those times wondering why it took so long to embrace these ground-breaking concepts.English instructors... be patient... this is gold.

I'm aiming this review toward instructors who, like me, may be put off by the word "radical" that is so often used to describe this book. Even if you are a very traditional-minded teacher you may often feel as if you are trying to cram too much into an introductory-level writing/literature course. You may be frustrated by a mismatch between the lively discussions that go on the classroom and the dead, formulaic papers these same students hand in to you. You may constantly feel that you don't know how to find a balance between lecturing about literature, theory, research and getting your students to learn things for themselves. This book will explain to you why you feel all these frustrations and will guide you toward a way of teaching that gets rid of them. Just read it. You won't regret it.

The Literature Workshop (2003) presents and demonstrates a literature pedagogy informed by writing process pedagogy: The emphases are that reading, like writing, is a process and that students need to be producers of interpretations of literary texts--and that they can be.Sheridan Blau describes the key common problems that students run into, such as assuming they can't understand difficult texts after only reading them once. And he gives--and demonstrates in several chapters through innovate "transcriptions" of reading workshops--ways to convince students that they can and should reread and create interpretations.Blau expresses his ideas with great clarity and insight. I will definitely be using this material in my own literature classes, even photocopying some pages for my students to read.Both Peter Elbow and Gerald Graff give this book glowing reviews on the back cover. The text is geared for those who teach introductory literature classes in college or secondary schools.