The English word college comes from the Latin collegium, or a community. Our classroom represents a Latinate college, wherein students and I form an intellectual partnership. One way to inculcate our classroom college is by meeting students where they are. For example, when I teach Shakespeare, I use the Classical Comics adaptations with original language, allowing students to ease into the verse while also encouraging their visual literacy skills through the comic’s art. From there, students are more apt to share their insights into the text, which nurtures our intellectual partnership. Deep reading is a virtue in our class. I assign lesser titles, but we spend more time with our assigned works. In my Intro to Literature course, I typically incorporate three primary texts on my syllabus. But we spend weeks at a time on one play, poem, or novel, giving students time to sit with the text. I encourage deep, intentional reading by modelling close-readings, along with incorporating small group workshops center-based activities such as jigsaws or theatrical student companies to act out or improvise scenes from the literature we are reading. Performance-based pedagogy is especially important to my class, as physically enacting the literature allows students to make it their own.

I value student-led discussion, so students bring submit at least three concrete questions about our studied text, such as The Faerie Queene, which serves as the basis for learning-centers. In such an activity, students in small groups move through stations, writing on each station’s poster paper ideas related to a that station’s question. Each time a group comes to a new station, they read the question, see others’ insight, and add their own. This activity example highlights collaborative and deep reading, as student sit with intentional questions for upwards to fifteen minutes. Many times, when assigning group activities, I’m intentionally vague, giving basic instructions, and allowing students to fill in the details. When students ask me, “Finley, what should we do?” I respond, “Ask your group members.” Every time, groups go from confusion to clarity through collaboration and interdependence, further reinforcing the virtue of collegium in our classroom.

Recognizing that a high affective filter yields increased anxiety, emotions detrimental to learning, I strive to lower the emotional affective filter by building a safe and nurturing intellectual community founded upon mutual respect and strong positive rapport amongst everyone in the class. For example, I sit at a student desk using a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard connected to the computer’s projector. Simply moving my seating location to the physical level of my students lowers their affective filter, as no one occupies the symbolically power-laden lectern position. At least 10 minutes before class starts, soft music playing in the background, consisting of students’ selected titles from a shared Spotify playlist. However, when class starts, I seamlessly transition from the student playlist to classical music, aurally signaling to students the commencement of class.

As a teacher, I am a gardener, watering the seeds of my students’ imaginations through both academic content and pedagogical methodology. I endeavor to show students how reading literature helps us gain a richer imagination, in turn gifting us a deeper, more enriching life which is autonomous and uplifting for ourselves and those around us. In Lewis’s sense, I strive to be a modern educator, serving students by embodying the Sidneian ideal of delightfully instructing them. There’s a difference between content and student-focused pedagogy. I teach students, not literature, but I do teach students…literature.