How I Teach Literary Theory to High Schoolers (and you can too!)

A scalable approach from secondary classrooms to seminar courses

After my previous post detailing the deeper “Why?” behind teaching literary theory, I wanted to go into more detail about how I introduce it to my students. I plan on doing another post where I take a deeper dive into how I teach particular theories, but I wanted to start with a broader introduction that pretty much anyone else could use in their classroom.

---

My first memorable encounter with literary theory was my sophomore year in English 399: Introduction to the Major. My professor was a smiley, gregarious man named Ramenga Osotsi. Dr. Osotsi was the coordinator of our world literature program and took a special joy in paradigm-busting the Western, white, middle-class frames that most of his students at James Madison University viewed the world through. I took him for every class I possibly could. After completely rewiring how I understood Africa’s relationship to the world in his Postcolonial literature class, it was fitting that he would also rewire how I viewed English. We read one book that semester—Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. We also read a monstrous amount of theory and had to annotate each chapter from a range of different theoretical perspectives and eventually select a few to write a final paper. It was probably one of my favorite classes of all time (and I’m pretty lukewarm on Franzen).

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t note that Deborah Appleman’s Critical Encounters in Secondary English was utterly foundational in my decision to bring theory into the secondary classroom. If you’re new to the world of theory, then it is the absolute best place to start, and even if you’re a vet, it’s an incredibly useful guide for implementation. It’s the core text of the English methods grad class I’m teaching right now, and the teachers seem to be eating it up.

I share this because, though I have a different focus this week, teachers starting this work must consider their relationship (or lack thereof!) with theory before teaching it. I don’t say this to inflate its importance or to gatekeep—quite the opposite. I share it because literary theory isn’t just a lesson plan or teaching strategy. It is a whole new way to engage with literature. If you’re new to the world of theory, I encourage you to buy Critical Encounters and/or dig into some of the resources I’ve shared in previous posts before trying the pedagogical routines I’m sharing below. If you’re already theory-curious and are excited to share that with your students, then dive right in!

Setting the Stage

This pedagogical sequence is probably one of my all-time favorites. It’s the moment when lights start switching on and students’ understanding of what English can be shifts. The sequence begins with a simple question posed to the class—what does it mean to “Do English?” Students typically offer up pretty canned answers: reading books, writing papers about themes, doing grammar worksheets, all that fun stuff.

“Nope!” I say impishly. “Nope. Nope. Nope. Those are all things you do in English class, but there is nothing about anything you’ve said that is distinct to the discipline of English. Do you mean to tell me you’ve been taking English for 10 years and you don’t even know what it is!?”

They scratch their heads. Some roll their eyes. Others giggle, knowing I’m being purposefully annoying. I find it interesting that they don’t protest or challenge me more, but perhaps that speaks to the fact that students are rarely asked to consider and reflect on the continuity of their courses or the nature of academic disciplines.

“Well then,” I sigh, throwing my hands up in the air. “This is serious. I guess I’d better bring in some backup to get you up to speed. Allow me to introduce you to literary critic, theorist, and professor Robert Eaglestone’s book Doing English: A Guide for Literature Students.”

I then introduce a pedagogical routine that I picked up from friend of the sub, Remi Kalir, called social annotation. According to a paper he co-authored with Justin Hodgson and Christopher Andrews:

social annotation is a type of learning technology enabling the addition of notes to digital and multimodal texts for the purposes of information sharing, peer interaction, knowledge construction, and collaborative meaning-making

It’s a fantastic routine that my students have enjoyed and benefited from over the last few years, especially my more introverted learners. Unlike discussion boards or LMS quizzes, it roots the discussion and responses in the actual text.

Here’s an example of what one of my previous classes’ social annotations of Doing English looked like.

I won’t post the entire chapter for obvious copyright reasons, but he does supply a pretty helpful summary at the end of each chapter. Just so you get a sense of what students are coming away with after their reading, here’s a snapshot. Sometimes I have them read and socially annotate for homework, other times I put on a lo-fi playlist and have them annotate in class. There are pros and cons to each.

This usually gets the class buzzing a little bit. The idea that there are multiple “correct” answers is intriguing for them—even a little transgressive. For the record, I’m not claiming their previous teachers told them there was only one right interpretation—rather, many students deeply internalize right/wrong binaries as being an inexorable part of school. Sometimes it takes explaining that fallacy boldly and plainly to them for them to see it. The fact that they’re being told there is always more than one way to interpret a text by an actual literary critic, theorist, and professor adds additional weight to the legitimacy of the claim.

It is also one of many ways I try and help students internalize that, that every time they debate, discuss, and construct interpretations, they are participating in the discipline of literary studies. In other words, they are “doing English.” Or, as Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant put it in the introduction of their upcoming publication Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century:

If you write a close reading, you are a literary scholar. Welcome.

After the first few weeks of school, students are fairly comfortable with noticing—the term I use to laminate the various interpretive practices associated with tending to an author’s use of aesthetic forms. Drawing on Terry Eagleton’s framing, I help students come to understand that literary texts are deliberate constructs. In other words, to see that the characters, events, and other aesthetic forms within these texts function as tools that authors employ to create specific effects on their readers. These tools can range from subtle techniques like punctuation to broad structural choices like genre conventions. Point being—once students recognize that every element in a text serves a purpose and that meaning emerges from their interpretation of the interplay between its form and content, they can move past identifying form and begin to construct meaningful arguments about texts. Now it’s time to expand students’ interpretive toolkits—enter literary theory.

Introducing Literary Theory

The goal of this activity is for students to actually engage in the interpretive work they read about in the Doing English excerpt. It’s not enough for them to be told they can construct multiple interpretations of the same text—they need to experience it. This routine could work with any literary text, but I’ve been using Langston Hughes’s “Harlem” for the last few years and have been pleased with the results. The “dream” offers a clear central object whose meaning shifts based on the lens through which it is viewed. It’s also jam-packed with figurative language, so students can practice mapping theoretical concepts and ideas onto aesthetic forms.

As students enter class, the room is set up in three or four stations, depending on a few different factors. Every desk has a copy of the poem on it in large font with plenty of space between each line. At each table, there is a pile of Literary Theory one-pagers and colored pencils with a corresponding color. The slide below is displayed on the board, which I explain to them before they start.

As students move from each station, they add a new set of annotations to their poem. By the time they’re done, it’s a bit of a mess, but that’s a good thing. Students usually start off struggling a bit, but the more stations they switch to, the easier it becomes for them to think more fluidly about the text. They also begin to pick up on patterns across their reading. For instance, they quickly draw the connection that, regardless of the lens, the “dream” is positioned as an unobtainable object of desire. What that object represents shifts based on the lens, as do students' interpretations, but this recurring pattern helps students recognize that a text's formal elements—its structure, imagery, word choice—create certain interpretive pathways that are likely to emerge regardless of the critical approach being used.

While multiple readings are always possible, the poem's aesthetic choices make some meanings more prominent or accessible than others, leading different readers to converge on tangential thematic clusters even when using different literary theories. As texts become longer and their formal elements more varied and distributed throughout the work, the range of possible interpretations naturally expands—the aesthetic constraints become less concentrated and thus less directive. However, even in sprawling novels or epic poems, the author's structural choices, recurring motifs, and stylistic patterns still establish boundaries that make some readings more textually grounded than others. The interpretive field widens, but it doesn't become limitless.

It can be a bit of a balancing act to invite a wide variety of interpretations while still ensuring they don’t venture too far away from the language offered in the poem, but the rich metaphors give a lot of room for creative connections. While students are working through their annotations and discussions, I’m hustling around from table to table to ask prompting questions and support anyone who seems to be struggling. It’s invigorating to see students wrestle with these ideas, and I’m always quite impressed at how quickly they pick it up. After they wrap, we have a class debrief where we work through these questions aloud together.

That concludes the intro to literary theory day! Students answer a few reflective questions on Google Classroom for me to sift through, and we return the next day ready to really dive in.

Discussing, Debating, & Dialoguing with Theory

The following class is usually a branching path for me, depending on the course, my schedule, student engagement, and readiness, etc. However, I’d say there are two ways that I typically ask students to demonstrate their growing familiarity with theory following our activity. One approach is a little more constrained and guided, and the other is more freeform and rooted in students’ lifeworlds. There’s good reason to pick one or the other, but I’ve been most satisfied with the unit when I’ve done both.

The first approach, reading a short story and facilitating a theory-fueled Harkness discussion, isn’t very innovative, but it does provide a good opportunity for students to apply their learning and engage in some close reading. I love pairing this activity with Kijj Johnson’s “Ponies” because it’s short, loaded with figurative language, fairly straightforward plot-wise, and offers some rich terrain for theorizing. Oh, also, it’s positively demented, so that's fun too. Read it for yourself!

Having opportunities to discuss, debate, and dialogue about their different interpretations is great practice for acquainting students with the benefits of theory. Following this, students write a brief literary response paper where we workshop our way through a round of drafting and editing, ensuring the ideas we discussed in class can translate into coherent interpretations that they make their own.

While I encourage them to be pluralistic in their use and applications of theory, I also encourage them to dig deeper into the one or two their most interested in or passionate about. The more students feel their way into their interpretive preferences and interests, the wider variety of perspectives they’ll bring to class discussions. Scott Storm has some great writing about how his students reach a point where they are facilitating full-blown literary salons themselves.

Literary Lightning Talk

The other approach, Literary Lightning Talks, is a different sort of transfer task that provides students with the opportunity to use literary theory to interpret a pop-cultural object of their choosing. The directions are fairly straightforward.

Before I ask them to start their research, however, I will model some examples that I made. I’ll discuss my process with them and do a mock presentation so they get the gist. Considering the incredible season of Andor that just wrapped, I used this one this year. I bolded the key concepts in red to highlight how I was able to use them as tools to construct my interpretation. This activity can also serve as a bridge to applying theory to film, media, music, etc., as well as studying aesthetic forms beyond the written word. I’ve written on that more extensively in other posts if you’re keen to explore that intersection.

Students stand and deliver their two-to three-minute literary lightning talks similarly. They have loved this activity, and it doesn’t take much time, so I recommend giving it a shot. In addition to providing learners with an opportunity to share their interests and passions with their classmates, it’s a great way to help students see that these concepts are relevant beyond English class. I know it might not seem like a big deal, but activities that invite that kind of expansive framing sets the stage for future learning transfer.

When contexts are framed expansively, students are positioned as actively contributing to larger conversations that extend across time, places, and people. A set of recent studies provides empirical evidence that the expansive framing of contexts can foster transfer.

(Engle, et. al, 2012).

Karis Jones’s and Scott Storm’s recent book Fandoms in the Classroom has scaled an activity similar to this into a sprawling multi-week project that has students interpreting texts, performing discourse analyses in fandom spaces, and even cosplaying as comic book heroes and literary legends.

My Go-To Resource

After this unit wraps, my go-to resource for the rest of the year is the Literary Theory one-pagers I used for the “Harlem” activity. They each include an overview, a list of prompting questions, and (most importantly) hyperlinks to key concepts that students can use to dig deeper into specific thinkers and theories within the broader critical tradition they’re researching. Each year, students say this is the most useful theory tool I provide them. Download them for free here and stay tuned for updates.

I know there are a lot more literary theories out there, but these are the ones I primarily focus on to start out with. More one-pagers coming soon.

I should note that, while these resources are incredible scaffolds, they are not drag-and-drop solutions. There is a lot of value in having students engage with primary theoretical sources or academic databases where they can curate their sources. These are a useful means to an end—water wings for students who are venturing out into new interpretive waters.

Wrap-Up

Don’t think for a second, however, that this mini-unit is the last time we will discuss theory in my class! It’s vital that teachers and students don’t treat these lenses like a one-off event. For the rest of the year, literary theory is intertwined with our learning. Our novels will have paired theoretical texts that I either provide, curate, or support students in finding. We’ll apply lenses to our article of the week discussions or run back more rounds of Literary Lightning Talk. It’s even woven into how I structure my “call for submissions” when students write analytical essays in my class. This is just the beginning. I look forward to sharing deeper dives soon.