Making the Hard Sell
Deploying everything from rock music to blogs, Associate Professor of English Deborah Laycock shakes up her students' preconceptions about both eighteenth-century literature and Canadian culture.
Exploit contemporary culture
Do you know anything about the musical groups Broken Social Scene and Arcade Fire? Do you keep up with the political satire of Stephen Colbert? Deborah Laycock does, and her students benefit. Laycock believes that her ability to engage students depends in part on welcoming contemporary perspectives, not for the sake of sugar-coating but in recognition of the fact that "our understanding of the past changes how we read the present. And we also have to recognize that we are reading the past through the lens of the present, so we might as well do that self-consciously." So, in Laycock's course on early eighteenth-century literature, students reading Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels will also analyze the satirical strategies of Monty Python's Flying Circus or The Colbert Report. Her Restoration drama class might examine modern films that recreate late-seventeenth-century England, like The Libertine, starring Johnny Depp. "I like to move back and forth between periods," Laycock says. "I want students to see how modern writers rewrite the past and thus get us to rethink both that past and the present moment." And what about Broken Social Scene? The Juno-award winning rock band occasionally figures in Laycock's course on Canadian literature.
Learn from the failures
Sometimes, when Laycock begins discussing Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele, who triggered a revolution in British periodical literature with their publications The Spectator and The Tatler, students roll their eyes in boredom. "There are always works that students don't find interesting, but that doesn't mean I jettison them," she says. "It means I've got to figure out a way to make them interesting." Students warmed up to Addison and Steele's essays when Laycock juxtaposed them with analyses of blog culture. She selects works that speak to each other in interesting ways, "revealing continuities and discontinuities." "When something that I think students should know isn't working, I'm challenged to create a new context for it," she says. "I learn as much from the failures in the classroom as I do from the successes."
Revise the syllabus, regularly
If you studied Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift with Laycock five years ago, you wouldn't meet the same Johnson and Swift in her classroom today. Laycock takes a red pen to the syllabus every time she teaches a course anew, sometimes changing the required reading, sometimes altering her approach--and often both. Such adjustments make her approach the texts and the historical period in a new way, from a new perspective. Laycock can make new connections. Teaching itself becomes an act of reinvention. Laycock believes constructing syllabi is the hardest but most important part of her teaching. She always endeavors to "select readings that reveal an age or period as complex and diverse as our own." Redefining her courses every semester appeals to her inner explorer. "I try to set things up so that patterns can emerge, but I also hope there are patterns yet to be discovered, forged, and stumbled upon as we trace 'one warm line,'" she says, quoting songwriter Stan Rogers, through uncharted territory.
Subvert expectations
Laycock knows that both eighteenth-century English literature and even modern Canadian literature can be hard sells. "You have to work hard to make the eighteenth century interesting," she says, "not because it is intrinsically dull and soulless, but because students are predisposed to find it so, especially if they have inherited a suspision of neoclassicism from the Romantic poets." Similarly, students may assume that Canadian culture is just a bland version of the United States. Laycock likes to ambush such notions. Just as she gets students to see the eighteenth century with fresh eyes by drawing comparisons between Jonathan Swift and Stephen Colbert, she clears a path toward new views of Canada by "defamiliarizing" the United States. On the first day of class, with boom box in hand and lyrics to distribute, Laycock plays songs like "Call It Democracy," by Bruce Cockburn, or "Woodstock," by Joni Mitchell, introducing students to Canadian artists who have redefined for Americans some aspects of U.S. culture. "We can begin to talk about Canadian identity after making 'American' identity more contested a construction," says Laycock. Her students
go on to read such authors as Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Anne Hébert, and Michael Ondaatje with a more subtle understanding of distinctively Canadian themes and concerns.
Never be without paper and pen
Neither sleet, nor snow, nor the demands of two energetic Siberian huskies can prevent Laycock from committing her thoughts to paper. She says inspiration often strikes when she is walking her dogs in the morning--having reread, the night before, the works she will teach that day. "During the walk I can get some perspective, situating the text in relation to texts that have preceded or will follow it on the syllabus, and in relation to critical works I have been reading," she says. Laycock is given to scribbling ideas onto scraps of paper, collecting, shuffling, and reassembling them as the semester goes on. She recalls one peripatetic revelation that came as she was pondering the implications of Jonathan Lamb's essay "Eye-Witnessing in the South Seas" in relation to issues of travel and perception in Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko and Swift's Gulliver's Travels. "I struggled to jot down a new version of the course--or at least ideas that would take us in a new direction--while trudging in the tracks left by my dogs in the snow."
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