Download Cognitive Pedagogies Session #553 MLA Roundtable, 2014

Cognitive Pedagogies
Session #553
MLA Roundtable, 2014
Saturday, January 11, 1:45-3:00
Chicago A-B, Chicago Marriot
Session organizer and chair: Nancy Easterlin
Cognitive approaches to literature have undergone robust development in the past two
decades, the diversity and vitality of these related research areas attested to by the achievement
of division status for the field within the Modern Language Association of America. The
motivating impulse behind this session assumes that any healthy research area will be
dynamically integrated with changing and, in this case, emerging classroom practices that both
draw on and inform scholarship. This roundtable features five practitioners who both teach
across a range of literary and cultural areas and draw on a variety of cognitive-evolutionary
theories.
In “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Biocultural and Cognitive Approaches to
Teaching Italian Renaissance Comedy,” Linda Carroll will recount the challenge of teaching
unfamiliar cultural and historical material from a cognitive perspective. New understandings of
literary artifacts require laying some crucial groundwork: first, by familiarizing students with a
social structure and set of values that in some respects differ vastly from those of today and,
second, by versing them in sufficient historical information to interpret the facts of the comedies
of Renaissance Italy. These plays, filled with conflicts of class, age, and gender, offer rich
opportunities for engaging contemporary students with cognitive approaches. Relating specific
episodes in the plays, Carroll illustrates the method of balancing historical and cognitive
interpretation, and she elaborates on decisions in course design and pedagogical approach,
including instructional methodology (deductive, inductive, overt, Socratic), and course tools
(readings, discussion, short essays) that encourage acquisition and synthesis of knowledge
networks, thus enabling cogent analysis of the plays.
An interdisciplinary, team-taught course at a small, private liberal arts college presents
some similar opportunities to Carroll’s course but perhaps its own set of challenges, as Judith
Saunders will relate in “Literature and Biology: Interdisciplinary Team-Teaching.” This lowerlevel English literature course provides undergraduate students with a scientific understanding of
essential principles of evolutionary science together with the foundations of Darwinian literary
analysis. Explaining how she and her colleague, an animal behaviorist, blend the presentation of
scientific and literary materials, Saunders will also reflect on the benefits and difficulties of this
interdisciplinary collaboration. As her discussion and supplementary course documents will
demonstrate, the course compels students to think outside traditional disciplinary boundaries and,
as a consequence, to begin to approach knowledge in an increasingly integrative spirit.
In “Cognitive Phenology: An Evolving Approach to the Challenges of Teaching
Environmental Literature,” Colin Irvine will outline and discuss the ways that his own research
in narrative theory, cognition, and evolution have shaped his pedagogy in general and his course
in environmental literature in particular. Built around a semester-long assignment involving
several relatively unorthodox assignments (or “challenges”), the environmental literature course
invites students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds to think differently about the core
subjects and common texts. As importantly, the course – due to its reliance on methods and
readings associated with cognitive studies – provides the students and the teacher with important
opportunities to chart, as phenologists might, the changes in their thinking that result from the
shared reading of literary texts and engagement in intellectual and physical challenges.
Lisa Zunshine’s “’Theory of Mind’ as a Pedagogical Tool”demonstrates how a cognitivenarratological perspective on “theory of mind” (i.e., our tendency to explain people’s observable
behavior in terms of their underlying mental states, such as thoughts, feelings, desires, and
intentions) offers a new tool for the collaborative classroom exploration of representations of
fictional consciousness. In particular, Zunshine tells of her experience in asking students to write
up “missing” passages from Edith Wharton’s short story “Xingu.” This exercise follows the class
discussion of the construction of social minds in“Xingu,” a discussion which draws on
theoretical perspectives that either directly represent theory of mind, such as Zunshine’s
“sociocognitive complexity” and Alan Palmer’s “intermental thinking,” or are highly compatible
with it (Suzanne Keen’s “strategic empathizing”). Having used research on theory of mind to
teach a wide range of texts from Fielding’s Tom Jones to Cao Xueqin’s The Story of the Stone on
both graduate and undergraduate levels, Zunshine centers her talk on the immediate classroom
payoffs of this approach as well as its relationship with other, more established pedagogical
strategies.
In “Teaching Cognitive Approaches to Romanticism,” Nancy Easterlin, like Linda
Carroll, discusses the benefits and challenges of teaching a conventional literary historical area
within a cognitive approach. Easterlin describes the value of organizing Cognitive Approaches to
Romanticism, a masters-level seminar, by aligning areas of psychological study with specific
authors. These include: research on narrative mentation (narrativity) and Lyrical Ballads or The
Prelude; odes of Coleridge and Keats and the study of sensory imaging; and novels by Austen
and Emily Brontë and evolutionary psychology. This topical approach encourages graduate
students to begin exploring the library databases in psychology and to pursue cognitive criticism
in a simultaneously creative and scientific spirit.
As these diverse teaching applications demonstrate, cognitive approaches to literature and
culture bring together cultural artifacts, traditional literary historical and theoretical methods, and
theory in the social sciences to illuminate both the processes of and subject matter in aesthetic
objects and the relation of humans to their diverse environments. The roundtable, intended as an
initial offering in an exchange about the teaching of interdisciplinary cognitive and evolutionary
courses, has been planned to complement the publication of a special issue of Interdisciplinary
Literary Studies on the same topic (edited by Nancy Easterlin, expected publication fall 2013).
Because the goal of both the roundtable and the special issue is to spur collegial interaction on
the topic, presentations will be limited to ten minutes per speaker, thus allowing twenty minutes
for discussion.