Haley Petcher Bynum

During my final semester of grad school, I took Teaching Literature, or Literature and Pedagogy. I chose to take this class because I wanted to be better equipped as a teacher, and I believed that the combination of studying theories and practicing those theories would help me reach my goal. In class, we discussed possible answers to questions about the relationship between reading and teaching, theories of literature and theories of teaching, and writing pedagogy and literature pedagogy. One of the main goals of the course was to teach us how to choose readings and develop writing assignments for literature courses. 

 

During the semester, I wrote about why I would choose one anthology over another, analyzed syllabi for literature courses, and created a general syllabus and a detailed unit plan for a high school English course. I have decided to plan a unit around George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, which would allow my class to discuss issues of language and social status. I paired the play with the text that inspired Shaw–Ovid's "Pygmalion"–and texts that perhaps were inspired by Shaw and/or Ovid, such as makeover stories where one person "makes" the other and falls in love. By examining these texts, students can make an argument about a trend or issue that they see in the texts.