In this chapter we look at the work that takes place in the classroom as you, other students, and the teacher tackle a particular text or topic. What kind of activities might occur during the hour or two that you are together? And who decides what happens -- you or the teacher? Much of the discussion of the previous chapters has been a preliminary to this chapter. We have looked at methods for responding to texts and methods for studying their various features, and we have examined several ways of getting prepared for study. Now you are in the classroom, ready to begin. How do you design a session that will provide you with opportunities both for learning and for contributing to the learning of others?

We will take the issues as they arise. First, we will look at the question of aims for a session. Second, I will discuss how you, as a student, might enable the session to be shaped by students' interests rather than by the leadership of a teacher. Third, and most important, we look at the management of learning in small groups (which involves several related issues, such as resolving conflict, coping with students who talk too much or too little, managing time, and reporting to the whole class). In the fourth section of the chapter I describe project work, and offer several examples from students' discussions of group work, where the students had worked on a particular project across several sessions. Finally, in a brief coda to the chapter, we look at the issue of relating work done in a given session to your wider understanding of literary studies.

But first, a word of caution. You may feel a sense of disturbance or anxiety when you come to follow the methods I am about to describe. This is to be expected, but it is as well to think about the reasons behind it.

Students who are unused to taking the initiative in class, who have not been accustomed to defining their aims, devising their own methods, or working autonomously in groups, sometimes find it difficult to adapt to the methods I suggest in this book. For you the methods will seem the more difficult the less you have been used to deciding what and how to learn. I have heard students describe high school classes in which they were made to sit in rows and given notes about a novel or a poem by dictation -- this is perhaps the worst case. But if all your learning has been determined by a teacher in this or some other manner, it can be hard to adapt: the teacher chooses what you should learn and controls the way in which you are expected to learn it. If this has been your only experience, it can be unnerving to try something else. The difficulty is increased if the teacher in charge of your session at university seems prepared to act in more or less the same way, by remaining in control of all the main activities during the session.

It may seem self-evident to you that learning has to be teacher-directed (what are teachers for, after all?). Teaching of this kind also appears to be more efficient. The teacher offers coverage of the ground required, and can lead a large group of students through the same topics. It is possible to learn under these circumstances, although it has to be said that learning in the classroom (in contrast to the essay preparation or homework you do on your own) tends to be erratic and fortuitous. You will learn when a point being made by the teacher relates to something you already know or have an interest in, but much will pass you by because you have no way of assimilating it.

Learning with such a teacher is rather like taking a guided coach tour through a city. Certainly you will see most of the main sights, assuming you were looking in the right direction, and you will gather a few facts about the history of each monument you pass, but your impression at the end of the day is likely to be a somewhat disconnected jumble of impressions. You learn about a city far better by walking the streets for yourself, with a map and guide in hand. You may not get to see so much, and you will take longer over the tour, but you will feel and hear the city on your own terms and at your own pace, and you will see many scenes that the coach tour ignores. So it is with learning in English. The learning you do under your own direction unquestionably takes longer and demands more effort, and may become tiring or distressing at times (as when you wander into a side street and become lost), but it ends by giving you far more real understanding.

This learning is often called student-centred learning. It is the kind of learning I describe in this chapter. One of its key features is to redefine the role of the teacher, as we will see. But its most important feature is that it involves a change of expectations on the part of the students participating. You give up the security and comforts of the guided tour in return for a less comfortable, and sometimes unsettling, journey on your own feet. But you will be in control of the itinerary.

Think of the curriculum as analogous to the city. There is a range of literary and other texts which you must come to know, chosen by the teachers who planned your degree. There is only this city (other cities are called history, philosophy, and the like), and it is where you have decided to live for the next two or three years. Now you must discover for yourself how to live here. The teachers for your course also live in the city, and like city administrators they necessarily shape many of the ways in which you relate to the city. But it is open to you to work out a way of life which suits you, negotiating with your teachers -- and other students -- when required. In the long run you will find it far more satisfying if you do. [Continued . . . ]