As he observed their reaction to his teaching, Pustejovsky came to believe this is what his teaching led students to conclude about themselves:

1. "What interests a literature professor and what interests a college sophomore are completely different. The professor's reasons for reading don't originate in the same universe."

2. "Professors do a different kind of reading than what we students do." This view is continually reinforced by the professor's (completely well-intentioned) identification of significant passages of the text, passages which the student herself had already read without noticing anything significant.

3. "Interpretation is something that is shown to you. It's not a process you can join in and you can't do it yourself since it obviously requires lots of years of graduate school. Despite a professor's assurances that 'There are many possible interpretations of this poem/story/drama ...' you're best off learning the one she obviously thinks is right.

4. "Undergraduate students simply can't see all that a teacher sees in a text." The teacher bases his instruction on some kind of higher ability or vision, and it doesn't translate well into a college classroom environment.

If they were right, lie concluded, then, for them, studying literature was an expensive waste of time, awakening no passions, developing no abilities and kindling no loyalty to a common cultural tradition.

This led Pustejovsky to ask why we tolerate this discrepancy between what we expect as teachers and what we settle for? "Isn't it pointless -- or even cynical -- to persist In classroom behavior that encourages them to draw these conclusions about their own abilities?" he asks. "The only reason I can find for our tolerating the situation is that we all still believe we have something of great importance we want to give our students," he says. "What we most want to convey is our own wonder at the artistry of words. We want them to see that a work of literature is an individual record of how someone else has faced life, and succeeded or failed. In short we what to show them that through words we can come to know ourselves."

But the old approaches weren't working and when students didn't discuss, Pustejovsky ended up doing all the talking. "When I saw their interest fall, I felt obliged to raise them out of their indifference through my own "performance." I tried to demonstrate everything that close reading and argumentation can accomplish. But the effect was to reinforce their own suspicion that - when it comes down to their ability to do these things -- they just don't get it and never will." But then, as he explains below, John Pustejovsky encountered shared inquiry and began using it in his college literature classes.

What is "Shared Inquiry"?

The process called "shared inquiry" provides some solutions to the mutual frustrations students and teachers often feel with traditional lecture and discussion approaches to teaching. It's because of this better way that I came to see that my own traditional way of teaching was keeping my students and me apart.

"Shared inquiry" has been popularized by the Great Books Foundation of Chicago, an organization founded in 1947 to provide people of all ages with the opportunity to read, discuss and learn from the great works of literature. What has sustained my enthusiasm for the program, however, is not its canon of books," but the process of discussion it champions.

The Method

My introduction to the shared inquiry approach came through the Junior Great Books program in my children's public school in Whitefish Bay. There students meet once weekly during their lunch hours to read and discuss stories from a Junior Great Books reader. The discussion occurs in groups of 7 - 12 children, and two adult discussion leaders. One leader reads the selection aloud (while the kids eat lunch), after which the other introduces a question for discussion. The goal of the meeting is to reach consensus on the answer to the leader's question. The school schedule allows about forty-five minutes for these meetings. The texts are chosen to be age-appropriate, but they must also have literary merit (The fourth-grade reader, for instance, includes a story by A.A. Milne, an African folktale, and a tale by Kipling. among other things.)

Everyone follows four simple rules. 1. No one may participate in discussions who has not read the story. 2. Discuss only the story everyone has read. 3. Do not introduce outside opinions unless you can back them up with evidence from the story. 4. Leaders may only ask questions, they may not answer them. The rules are easy to learn, and (initially) hard to follow.

Wrong Questions; Right Questions

All leaders are required to undergo a ten-hour Basic Leader Training session, conducted by a representative of the Great Books Foundation. Before starting the training, I had assumed that I'd be good at this. After all, I assured myself I'm a literature professor, and my critical expertise will certainly put me ahead of non-specialists. I was wrong. In practice discussions, I tried to develop questions that would underscore interesting thematic or structural features. "Do you have someplace you're trying to lead the students with this question?" was the trainer's comment. "Of course," I said. "Then it's the wrong kind of question," was the reply. "Your Job is not to show how smart you are, but to foster inquiry by the group.

The questions used to initiate shared inquiry discussions must meet several criteria. 1. The leader's questions must be answerable using only the story. 2. Questions must have more than one possible correct answer. 3. Questions should express the leader's own doubt about the story.

Over the next few weeks, with my fourth graders, I learned to quit asking "teacher questions" (looking for answers that everyone already knows) and start asking questions that I really wanted answered. The amazing thing was that when I did, I could see that the nine kids in my group were working together to find answers. And some of the answers were astonishingly insightful.

Results and Implications

Since then I've led Junior Great Books discussions for two more years, and am now the coordinator for the school's program. It's easy to see why the program is one of the most popular activities sponsored by the PTA. It gets children to read carefully. (Someone who overlooks an important fact will immediately be told about it by classmates.) It encourages children to form and then reform an opinion based on a knowledge of the text. It demands that children listen to others in the group, respond to the question asked (not the one they thought they heard), defend one's own point of view, sharpen it, and then watch it build into an answer that everyone agrees on. What makes the process exciting for children is that they can see that they are contributing to answering a question that someone else in their group needs answered. For elementary-age children Junior Great Books offers a chance to actually see why their parents care about reading in their discussion meetings, they see adults who care about reading and care about their reading, they find adults who will listen to them with full attention, who are concerned about what they say, and who make them part of their search for an answer, they learn that their peers will listen to what they have to say, and that they themselves have something to say.

What Junior Great Books Has Taught Me About College Teaching

The "rule" that first shocked me into recognizing how I was building failure into my own students' classroom experiences is this: Leaders may only ask questions that they really care about.

I have used tile shared inquiry rules in my Marquette University classrooms many times. The effect on college students' behavior is the same as on elementary school students. Students' anxiety about speaking up diminishes quickly when they begin to accept that I will not intervene to dominate the discussion with my own way of reading something. When they really recognize that I am only going to ask the questions, not answer them, they start to show "ownership" of their answers, and focus on the task of settling on a consensus answer. In short, the method has developed in my students a sense of self-reliance, an awareness of what they've read and what they think the text says, they listen very carefully to each other. The greatest benefit is this: my students are learning to listen to the text. They listen to it as they read, as others talk about it, and as they reread it. They no longer see the literary work as an icon, or an oracle, and they don't see me as a high priest. The text has become something that can be explored as a source of interest concern and wonder.

Can this approach be used to teach literature at the college level? Yes, obviously. Is this a method for teaching literature? No, it models a method of inquiry, and produces interpretations through an argumentative approach. It rewards certain behaviors, such as careful attention to textual detail, to others' points of view, to one's own form of expression. It does not address all of the traditional objectives of a college-level literature course. What it does create is self-esteem and a positive disposition toward a process of inquiry.

The class where shared inquiry is being used always appears headed for someplace: the objective of a given day's discussion is always out in the open. The agenda is simple: pose a question, wrestle your way to an answer, move on to another question, forge ahead. I use shared inquiry -- which is essentially an argumentative approach -- in combination with an analytical approach where I eventually ask students to pose their own questions as they read. Look for patterns, identify significant passages, I tell them, and ask yourself questions about the patterns and passages you notice. A person equipped with the literary scholar's tools -- knowledge of style, narrative technique, cultural allusions, things best learned through some other pedagogical approach -- will simply notice more things and offer more sophisticated answers to interpretive questions. At the same time, as their ability to observe analytically develops, the text in turn produces more and deeper questions for them to wonder and argue about.

And Assessment?

Assessment of the student who participates in this way of teaching, is made easier by the fact that he is continually reminded that his own preparation and participation are the key elements of a successful course. Self-assessment becomes a natural part of the learning process.

Having been introduced to this method, it's become much easier for me to share my own sense of wonder. Students eventually assimilate the idea that wonder is what propels the questions and the process of arguing one's way to an answer. Once this happens, the leader's job retreats into the background. Example: One evening, after having using shared inquiry for six weeks in a class on modern German short stories, I was prepared for the evening's discussion with a set of six questions on Martin Stephan's story "The Tub." But after reading the story aloud, rather than introducing my first prepared question, I asked, "What do you wonder about in this story?" Forty minutes later the students had raised and answered all six of my questions, as well as several of their own. Shared inquiry makes it possible to communicate one's wonder at literature by turning it into an experience of shared wonder, in an open process of doing. The whole endeavor becomes a process of guided discovery.

Shared inquiry intensifies the sense of a classroom community. It encourages interaction among the students, rather than the interaction of one student with the teacher while others watch. Tile group, not the teacher, comes to represent the source of answers. Thus students realize they possess the resources to pursue those things they wonder about.

After scores of hours of using this approach, it pleases me that my students' reasons for reading are starting to look very much like my own. It pleases me even more that now their readings of literature are fully their own.