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It describes how Westminster College reorients outcomes away from covering content toward critical reading, critical and creative writing, and scholarly conversation, organized across two survey courses in British and American literature. 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Some twenty years later, we are still searching for approaches that would make these courses more meaningful and valuable to our students. How can we create a survey experience in which students’ engagement with literature is less perfunctory and more genuine? For faculty teaching at under-enrolled liberal arts colleges, this question is particularly concerning, given the survey’s potential for attracting and retaining students. After all, a good survey experience has the power to reaffirm a student’s choice of the English major, to entice a non-major to join the program, or to turn a student away from critical reading and writing altogether.  \nI teach at Westminster College (New Wilmington, Pa.), a small, undergraduate liberal arts institution where English faculty approach the teaching of introductory survey courses in the same way we approach the teaching of the senior capstone course: collaboratively and creatively, with an emphasis on student-centered instruction. Throughout the past decade, in an effort to keep English studies relevant to a shrinking pool of students, we have shifted our survey (and overall program) outcomes away from the acquisition of content and toward the development of skills. This shift evolved from faculty conversations that began in the early 2000s, when, according to Westminster Professor Bethany Hicok,“we stopped thinking that American and  \nBritish literature could be ‘covered’ and that our students could be ‘filled’ with these texts”(42) .“Instead,” Hicok writes,“we invited our students to talk to us, to each other, and to the texts they were reading”(42) . More recently, we have begun to focus survey course design more intentionally on skills-based outcomes, which primarily concern areas of critical reading, critical and creative writing, and scholarly conversation. Our survey sequence consists of two courses: ENG 240 introduces key texts in British literature, while ENG 250 focuses on American literature. Each course introduces and requires students to begin applying theoretical approaches, including New Criticism, feminism, Marxism, and psychoanalytic criticism (ENG 240) and structuralism, postcolonialism, African-American Criticism, and New Historicism (ENG 250) . We offer two sections ofENG 240 every fall, and two sections ofENG 250 every spring. Each section is taught by a different faculty member, which facilitates faculty collaboration in the design and implementation of the syllabus and major course assignments.  \nIn its existing configuration, each of our modified surveys requires heavy multitasking of both teachers and students, riddled as it is with a number of goals. As the gateway to the major, the survey is at once an introduction to British or American literary tradition, an overview of theoretical perspectives, and a fine-tuning of the reading, writing, and thinking skills students are acquainted with in freshman writing and liberal arts education courses. English faculty know that, in the context of the literature survey, efficiency is at once a strength and a downfall.1 For English faculty at Westminster, preparing students to succeed on the varied assignments I describe in the following pages requires significant collaboration and a great deal of class time, which ultimately means that we read fewer pieces of literature and spend less time on historical  \nand cultural context. But because our curriculum places the student in the role of the scholar from the start, we are as invested in cultivating students’ capacities for critical thinking, writing, and speaking about texts as we are in developing their understanding of literary history and tradition. Accor","cbCaikcHrN5ruAH3","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaikcHrN5ruAH3","pdf",782338,32,"English","# The Need for Meaningful Survey Courses\n## Student Engagement and the Risk of Perfunctory Reading\n# Westminster’s Skills-Based Redesign\n## Outcomes Shift from Content to Skills\n## Two-Course Structure: ENG 240 and ENG 250\n# Collaboration and Instructional Trade-offs\n## Multitasking, Time Constraints, and Reduced Context\n## Why Skill-Building Still Matters","[{\"question\":\"What challenges arise from the modified, skills-based design?\",\"answer\":\"The essay highlights heavy multitasking and many overlapping goals for both teachers and students. It also notes that more intensive preparation can reduce the number of texts covered and limit time spent on historical and cultural context.\"}]","Prioritizing Student Skill Development in the Small College Literature Survey - Kristianne Kalata - Seminar Paper | PDF",1792086140,81]