Teaching Foucault to undergraduates can be a daunting task. However, I find that an enthusiastic group can handle short portions with ease when appropriately prepared.

As cliché as it sounds, as an English teacher I've always thought it one of my tasks to make literature come alive in the classroom by sustaining a sense of engagement and connection in class. While generally this entails rather obvious things like talking to students rather than lecturing at them, and engaging on a one to one level, I find it takes more than this to really drum up interest about our texts. To this end I try to show them how literature that may be one or two hundred years old still lives on, in important ways, in our own lives.

Towards the end of the semester, I always like asking students to reflect upon what they have learned and to assess the value of it. This is probably a fairly standard practice – I remember teachers doing it to myself since second grade – but it seems more necessary in these days of budget cuts and attitudes fostered by entitled entertainment. Big pictures are good, especially when you’re teaching rhetoric to a room full of science and business majors.

I’m teaching an upper-division rhetorical theory course about legal rhetoric in which I focus students on the rhetoric involved in adjudicating particular cases in dispute. The initial unit in the course focuses students on the rhetoric of narrative, memory, and proof surrounding factual disputes in particular cases. Although there are many examples of such discourse, the most classic example is in a legal trial.

As instructors, we all know how haggard most students look on the day that a paper is due—the sunken cheeks, the bleary eyes, the undaunted yawns all signal to me that heady material isn’t going to be as quickly (or as enthusiastically) received as usual. So, many of us make it a point to have some sort of fun activity on the day that a paper is due. We all know the kind of activity I’m talking about—the kind where students don’t have to have read or prepare prior to coming to class.