Teaching Literary Criticism: A Curriculum with an Emphasis on Religion

摘要

In 2011, a study conducted by Arum and Roksa found that college students were not effectively learning critical thinking skills according to the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). They suggest that students are distracted by socializing and working. However, community college students are not learning how to apply their critical thinking skills to other courses. The purpose of the Teaching Literary Criticism on Religion course is to improve college-age students' critical thinking skills as they use them to evaluate literature content. The curriculum contains six units that scaffold a portion of an argument map that learners will utilize to create their critique in an argumentative essay. Learners will produce critical interpretations of religious literature by utilizing a reader-response criticism to provide a comprehensible critique. After the successful completion of this course, students will be able to critique literary texts, apply literary theories to literary texts, and provide reasoning to support the argument in oral discussions and writing. Students will analyze literature critically with the appropriate support, develop the ability to read works of literature and religious literature. Additionally, they will deploy ideas from these texts in their own reading and writing. The summative evaluation includes a literary analysis of a piece of religious literature utilizing the reader-response criticism and a literary text of their choice. The New World Kirkpatrick's model of evaluation was used as an approach to evaluate the curriculum. Hence, students will apply their critical thinking skills to a literary text as a literary criticism.