Expand opportunities for students to successfully pursue advanced scholarship across all divisions and departments

Written by Cynthia Lotze, English Department Chair and AESR Instructor

Developing an English research pedagogy for Breck and leading the inaugural year of Advanced English Scholarship & Research (AESR) has been an utter delight for me – as a veteran teacher, as a poet, and as a deep believer in the power of artifacts, the physical items of a writer’s life and artistic process. The scholarship, both individual and collaborative, shown by this first class, the impact of our rare books and manuscripts trip to New York City, and the culminating presentations of research in the spring immediately set the bar high for next year’s students and created a clear map for my own nuanced shifts to the class in scaffolding rigorous inquiry, joyful curiosity, and skilled research practices for Breck’s highest English achievement. 

We entered the class seeking to trace that first, electric thought that becomes a book. Most of us erase that first gesture, overwrite the first draft. Our class tracked back and through the first scribbles that led to masterworks and emerging classics, challenging students to make inferences about those first marks on paper toward creation. We began with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Orland and Bayles’ Art & Fear, and Heather Cass White’s Books Promiscuously Read, to support our collective investigation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Along with archive visits and graduate student interviews, students spent the summer asking questions about the many levels of literacy they bring to reading and about the layers of circumstance, awareness, and mindset that come together to create novels like Frankenstein.

Next, students read Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Percival Everett’s James as a pairing, to study how art can speak to art over time and to experiment with lenses of literary theory to frame their understanding of that century and a half spanning conversation. 
As students came away from quarter 2, they had their individual research plans cemented and began to build their literature reviews, traveling to New York City and Yale University, to learn from experts in research, publishing, and creation, and immerse themselves in the artifacts that pulled their research off the screen and into the real, material world in which it was created.

This class is rooted in process – that of writers and that of a student studying a writer. Researchers study artifacts, but they themselves create artifacts. They leave that trail of scribbles that traces the path of discovery. And, at Breck, we don’t get there alone. Our students’ learning is inextricably bound with the lives of others, rooting us in WHY we thrive in community as humans at the most basic levels, and why the highest levels of scholarship are not lonely towers of separate thought and jealously guarded hypotheses. Breck scholars have shared hopes for experience and contribution, and the joy of seeing out those hopes to a kind of completion that could never come in solitude. In Advanced English Scholarship & Research we learn, yes, the fundamentals of literary research, but we do so while employing the metacognition and inclusivity woven by the Peter Clark and Melrose Centers through each student’s time at Breck, growing each other’s learning about research with the gift of process and the artifacts that make learning visible along the way.

I am so excited to continue to bring your students this new program and to seed excitement for English Research in our youngest learners in the years to come.