Journal of Academic Development and Education JADE Issue 11 Summer 2019 | Page 8

I took learner activity into account by building
in exercises which required active thought and
engagement with the text. In the latter half of the
seminar I set students a close reading passage to
analyse with a partner, which required them to
find links between the close reading and the larger
thematic issues in the text that we had previously
been discussing. This activity also brought in
interaction – both between each student and
his or her close reading partner and between
the students and me, and the students and the
rest of the class - in the whole-group discussion
period that followed the close reading. Students
had to explain and rationalise the ideas they had
developed in the close reading exercise to the rest
of the group.
Given the importance of building upon the
students’ established knowledge-base, I tried
throughout the class to emphasise the way in
which that week’s text might be linked to other
texts that the students had encountered, both on
this module and more generally. For example, I
showed them a clip of the 1962 film of The Mutiny
on the Bounty, and encouraged them to compare
that film text with Byron’s poetic one. I asked, what
kind of effect did the film aim to create? How did
that compare or contrast with the kind of effect
that Byron aimed to create? This was an effective
approach, as it got students thinking and talking
about the way in which the same basic story
can be told in a number of different ways. They
discussed how the film version emphasised action,
adventure and excitement, whereas Byron’s poem
seemed to deliberately leave out the more action-
orientated sequences, preferring to concentrate on
establishing a sense of the island paradise and an
alternative to heroic martial action in its depiction
of the desirability of a state of peace, love and
harmony. In this way, we built on the students’ own
knowledge of action-themed films and books, and
explored how Byron seems deliberately to reject
the approach to his subject that he might have
been expected to take.
8

Conclusion
Overall, the session seemed to go very well. The
students started from a position of some confusion
and, in one or two cases, even resentment
towards the text, which they complained was
‘boring’, ‘slow’ and ‘hard to follow’. However, as
the class proceeded they began to find ways of
moving beyond this initial position. Though group
discussion, guided by focused questions from
me, they came to realise that it was not that they
were failing to read the poem ‘correctly’, or that
the poem was ‘bad’, but that it was simply that the
poem did not fit their mental model of how a story
about a mutiny ‘should’ be told. This realisation
represented a threshold concept 5 : once the
students had grasped the idea that the meaning
of a text comes not just from the story it tells but
also from how the story is told, they were able
to use this knowledge to develop a much more
satisfactory understanding of the text. By the end
of the class, they were engaged in ‘deep’ learning:
rather than merely ‘skat[ing] along the surface of
the text' 6 , as they had been doing to start with,
they were showing their understanding of the text’s
larger issues and themes through their ability to
engage in close textual analysis that supported the
theories about the text that they had developed
previously. Their responses showed that the ILOs
for the session had been achieved: the students
gained more experience at close reading and were
able to make links between their close reading
activity and the larger thematic issues in the poem,
ultimately coming to interesting conclusions about
Byron’s treatment of the themes of gender and
heroism.