Two years ago I created a pedagogical tool called the Reading Journal. The instructions are the following:
– When reading a text, the student will have a separate notebook in which he will write his thoughts, feelings, vocabulary, quotes, post things in collage manner, ask questions to himself, to the class, etc. Any sort of thing the student would have in mind while reading the text.
– The student would bring the Reading Journal to every single class.
– Sometimes I would ask them what they had written, others when the discussion was turning slow I would ask them to open their Journals and find items to discuss.
– I would take a few of them home at a time, randomly, to grade and read.

It worked. The students were interacting with the texts in a different way they hadn’t before. I was grading less hours every week ( which is always helpful ) and the interactions grew.

Six months ago I started teaching at Baruch College. I found myself, for the first time in my teaching career, in a smart classroom I was ecstatic. And ready. I needed to change things around.

Disclaimer: I teach literature courses for non literary majors. Most of the students are not interested in literature nor in the course. They just want to pass and most of the courses I have taught are a requirement, so bringing interest to the classroom, making the students read and then having them enjoy it, that was the goal. I have achieved that goal… but of that, later.

I wanted to bring something new, something my students had never done before. I asked them to create Tumblrs.
Why Tumblrs? well, it is a free blogging platform which is very friendly with all sorts of media. I thought it would work. It did.
The instructions for the first blog were quite simple. Each student had an author we were reading in the classroom and they had to read more of his works than the one we had in the syllabus. They had to do research and create a narrative they would present. Most of all, I wanted them to find connections.
What do I mean by connections?
When a student who is studying advertisement suddenly finds himself reading Descartes, or Kant or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, generally, they find no space for those texts in their everyday lives. There is no entry way in which they find that the texts speak to them. I wanted them to find those connections, to dig into the text and find something that spoke to them.
The instructions were a little vague but I wanted to see what would happen.
The results were astonishing.

The first two Tumblrs were amazing.

www.idltr.tumblr.com – was done by a student who claimed he hated to read. His Tumblr was on Tartuffe. In it he put media, including a picture of Family Guy’s father as Orgon. He did an analysis based on the seven deadly sins that Tartuffe was guiltly of. He also wrote an extended ending, in rhyme, of the text.

Was also based on the same text. This Tumblr was less adventurous but extremely well done. The student researched and found the original publication, which she added as a picture. She explained Moliere’s play in five steps with a lot of humor and a few memes. She also did more research on the historical aspect of the play.