Abstract
In this chapter I will discuss how creative projects can motivate and enhance students’ critical and creative engagement with literary texts produced in different socio-cultural and historical contexts. I will draw on the creative projects that students produced in an undergraduate survey course, ‘Literature Across Time,’ which I taught in Hong Kong to demonstrate how such projects can encourage self-reflexivity, creativity, and critical engagement with texts and contexts. I will focus on discussing students’ creative responses to Charles Dickens’s short story, ‘The Signal-Man’ and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Students formed small groups and decided on their own topic and approach, such as creative writing, adaptation and appropriation, audio-visual production and digital representation, in response to these texts. The completed projects were then uploaded to a course-dedicated website so as to allow for peer interactions. Through publishing their work on an online platform, it also helped deepen their understanding of the relationship between mode of expression, publication, and literary creativity.
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Notes
- 1.
Of course, colleagues from different parts of the world have adopted different pedagogical approaches to address this. See for example, Kooistra 2008. Experiential learning in Kooistra’s classroom means the “hands-on practices with poems and pictures on the printed page” (Kooistra 2008: p. 43). For discussions of the challenges of teaching Victorian literature in contemporary classrooms and the different ways of engaging with students, see Allen-Emerson 2017, Jenkins 2017, and Deis 2017.
- 2.
- 3.
The interviews cited in this chapter were conducted in English.
- 4.
For a general discussion of the challenges of collaborative projects, see Rogat et al. 2013.
- 5.
I would like to acknowledge the support of a Teaching Development Grant for the project “Literary Studies Beyond the Classroom: A Web-based Platform for Students’ Literary Creative Projects” (Project No. 6000652). This grant provides funding to hire a project staff to construct and maintain a course-dedicated website to curate students’ creative projects. I would also like to thank Kenny Luk for transcribing the interviews cited in this chapter.
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Lee, K.H.Y. (2022). Bridging the Distance: Learning Victorian Literature Through Creative Projects. In: Morrison, K.A. (eds) Victorian Culture and Experiential Learning. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93791-1_3
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