[Not a fan, this morning, of my voice in this one, but I suppose that’s what our workshop is for. I’ve been writing too many conference papers and need to shake the academese.]

The peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece were on to something. While I can’t walk with every class, I invoke our ambulatory forebears to point up the fact that thinking never happens in a vacuum. Whatever we mean by “literature,” the practices it comprises, whether at point of production or reception, are at the very least embodied and situated practices. This emphasis on thought as an irreducibly mediated experience lives at the core of my pedagogy, and it animates what I consider a tactical philosophy of teaching: a set of broadly applicable tools kept close at hand to either demystify or ramify, as needed. Few concepts are as universally accessible as body and place, and given the diversity of subjects, contexts, and mandates represented in my teaching portfolio—from introductory community college courses for students ill-served by their high school years to seminars aimed at advanced English majors with graduate aspirations—I’ve found that the fundamentals of this approach consistently ring true. In each case, I’m asking students to pay attention to their own attention, and I hope, in cultivating self-conscious engagement with cultural productions, to leave them slightly better managers of their minds. [Thinking of making this point the animating sentiment of a more casual–and, I hope, readable–revision that dwells more explicitly on teaching introductory writing.]

Being a scholar of cities affords special opportunity to build situation into my classes—or rather to open them toward the already built situation in which they take place—and I’ve been seizing chances to work alfresco since my earliest forays as an instructor. In my seminar Shadow Cities: Literary Alterity and Urban Otherworlds, I supplement traditional assignments (designed to inculcate conventional but necessary academic skills such as close reading) with what I term “literary fieldwork.” The latter might entail adopting an existing though unfamiliar genre and writing in the wake of one of our authors (students are invited, for instance, to “exhaust a place” in the spirit of Georges Perec, and to document their noctivagations à la Dickens’s “Night Walks”), or it can involve more freeform excursions to catalogue the subterranean, invent histories of urban hellmouths, and report on what Marc Augé calls the “non-places” of postmodernity (transit spaces, lobbies, waiting rooms, roadway medians, and the like).

Intended to open the sensorium and expand the attunement of literary inquiry, fieldwork has proven popular. “For a research class,” wrote one student afterwards, “I thought the fieldwork was an excellent component.” But it also complements and complicates the traditional understanding of humanities research, not to mention the tools used to conduct and present that research. Mapping is a case in point. While I employed digital maps to align readings, discussions, and exercises during a summer spent on-site for Writing London (lecturing to students as we walked, for example, the routes taken in Mrs. Dalloway), my urban literature courses now ask students to progressively assemble individualized city exploration itineraries, charting their own links between site and content. The semester culminates with an exchange of projects, as students follow in their partners’ footsteps, annotating itineraries as they go and then reporting on the experience during our final meeting. Apart from being an excuse to send one another on adventures, the exercise enables critical reflection on the experiential aspects of literature—as, again, an endeavor at once embodied and situated—and it underscores the effectiveness, for me, of social pedagogy.