Teaching with Exigence

NPR recently broadcasted a story (available via podcast) about Soldier's Heart: Teaching Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, a new book by Elizabeth Samet. I haven't read the book, but listening to the podcast and Samet's comments about teaching young officers-to-be, many of whom will likely be going to war, I couldn't help wondering how the exigence supplied by an active war might shape the transaction of reading, the exchange that takes place in the classroom, the instructor's choices about texts, topics of discussion, etc.

For most of us teaching in higher education, there is simply little sense of exigence. This is true of both teachers and students, both of whom are too easily isolated--temporally and spatially--from the contexts and challenges our students will experience once their schooling is finished. This isolation is generated by all sorts of factors: the abundance that surrounds us, our priviledged place within that abundance, the variety of contexts our students will encounter upon graduation.

How would our teaching change if we had a more immediate and concrete sense of the challenges our students would confront? How would levels of student engagement change with a greater sense of exigence? Can such exigence be framed or generated with authenticity?