Tips on structuring emotionally rich book/film discussions
October 17, 2024 3:50 AM
I sometimes end up leading discussions on fiction in a classroom-adjacent context. I often feel my natural approach (analytic, thinky) doesn't mesh well with what participants would find satisfying, but I don't quite understand how an alternative approach would work. If you've been in great book discussions, explain what kinds of questions/topics they contain?
To clarify, I do personally engage emotionally with fiction, and I think it's great that others do too! Also I'm reasonably good at using Rogerian-style responses to help people process their real-life feelings one-on-one. However, I need to better understand how, and to what purpose, this gets folded into the subject matter of a forward-moving quasi-academic group discussion.
I tend to understand formal group discussions, even about stories, more like collaborative intellectual problem-solving: hey look at this interesting question of structural dissonance, historical connection, technical choice! let's all pitch in some logic to understand it!. Those crackle with curiosity and move forward productively in a way that I assumed was the point of book discussions. However, a fair number of other people, possibly the majority, always seem disappointed by this style, as though they were excited to discuss something else (what??) and experience dissonance when things go instead to an analytic place.
On the other hand, if I assume that what people want to talk about is feelings-y personal response stuff, then I really really do not understand how that would work structurally. Topics like "so how did you feel about this character?" "What are they feeling in this situation?" "What do you think about the emotional situation on p 3 where they..." just seem like they... don't lead anywhere or connect to anything? Like if we all go around and share "sad"... "sad"... "really sad, like that one time when"..."sad," or "I think that was wrong of her, she shouldn't have done that, it caused him a lot of pain"... "yeah, that was terrible,"..."yeah," then what's left to do, where are we going with this? Even if someone breaks out a deep personal anecdote, we all nod and say "wow, that's so hard, so sorry you went through that," and... then what?
It seems this may be some kind of cognitive styles issue, and that I may just need someone to ELI5 the other style for me. So if there are Mefites of the style I'm describing, who would also dislike an abstract, debate-y, analytic fiction discussion but have experienced wonderful book or film discussions that worked along different lines... could you give some examples of how those went, how they progressed, and what people got out of them?
To clarify, I do personally engage emotionally with fiction, and I think it's great that others do too! Also I'm reasonably good at using Rogerian-style responses to help people process their real-life feelings one-on-one. However, I need to better understand how, and to what purpose, this gets folded into the subject matter of a forward-moving quasi-academic group discussion.
I tend to understand formal group discussions, even about stories, more like collaborative intellectual problem-solving: hey look at this interesting question of structural dissonance, historical connection, technical choice! let's all pitch in some logic to understand it!. Those crackle with curiosity and move forward productively in a way that I assumed was the point of book discussions. However, a fair number of other people, possibly the majority, always seem disappointed by this style, as though they were excited to discuss something else (what??) and experience dissonance when things go instead to an analytic place.
On the other hand, if I assume that what people want to talk about is feelings-y personal response stuff, then I really really do not understand how that would work structurally. Topics like "so how did you feel about this character?" "What are they feeling in this situation?" "What do you think about the emotional situation on p 3 where they..." just seem like they... don't lead anywhere or connect to anything? Like if we all go around and share "sad"... "sad"... "really sad, like that one time when"..."sad," or "I think that was wrong of her, she shouldn't have done that, it caused him a lot of pain"... "yeah, that was terrible,"..."yeah," then what's left to do, where are we going with this? Even if someone breaks out a deep personal anecdote, we all nod and say "wow, that's so hard, so sorry you went through that," and... then what?
It seems this may be some kind of cognitive styles issue, and that I may just need someone to ELI5 the other style for me. So if there are Mefites of the style I'm describing, who would also dislike an abstract, debate-y, analytic fiction discussion but have experienced wonderful book or film discussions that worked along different lines... could you give some examples of how those went, how they progressed, and what people got out of them?
Who are these people? What backgrounds do they have? How old are they?
Also - how well do they know each other and how consistent is the group? Do you get a lot of new people most times? Do you have short sessions of a few weeks with new people each time?
I am intrigued by your question, since for years I ran a more-than-a-book-group-but-not-truly-a-class - we read a mixture of science fiction and literary criticism in a relatively structured way with some bigger goals, like developing a sense of the trajectory of feminist SF, exploring various ideas about the "origin" of science fiction, etc. We'd do sets of themed readings over some weeks.
Anyway, it was difficult, and one thing I ended up doing was relinquishing some of my goals - if most people got a broad sense of the topic and some people got more out of it, that was great. Since it was an optional activity, it simply couldn't work like the structured academic thing I'd like unless that was what they'd also like. On one level, this never stopped grinding my gears just a little because I really really wanted to be able to talk about the lit crit stuff in depth, but whatever, it was not a class for me.
So here are some things I did, mostly drawn from some trainings I'd taken on organizing.
1. I emphasized "building a container" for the group - meaning, I spent more time on set-up/getting-to-know-you activities in order to deepen everyone's investment in the experience and engagement with each other. This was scaled to group size and time involved. This often looked like go-rounds (whole group if small, small groups if not) for people to talk about their personal interest in the topic and their background. I would have done sillier activities with a different group, but the overall goal was to get people to have a sense of each other and their shared interest.
2. Start each class with a themed "icebreaker". I'd connect it to the reading - "would you rather live on an ice planet or a really hot planet", "would you go with the First 100 to Mars in Red Mars, etc as appropriate. This helped loosen people up and get them talking.
3. If people didn't know each other, I'd force them to do a paired activity ("force"), usually one where they each took one or two minutes (timed) to give their immediate impressions of the book with no interruptions, then the other person talked for two minutes. Doing this again, I might do a paired exercise where everyone would take their minute to talk on a specific point that they could choose. (I'd make a list - "hated the book", "favorite character", etc) The goal here was to get everyone loosened up and ready to talk, with the book at the front of their minds.
4. As the class got to know each other, I got less structured with things - if the group was small, we'd just do a "first impressions" go round.
If you have the right group that is committed to really active reading, you can ask people to bring in questions, but this hardly ever worked for me - too much commitment.
At that point, people were often ready to talk more seriously, and I could usually break out some more structured questions. Believe me, if people want to talk about their feelings, they will - no need to prompt them, you're not a therapist.
But if these aren't academic folks, you will need to ask questions in the right way - they may have trouble going to analytical questions, even though they don't have trouble with that type of thinking when they get started. So ask something comparatively juicy - maybe comparing two characters' motivations, make a provocative statement about the author's viewpoint ("I feel like the author is really sexist here because X") and see how folks respond, etc. This has a tragic ending - why does the author want us to read a tragic ending, would it be better if it weren't tragic? Keep it internal to the book - what makes it sad, would it be better if it weren't, is this intended to be 'realistic" or is the author stacking the deck?
Another thing that was very useful when I could pull it off - have people read two things to compare, either in sequence or together. One time we read two critically well-regarded novels on a similar theme written about twenty-five years apart with extremely different treatments of gender and violence, and we had some really great conversations comparing them. Often comparison helps people get at complex things, so if you can integrate film clips to compare to key scenes or short excerpts from other works, that is great.
The biggest piece for me was to get people invested in having relatively serious, relatively focused conversations - this was an optional activity for them and I had no authority. A tremendous amount of what happens in an academic classroom happens because of authority and carrots - you've got grades to give out, people want degrees or qualifications, they value the kind of status they get from being good discussants. Some of us miss out on this fact because we would be happy to sit down in our spare time for a little close-reading for the hell of it, and that can throw things off.
posted by Frowner at 5:37 AM on October 17
Also - how well do they know each other and how consistent is the group? Do you get a lot of new people most times? Do you have short sessions of a few weeks with new people each time?
I am intrigued by your question, since for years I ran a more-than-a-book-group-but-not-truly-a-class - we read a mixture of science fiction and literary criticism in a relatively structured way with some bigger goals, like developing a sense of the trajectory of feminist SF, exploring various ideas about the "origin" of science fiction, etc. We'd do sets of themed readings over some weeks.
Anyway, it was difficult, and one thing I ended up doing was relinquishing some of my goals - if most people got a broad sense of the topic and some people got more out of it, that was great. Since it was an optional activity, it simply couldn't work like the structured academic thing I'd like unless that was what they'd also like. On one level, this never stopped grinding my gears just a little because I really really wanted to be able to talk about the lit crit stuff in depth, but whatever, it was not a class for me.
So here are some things I did, mostly drawn from some trainings I'd taken on organizing.
1. I emphasized "building a container" for the group - meaning, I spent more time on set-up/getting-to-know-you activities in order to deepen everyone's investment in the experience and engagement with each other. This was scaled to group size and time involved. This often looked like go-rounds (whole group if small, small groups if not) for people to talk about their personal interest in the topic and their background. I would have done sillier activities with a different group, but the overall goal was to get people to have a sense of each other and their shared interest.
2. Start each class with a themed "icebreaker". I'd connect it to the reading - "would you rather live on an ice planet or a really hot planet", "would you go with the First 100 to Mars in Red Mars, etc as appropriate. This helped loosen people up and get them talking.
3. If people didn't know each other, I'd force them to do a paired activity ("force"), usually one where they each took one or two minutes (timed) to give their immediate impressions of the book with no interruptions, then the other person talked for two minutes. Doing this again, I might do a paired exercise where everyone would take their minute to talk on a specific point that they could choose. (I'd make a list - "hated the book", "favorite character", etc) The goal here was to get everyone loosened up and ready to talk, with the book at the front of their minds.
4. As the class got to know each other, I got less structured with things - if the group was small, we'd just do a "first impressions" go round.
If you have the right group that is committed to really active reading, you can ask people to bring in questions, but this hardly ever worked for me - too much commitment.
At that point, people were often ready to talk more seriously, and I could usually break out some more structured questions. Believe me, if people want to talk about their feelings, they will - no need to prompt them, you're not a therapist.
But if these aren't academic folks, you will need to ask questions in the right way - they may have trouble going to analytical questions, even though they don't have trouble with that type of thinking when they get started. So ask something comparatively juicy - maybe comparing two characters' motivations, make a provocative statement about the author's viewpoint ("I feel like the author is really sexist here because X") and see how folks respond, etc. This has a tragic ending - why does the author want us to read a tragic ending, would it be better if it weren't tragic? Keep it internal to the book - what makes it sad, would it be better if it weren't, is this intended to be 'realistic" or is the author stacking the deck?
Another thing that was very useful when I could pull it off - have people read two things to compare, either in sequence or together. One time we read two critically well-regarded novels on a similar theme written about twenty-five years apart with extremely different treatments of gender and violence, and we had some really great conversations comparing them. Often comparison helps people get at complex things, so if you can integrate film clips to compare to key scenes or short excerpts from other works, that is great.
The biggest piece for me was to get people invested in having relatively serious, relatively focused conversations - this was an optional activity for them and I had no authority. A tremendous amount of what happens in an academic classroom happens because of authority and carrots - you've got grades to give out, people want degrees or qualifications, they value the kind of status they get from being good discussants. Some of us miss out on this fact because we would be happy to sit down in our spare time for a little close-reading for the hell of it, and that can throw things off.
posted by Frowner at 5:37 AM on October 17
Just to clarify, I'm comfortable with the approach seemoorglass describes, where you start with feelings and ease into formal/ academic analysis. But I'm wondering how it would work to structure a discussion entirely around "softer" approaches, as in casual book groups where nobody has a particularly analytic orientation, or academic contexts where fiction gets assigned because of its topical overlaps with course content (e.g. to liven things up in a bio, business or psych class), but formal analysis is not the point.
posted by sockroy at 5:40 AM on October 17
posted by sockroy at 5:40 AM on October 17
One thing I notice about your examples here is that your sense of the "emotional" conversation is mostly one-word answers with no nuance, but lots of people talk about emotion and affect (both their own and fictional characters') with much more nuance than that. It's honestly hard for me to imagine anyone I talk to regularly about books just coming back with "sad," when asked how a book made them feel. It's very possible to be analytic and thinky about emotions. I hesitate to recommend academic reading as a way through this, but dipping your toe into affect theory could be helpful here.
I also suspect there's a place between the two extremes you name that allows people to name their emotional responses, e.g. "I was frustrated by the ending," and discuss how those responses emerge from genre expectations, formal structures, and social and historical contexts. This is similar to what seemoorglass is describing, though I don't necessarily always think of it as a progression, so much as one element of the conversation.
posted by dizziest at 7:27 AM on October 17
I also suspect there's a place between the two extremes you name that allows people to name their emotional responses, e.g. "I was frustrated by the ending," and discuss how those responses emerge from genre expectations, formal structures, and social and historical contexts. This is similar to what seemoorglass is describing, though I don't necessarily always think of it as a progression, so much as one element of the conversation.
posted by dizziest at 7:27 AM on October 17
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Ex “how did it make you feel?” “Extremely sad… it reminded me of XYZ” “why do you think the author included that scene?” And let that hang in the room as long as needed, (and importantly, make sure it is open to the whole class, so people don’t feel picked on for just having raised their hand and shared vulnerably).
9/10 times if the audience is people who want to be there, someone will chime in something that keeps things moving.
Either way, you will have to prepare some themes, topics and academic concepts in advance, but keep them in your back pocket and keep gently poking the audience towards the relevant academic concepts rather than the formal style you first described.
This method also works well when you grab a response from one person, gently work through the process from emotional response —> academic concept - and then do the exact same thing with someone else.
Ex “anyone else? Did you have a similar reaction? Or maybe a completely different one?” “Yeah actually it made me feel happy, nostalgic and wistful because it reminded me of XYZ” “interesting! Do you think that was intentional? What sort of literary device do you think author was using that would evoke such different reactions based on the reader?”
TLDR - the best teachers allow students to draw their own conclusions - which can still work outside of super formal dialectic styles. The starting point is just different and it requires you to put on a gentler, possibly more empathetic and patient hat than logic driven methods.
posted by seemoorglass at 5:25 AM on October 17