I posted a question in the web page “classroom 2.0” and I got an interesting response.
My question was: What are some strategies for approaching literary theory in a high school classroom?
My response was: I teach African American Lit and each week I introduce literary theory that corresponds to the contextual elements of the texts as well as the time periods we are reviewing--for example, when we discuss the 1930s, we go over Marxist Literary theory, when we talk about the Black Arts Movement, we go over African American Literary Criticism and Feminist Literary Criticism--however, I encourage students to explore the theories that reflect their views of the text (Reader Response, Historical, Biographical etc) as well. It's always good to work with a few different texts and ask students: How would a Feminist critic interpret this text? How would a Structuralist interpret this text? to show the students firsthand how a book can generate so many interpretations...if the specific elements of the text are used to coincide with the critical view.
What I find really interesting isn’t necessarily the answer but the knowledge that I gained from asking this question. Before I posted the question I did some research about literary theory and this site was very informative: http://www.iep.utm.edu/l/literary.htm
However I didn’t really learn any strategies. I guess what I am trying to say is that we as future teachers can learn so much about a topic but it will be extremely hard to apply that knowledge without some help from others in the field.