Teaching Chaucer

de Louise Sylvester, Gail Ashton

This volume of original essays brings together contributors from both sides of the Atlantic to offer innovations in teaching and learning in Chaucer Studies from scholars and practitioners with hands-on experience of engaging students. Students of Chaucer are often unfamiliar with poetry that is textually, linguistically and culturally different from contemporary material. The projects explored in this study put students first to encourage active, often collaborative learning designed to enhance critical thinking and independent research skills. The kinds of learning experiences described here confront, often simultaneously, issues about language, manuscript evidence, the reception of texts, performance and orality, history, and cultural images and contexts - from both medieval and contemporary perspectives. Contributors mediate philosophy and pragmatics to reach out to all those teaching pre-twentieth-century texts for, above all, this book seeks to establish conversations: between students and teachers, students and their peers, and students and texts.