Podcast - In the Classroom - Episode 7: How to Make an Old Text Relevant to Today's Students - student engagement strategies
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Episode 7: How to Make an Old Text Relevant to Today’s Students

As English teachers, we are often quick to find the beauty or humor or nuance in the texts we read in class. Our teenage students? Not so much. That’s why, probably more than with anything else, when we’re planning to teach an old(er) text, we need to dig deep into our bag of student engagement strategies tricks and pull out the best we’ve got.

We know these texts are good and relevant to today’s students (otherwise, hopefully, we wouldn’t be teaching them), but students don’t always like what’s good for them, right? We’re not advocating pandering to our students or shortchanging the elegance or sophistication of classic texts. Still, it is important that we create some student buy-in in order to explore these works fully.

In this episode of the podcast, we’re sharing some of the student engagement strategies we use to make our 21st-century students interested in reading, discussing, and analyzing texts they might not otherwise relate to.

Some Student Engagement Strategies We Discuss

  • Have students complete a “modern” activity (e.g., Instagram posts for Odysseus in The Odyssey)
  • Use videos to provide historical or contextual information that will make the text more accessible (e.g., show IMAX Everest documentary when reading Into Thin Air)
  • Make the question, “Why should we read and care about this text in 202_?” (e.g., Elie Wiesel’s Night)
  • Create assignments that grab students’ interests (e.g., crime report for Julius Caesar)
  • Show the movie (GASP, we know)

Want more student engagement strategies and ideas for how to apply them? Be sure to check out the episode!

Have a problematic textbook or curriculum that could use some help? Check out this episode of the podcast and this YouTube video for ideas and strategies.