Ellen Andrews Knodt

My contribution to Teaching Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises embodies two aspects of my more than twenty-five years of teaching at Penn State: my love of American literature and my commitment to teaching undergraduate students. My essay "Teaching the Lost Generation to the Current Generation Through Active Learning" reflects my experience in involving students in reading and interpreting texts through active learning practices that enable students to make more meaningful judgments of what they have read than more traditional lecture-discussion methods. In the essay I explain how to engage students in active questioning, discovery, and open-ended argumentation that illuminate Hemingway's themes and style of writing. These techniques can be used to involve readers in other authors' texts as well.