Depth vs. Breadth and Peter Elbow

In his article “Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process,” Peter Elbow discusses one of the many paradoxes of teaching: helping students learn verses upholding the standards of the discipline we teach.

In my own experience, I feel this paradox constantly. The time-old debate of depth vs. breadth is still a difficult one for me. I want them both. As a teacher who controls her own curriculum—which amounts to 75% of the English curriculum in the high school—it’s a debate I don’t take lightly. I struggle with it constantly.

On the one hand, I feel like the depth approach is the way to go—making sure all students have tackled and grasped certain skills/content before moving on just seems like common sense best practice.

But on the other hand, there is SO MUCH content and SO MUCH my students don’t know, that I feel like I’m doing them a disservice if I don’t try to cover as much as possible. Of course, I know that realistically there’s no way I can cover everything. However, in the face of such an overwhelming amount of content, it’s very difficult to not give into the “breadth impulse”.

When Elbow wrote that “our commitment to knowledge and society asks us to be guardians or bouncers: we must discriminate, evaluate, test, grade, certify” (2), he was referring (I think) to college instruction, though I feel the same sense of responsibility as a high school instructor.

Read differently, from the perspective of a high school teacher, I think that we must be discriminate about what we actually teach, how we evaluate, what we test, how we grade, and how we certify. As high school English teachers, we are not cranking out future English majors, but we are sending out future English communicators into the world and we have to think about the fact that for many of our students, high school is the last time they will receive any explicit instruction in how to communicate, whether through reading, listening, speaking, or writing. So our instruction has to be good. It has to be thorough. It has to have depth and breadth. Otherwise, our students will be have to spend too much of their time and energy floundering on their own, trying to navigate their way through making themselves understood. (Granted, we all have to do a little of that anyway, but you get my point.)

I really like Elbow’s article because he makes the case for alternating between both approaches, which I think is essential to not only achieve balance in our teaching, but also to achieve some clarity of mind when faced with the often daunting task of teaching.