The faculty and graduate student authors of this article taught English Literature before 1660 -"Beowulf to Milton" -in the fall 2010 semester to about 120 students at the University of Michigan. Students in this course are supposed to learn to read literature written in unfamiliar genres and verse forms, originally composed in several languages (Old English, Anglo-Norman, Middle English, Early Modern English) across a historical span of over 900 years. This wide historical range makes the course challenging to conceptualize and teach, as no one person can be equally competent across its chronological breadth. Our typically diverse instructional team included a medievalist, an early modernist, an early Americanist, and a British ninetheenth-century-ist, reflecting, furthermore, that graduate students in fields entirely outside the scope of this course are often assigned to teach it. A recent article describes Stanford University's innovative approach to literature survey courses like this one: such courses are taught by a team of faculty specialists in each of the fields covered, ensuring that students are exposed to advanced knowledge of the course content. 1 The major problem the present authors have with this design is that it relies overmuch on an "apprentice model" of instruction, namely, one in which the faculty lecturers demonstrate knowledge, and the undergraduates partially replicate that knowledge through exams and essays. 2 One notable weakness of such a top-down model is that it places Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture

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