A qualitative analysis of teachers’ responses to a “bookless” literature curriculum

When I asked a large Facebook group of English teachers to imagine teaching a term of Literature without a book, the responses were immediate, confident—and deeply revealing. The prompt was simple:

“If you were asked to teach a Literature unit for a term, without a book, what would you teach?”

On the surface, it looks like a playful thought experiment. In practice, it functions as a diagnostic: it exposes what teachers believe literature is, and what they think the curriculum of English consists of when the familiar anchor of a class novel is removed.

This piece offers a qualitative analysis of that discussion and shows how strongly the profession remains bound to a text‑first and skills‑toolkit model—and how small, but significant, the space is for a genuinely disciplinary curriculum of English.

The dataset and method

The discussion analysed here comes from a post in the English Literature Society Facebook group, where teachers from a range of contexts responded to the “no book” scenario. I treated the thread as a small qualitative dataset and coded each distinct respondent according to the kind of curriculum they imagined. I was interested in one central question:

When the book disappears, what do teachers think is left of “Literature” to teach?

From the responses, three clear categories emerged:

Text‑dependent responses
Skills / elements substitution
Disciplinary or meta‑literary responses

Each category reveals a different underlying conception of what “Literature” is and what a curriculum of English might be.

Category 1: Text‑dependent responses

“No book? Then I’ll choose another one.”

The largest group of respondents simply could not imagine a curriculum without a text. Faced with the removal of the class novel, they immediately substituted:

another single text (e.g. Jaws),
a set of short stories,
a sequence of poems,
or extracts and overviews of novels.

Even when they accepted the premise of “no book”, they quietly smuggled texts back in through the side door: a page of a novel, an epistolary sequence, world literature samples, historical extracts.

Others expressed outright resistance or confusion:

“Impossible!”
“What… no book? How does that work?”

These responses are not failures of imagination; they are symptoms of a deeply embedded assumption:

For many teachers, “teaching Literature” is structurally identical to “teaching a book”.

In this model, the curriculum is essentially text‑coverage. Take away the book, and the subject itself seems to vanish. Literature is not understood as a discipline with its facts and history, concepts and theories, procedures and methodologies; it is understood as a sequence of works to be ‘read’.

Category 2: Skills / elements substitution

When the book goes, the toolkit appears

A second, substantial group of respondents did manage to imagine a curriculum without a central text—but what they reached for was the familiar skills‑toolkit:

“elements of a story”
“figures of speech”
“parts of a novel”
“themes, character, plot, setting”
“literary elements” and “devices”

Here, the curriculum becomes a list of decontextualised skills and generic components. The book is no longer the organising centre, and respondents report a common disciplinary knowledge that begins to populate the terms of a procedural toolkit. This is the dominant curriculum in many departments: literature as a vehicle for teaching transferable skills—analysis, inference, identification of techniques—rather than as a field of knowledge in its own right.

The key point is this:

When the text disappears, most teachers do not reach for the discipline; they reach for skills.

The result is a curriculum of fragments: “how to analyse”, “how to identify”, “how to write about”. It is structurally thin. It does not ask: What is literature? How do different traditions read? What kinds of knowledge does literary study produce?

Category 3: Disciplinary or meta‑literary responses

A glimpse of a different curriculum

A small but striking minority of respondents did something different. They treated the absence of a book not as a problem to be patched over, but as an opportunity to foreground the discipline itself. Their suggestions included:

Exploring the question “What is literature?”
Investigating how we understand any book, not just one
Tracing social and literary revolutions and their impact on forms and voices
Examining poetic voice, worldview, and reader positioning
Introducing deconstruction, ideology, and the ways texts construct reality

These responses are qualitatively different from both the text‑dependent and skills‑toolkit models. They assume that:

Literature is a field of knowledge, not just a set of works.
There are methods, traditions, and conceptual tools that can be taught in their own right.
Students can study how literature works, not only what particular texts say.

This is the space in which the Discipline of English project operates: a curriculum organised around substantive disciplinary knowledge—concepts, methods, genealogies, and critical traditions—rather than around a single text or a list of generic skills.

What the pattern reveals

Taken together, the three categories tell a clear story about the current state of the profession’s imagination.

1. The hegemony of the text‑first curriculum

The dominant response is text‑dependence. For many teachers, the idea of Literature without a book is almost nonsensical. The book is not just a resource; it is the very identity of the curriculum.

This explains why so much curriculum design defaults to “which text shall we do next?” rather than “what disciplinary knowledge should students build over time?”

2. The skills‑toolkit as fallback

When the book is removed, the fallback is not a disciplinary framework but a skills framework which is often rooted in principles shared with English Language studies:

classifications,
devices,
themes,
and generic analytical procedures.

This is understandable—these are the tools teachers often inherited. But it leaves the subject hollowed out. Students are often focused on the literacy skill of reading and recall, but not what kind of knowledge constitutes the disciplinary identity of Literature, or why it matters.

3. The thin but real presence of disciplinary thinking

The minority of disciplinary responses is important. It shows that there are teachers who already think in terms of the meta‑questions (What is literature? What is a text?), who are engaging with critical traditions (deconstruction, ideology, reader positioning) and also the historical and conceptual structures (revolutions, movements, forms). These teachers are, in effect, already gesturing towards a Discipline of English—even if they do not yet have a shared language or framework for it.

Why this matters for a Discipline of English

The “no book” question is not really about removing texts from the curriculum. It is about exposing what remains when the text is no longer allowed to carry the entire weight of the subject. For a disciplinary curriculum of English, the answer should be rich:

concepts like narrative, genre, voice, form, interpretation, canon, authorship
methods like close reading, historicism, structuralism, post‑structuralism, reader‑response, feminist and postcolonial critique
questions like What counts as literature? Who decides? How do texts shape and contest reality?

These are not “extras” to be sprinkled on top of a novel; they are the substantive knowledge of the discipline. The Facebook thread shows that, for most teachers, this disciplinary layer is either submerged beneath the text, or reduced to a toolkit of skills. The task of a Discipline of English is to surface, name, and sequence this disciplinary knowledge so that it can become the organising principle of curriculum, not an occasional enrichment.

From thought experiment to curriculum design

The responses to the “no book” scenario can be read as a map of where the profession currently stands:

Text‑first: “Give me another book.”
Skills‑first: “Give me elements and devices.”
Discipline‑first: “Give me concepts, methods, and questions.”

The Discipline of English project is an attempt to amplify the third proposition. Some teachers might adopt small elements of the curriculum to enhance the knowledge domain of their own. Some teachers might see benefit in becoming closely aligned to a substantive curriculum.

A disciplinary curriculum does not abolish texts; it repositions them. Texts become sites where students apply, test, and extend disciplinary knowledge, rather than the sole content of the course. The question is no longer “Which book shall we do?” but “Which disciplinary ideas are we building, and which texts best serve that purpose at this stage?”

Closing reflection

The question is also an inhibitor. If you were asked to teach a Literature unit for a term, without a book, what would you teach does not explicitly state that we are investigating curriculum design. And one might also argue that Literature needs a book to apply the methodological learning to – without the book, no analysis can occur. Of course, the factual, conceptual and procedural needs to be taught and applied to texts as a sequence of learning, and so at some point the methodological does stand aside from the text, no matter how briefly. The question might ultimately be misleading, but it did open a debate about the content of a course. Ultimately, the Facebook thread confirms something many of us have felt but not always articulated:

How do you analyse Literature in ways that do not simply paraphrase, nor feature spot?

That is not an argument against books. It is an argument for building a curriculum in which the discipline itself gains priority. Only then can we say that students are not just “reading” texts, but joining a tradition of thought—learning how literature works, how it has been read, and how it might be read differently.

That is the work of a Discipline of English.