Teaching Theory in Lower-Level Coursework

There are certain moments in teaching where you realize students are not simply “learning material.” They are trying to figure out how to live in our current moment.

I felt that acutely a few weeks ago while teaching Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in an undergraduate close reading course. On paper, this should have been one of the hardest texts we encountered all quarter: fragmentary, allusive, dense with references, and written in a philosophical style that can feel deliberately resistant. Teaching theory at the lower-division undergraduate level often means confronting that resistance head-on. Students arrive expecting literature courses to provide stories, characters, or arguments that announce themselves or that fit into neat categories (this is a metaphor, this is irony). Theory instead asks them to sit with abstraction and uncertainty.

And yet, despite the difficulty—or maybe because of it—the conversation became one of the most emotionally engaged discussions we’ve had all term.

When I teach theory to undergraduates, I’ve learned that the biggest mistake is treating the text as something students must somehow “unlock” through sheer intellectual force. The language itself can become intimidating enough that students stop trusting their own interpretive instincts. So instead of approaching Benjamin as a theorist to be decoded, I tried to slow the essay down almost sentence by sentence. We worked thesis by thesis, image by image, asking very basic but surprisingly generative questions: What is Benjamin actually describing here? Why this metaphor? Why this historical example? What emotional tone does this passage create?

Once students realized they were allowed to linger inside the confusion rather than immediately overcome it, the text opened up.

Benjamin’s writing rewards that kind of patience because so much of the essay works through images rather than systematic explanation. The “Angel of History,” for example, became a central point of discussion. After giggling a bit at the image "an angel??" students settled into the density of the language. Students almost immediately grasped the horror of Benjamin’s vision: the angel facing the accumulating wreckage of the past while a storm propels him helplessly into the future. Even before students knew the broader intellectual context of the essay, they recognized the feeling. They understood what it means to inherit crisis after crisis while still being told to believe in the inevitability of progress.

What surprised me most was how quickly students connected Benjamin’s skepticism about “progress” to their own historical moment. They spoke about climate anxiety, political exhaustion, economic precarity, the endless churn of online catastrophe, and the strange feeling of watching institutions fail in real time while still being expected to perform optimism about the future. Benjamin’s argument—that history is not a smooth narrative of improvement but a landscape of ruptures, losses, and unrealized possibilities—felt less like an abstract theoretical claim to them than a description of everyday life.

One of the persistent misconceptions about theory, especially in public discourse, is that it is detached from lived experience. Students are often told theory is elitist, inaccessible, or impractical before they ever encounter it. But what I saw in this discussion was the opposite. Difficult theoretical texts can give students language for experiences they already feel but cannot yet fully articulate. Theory becomes less about mastering jargon and more about learning new forms of attention.

Close reading played an important role in that process. Slowing down the text prevented students from flattening Benjamin into a set of simplified political “takes.” Instead, they had to wrestle with contradiction. Benjamin is mournful but not hopeless. Critical of historical progress but still invested in the possibility of historical intervention. Deeply attentive to catastrophe while insisting that the past still places demands upon the present. Students often want texts to resolve cleanly into positions they can summarize. Benjamin resists that impulse, and in doing so, teaches a different intellectual skill: the ability to remain inside complexity without immediately reducing it.

I increasingly think this is one of the most important things humanities classrooms can offer right now.

We are living through a moment that rewards speed, certainty, reaction, and simplification. Students are inundated with content that encourages immediate judgment rather than sustained interpretation. Teaching theory—especially difficult theory—pushes against those habits. It asks students to practice patience, precision, and historical thinking. It reminds them that interpretation is work.

And maybe more importantly, it reminds them that history itself is not inevitable.

Benjamin wrote his theses while fleeing fascism in Europe, under conditions of extraordinary political despair. That context inevitably shaped our discussion too. Students recognized that the essay emerges from a world in crisis, but also from an attempt to think critically within crisis rather than surrender to it. To hold onto hope. The text does not offer comfort exactly, but it does offer a kind of ethical challenge: to pay attention to the past, to the forgotten, to the unfinished, and to the people history leaves behind.

By the end of class, students were offering up discussion, I think out of genuine desire to engage in the material. Not because it suddenly became easy, but because they discovered they were capable of engaging with something difficult and more importantly, that they had stakes in sitting in the difficulty.

Students need spaces where they can practice thinking historically, critically, and collectively about the world they are inheriting. The hard work of reading difficult texts together matters because it teaches students that confusion is not failure, interpretation is not passive, and intellectual life is not separate from political and emotional life.

In moments of historical uncertainty, those lessons feel more urgent than ever.