In modern usage, living “off the grid” means living totally independently, without the modern conveniences of publicly supplied gas, electricity, and water; it also refers to people who strive to remain unrecorded in governmental, financial, and medical documents. More generally, to live off the grid is to live against the grain of society, ideologically at odds with the mainstream. As we have put the idea to use for this guestedited issue, “Teaching Medieval Literature off the Grid,” instructors who incorporate noncanonical texts into their classrooms resemble the above definitions in several respects. For one thing, to teach “off the grid” is almost always to teach selfsufficiently — to locate the texts you think are important and figure out for yourself why they are important, to provide or create your own introductory notes, glosses, and other relevant contextualizing material for your students. It is to build a lesson literally from the ground up. You are certainly off the beaten path, without much assistance or advice from textbooks, teachers’ manuals, online resources, or other scholars’ work; there is little, if anything, to vouch for or justify your lesson plan. To put it simply, and most generally, to teach off the grid is to teach outside the comfort zone of the canon, without the builtin validations and pedagogies that literary tradition provides. The challenges of teaching off the grid are many, but this issue of Pedagogy argues that the rewards are great. Noncanonical texts can shed light on perspectives different from those represented by the culturally authoritative texts of the canon, often can serve the useful purpose of defamiliarizing traditional readings, and

Review Article| April 01 2013 De-centering Chaucer, Emphasizing His Contemporaries A Companion to Chaucer and His Contemporaries: Texts and Contexts. Edited by Laurel Amtower and Jacqueline Vanhoutte. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2009. Nathanial B. Smith Nathanial B. Smith Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2013) 13 (2): 391–393. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1958548 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Nathanial B. Smith; De-centering Chaucer, Emphasizing His Contemporaries. Pedagogy 1 April 2013; 13 (2): 391–393. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1958548 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 by Duke University Press2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.