In her fine essay on teaching book history to MLS students in this volume, Dierdre Stam opens with this sentiment: ‘I had been teaching book history surreptitiously for years before I was lucky enough to teach it openly … So secret was my pursuit that even I was barely aware of it’ (p. 72). Like Stam, it's hard for me to identify a particular moment when I started teaching the skills of textual criticism. I seem to have always been approaching texts in these ways, from the first time I taught the two versions of Sir Thomas Wyatt's ‘They flee from me’ from volume one of the Norton Anthology. That activity – a great one for helping students see the value of individual words in creating meaning – was also (though I didn't call it that) an exercise in collation, with students identifying the differences between the versions. I still use that activity, but I now introduce students to field-specific terms. As a class we determine our ‘copy-text’ based on information I give them about the origins (and uses) of the different versions, and they provide their results in an actual collation formula.

I can say, however, that in the past several years, my pedagogy has become more and more directed toward teaching with textual criticism.