An Expressivist teaches about Amy Tan

An expressivist course would focus on the way the students of the class could relate to Mother Tongue. Expressivist assignments and lessons are hard to structure and plan out (harder to plan out than the overall expressivist course), because each assignment should be developing organically from the student's responses to the text. This doesn't mean a lack of structure, but that the guiding structure established by the teacher would work best when developed from the student's responses, rather than simply being decided ahead of time. One student might want to examine the experiences of racial discrimination and how they relate to their own times when they were discriminated against, and there is plenty of substantial information in the text to created a nuanced, complex discussion from this. On the other hand, a student could instead choose to explore the complexities of being in a multilingual family in the USA, and have an equally broad and relevant depth of information to plumb. The expressivist teacher's responsibility isn't to create a structure, but instead to serve as a guide down the road to complexity, helping students expand upon their ideas, and aiming them away from overly simplistic or flawed thinking.