Literary Praxis. A Conversational Inquiry into the Teaching of Literature

Literary Praxis

PEDAGOGY, EDUCATION AND PRAXIS Volume 5 Editorial Board Stephen Kemmis, Charles Sturt University, Australia Matts Mattsson, Stockholm Institute of Education, Sweden Petra Ponte, Leiden University, the Netherlands Karin Rönnerman, Göteborg University, Sweden Advisory Board Jan Ax, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands Wilfred Carr, University of Sheffield, UK Eli Moksnes Furu, Tromsø University, Norway Inge Johansson, Stockholm Institute of Education, Sweden Petri Salo, Åbo Academy University, Finland Brigitta Sandström, Stockholm Institute of Education, Sweden Tracey Smith, Charles Sturt University, Australia The Pedagogy, Education and Praxis Series will foster a conversation of traditions in which different European and Anglo-American perspectives on ‘pedagogy’, ‘education’ and ‘praxis’ are problematised and explored. By opening constructive dialogue between different theoretical and intellectual traditions, the Series aims, in part, at recovering and extending the resources of these distinctive traditions for education in contemporary times. The Series aims to contribute to (1) theoretical developments in the fields of pedagogy, education and praxis; (2) the development of praxis in the pedagogical professions; and (3) the development of strategies capable of resisting and counteracting contemporary tendencies towards the technologisation, standardisation, bureaucratisation, commodification and demoralisation of education.

Literary Praxis A Conversational Inquiry into the Teaching of Literature Edited By

Piet-Hein van de Ven Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Brenton Doecke Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

SENSE PUBLISHERS ROTTERDAM/BOSTON/TAIPEI

A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-94-6091-584-0 (paperback) ISBN: 978-94-6091-585-7 (hardback) ISBN: 978-94-6091-586-4 (e-book)

Published by: Sense Publishers, P.O. Box 21858, 3001 AW Rotterdam, The Netherlands www.sensepublishers.com

Printed on acid-free paper

All Rights Reserved © 2011 Sense Publishers No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART 1: COMPARATIVELY SPEAKING 1. Opening their Teaching up to Scrutiny ...............................................................3 Piet-Hein van de Ven and Brenton Doecke 2. A Conversational Inquiry ....................................................................................9 Piet-Hein van de Ven and Brenton Doecke PART 2: TEACHING AND REFLECTING 3. Literary Conversations: An Australian Classroom ...........................................23 Prue Gill and Bella Illesca 4. ‘I’ll Never Know What it is Like to be Pregnant’: Teaching Literature in a Dutch Secondary School ...................................................................................43 Ramon Groenendijk, Mies Pols and Piet-Hein van de Ven 5. Toward an Understanding of Literature Teaching in Australia: Hanging On and Letting Go ..............................................................................69 Graham Parr 6. Between Dream and Deed: Constructive and Destructive Frictions in an Ill-Structured Domain ..............................................................................89 Theo Witte PART 3: READING AND REREADING 7. If in Doubt, Reach for a Story .........................................................................109 Terry Locke 8. Reflection on Literature Teaching: A Norwegian Perspective .......................123 Laila Aase 9. Texts, Tasks, and Talk.....................................................................................137 Anthony Petrosky 10. Difference in the Classroom: Whose Reading Counts? ..................................151 Anne Turvey and John Yandell

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

11. ‘Authenticity was Never Really the Question’: Reading, Ethics and the Historical Interruption of Literature Teaching by English..............................169 Mark Howie 12. Literature Classrooms and their Limits ...........................................................189 Irene Pieper 13. Reading the Word and the World: Teachers and Students Renegotiate Literature Reading, Teaching and Learning....................................................203 Mary Kooy PART 4: CONTINUING THE CONVERSATION 14. Literary Praxis: (A Concluding Essay) ...........................................................219 Piet-Hein van de Ven and Brenton Doecke List of Contributors ................................................................................................227 Index .......................................................................................................................231

vi

PART 1: COMPARATIVELY SPEAKING

PIET-HEIN VAN DE VEN AND BRENTON DOECKE

1. OPENING THEIR TEACHING UP TO SCRUTINY

This book arises out of a conversation that began in 1999, when Piet-Hein van de Ven and Brenton Doecke first met in Amsterdam at a conference of the International Association for the Improvement of Mother Tongue Education (IAIMTE). IAIMTE is a network established by Gert Rijlaarsdam (the Netherlands) and Ken Watson (Australia) in a bid to break down the parochialism that inheres within Mother Tongue (or L-1) education, and to provide a forum for conversations (in English) across linguistic boundaries. Piet-Hein brought to his conversation with Brenton extensive experience as a researcher in another network, namely the International Mother Tongue Education Network (or IMEN), including a set of protocols for classroom observation, a strong commitment to collaborative inquiry between academic researchers and school teachers, and a rigorously theorised approach to comparative research in L-1 or Mother Tongue education (see Herrlitz, Ongstad and van de Ven, 2007). Brenton was, at the time, editor of English in Australia, the journal of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English, and he was heavily engaged in debates about English curriculum and pedagogy vis-à-vis attempts by Australian governments to introduce standards-based reforms (Darling-Hammond, 2004, Jones, 2010). The upshot of this conversation between us – a conversation that has been resumed at various times over the intervening years, and in places as diverse as Nijmegen, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Albi and Toronto – was a research project involving Prue Gill and Bella Illesca, two English teachers based in Melbourne, and Ramon Groenendijk and Mies Pols, two Dutch teachers who worked in een school voor voortgezet onderwijs (a secondary school) near Nijmegen. The aim was to conduct a comparative study of the teaching of literature in Australia and Holland, using the protocols for classroom observation and inquiry developed by IMEN. Prue and Bella and Ramon and Mies agreed to develop accounts (or ‘cases’) of teaching literature in their respective settings. Bella acted as Prue’s ‘critical friend’ in developing the Australian case, visiting her school over a number of weeks and engaging in extensive conversations with her before and after each of the lessons she observed. Piet-Hein played a similar role with Ramon and Mies in preparing the Dutch case. When they had written their cases, the Dutch and Australian teachers then read each other’s writing, engaging in conversations that captured their sense of the similarities and differences between their pedagogies as teachers of literature. Although they were immersed in the immediacy of their day-to-day professional lives, Prue, Bella, Ramon and Mies still found time to reflect on their professional P-H. van de Ven and B. Doecke (eds.), Literary Praxis: A Conversational inquiry into the Teaching of Literature, 3–8. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

VAN DE VEN AND DOECKE

practice as teachers of literature, opening their teaching up to scrutiny by others and interrogating the assumptions behind their pedagogies. They were prepared to inquire into what their activities could mean for their students and what the value of a ‘literary’ education might be within society as a whole, believing that reflection of this kind is an integral part of their role as teachers. Such professional reflection cannot be taken for granted. Recently many educational systems have implemented standards-based reforms and other measures for regulating education, including accountability mechanisms like the Program for International Student Assessment (or PISA), administered by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as standardised testing developed at a national level (Australia, for example, has recently witnessed the introduction of the National Assessment Project – Literacy and Numeracy [NAPLAN] [see http://www.naplan. edu.au/). A consequence of these reforms for teachers is that their capacities are stretched to the limit as they endeavour to meet the performance benchmarks imposed on them, while trying to maintain an ethical commitment to the welfare of the young people in their care. It is not only the sheer busy-ness that is imposed on teachers that closes off the possibility of critical inquiry, but the way standardsbased reforms define a set of educational outcomes (including a certain construction of ‘literacy’) that people are not allowed to question. Standards-based reforms make it increasingly difficult for teachers to interrogate the meaning of what they do, both at the level of their capacity to respond to the needs of individual students (What can I do to help this particular person? Is the curriculum I provide sufficiently inclusive?) and at the level of thinking about the significance of their work as it contributes to the complex process by which a society reproduces itself through its school system (what social good does literature teaching serve?). The policy language used to describe education increasingly reflects a market mentality, including talk of inputs and outputs, investment and efficiency, of serving ‘clients’ and ‘value-adding’, at the expense of attending to the culturally specific nature of classroom interactions and the personal needs of individual students. Teachers are required to accept pre-determined educational outcomes, such as those enshrined in PISA and other forms of standardised testing, as a given, as though the manner in which these tests construct literacy ability is universally applicable. By raising questions about what it means to teach literature, Prue, Bella, Ramon and Mies have been challenging the ‘new orthodoxy’ of performance appraisal and international comparisons which suppose that everything can be reduced to the same scale of measurement, regardless of specific national contexts (Jones, 2010, p. 14). They were mindful of the value of comparative research, both as a means of recognising the specific character of their educational traditions, and of making their habitual practices and assumptions ‘strange’ by viewing them from the standpoint of others working in a different cultural setting. The conversations and writing in which they have engaged might accordingly be read as exploring the possibility of maintaining a professionally reflexive approach to their own teaching (i.e. a ‘praxis’) at a time when enormous pressures exist to simply do what you are told without questioning. 4

OPENING THEIR TEACHING UP TO SCRUTINY

***

Each stage of the research project in which these Australian and Dutch teachers have been engaged has involved complex processes of interpretation and representation of their classroom practices. The protocols developed by the International Mother Tongue Education Network (IMEN) for classroom observation presuppose that every observation of teaching and learning implies a particular standpoint or relationship between the observer and the phenomena that he or she is observing. There can be no such thing as an ‘objective’ representation of classrooms, in the sense of an impartial account that transcends the perspective and values of an observer. For all its claims to ‘objectivity’, so-called scientific research, involving statistical data that have been generated through standardised testing, provides only a partial representation of the relationships that constitute any social setting. Such ‘objectivity’ actually has as its heart an interpretive act, involving an explanation of phenomena that has always-already been constructed as ‘data’ (Anyon, 2008). This recognition that all observations are made from a particular perspective is what gives point to the notion of comparative research as it is conceived by IMEN, and the opportunity that such research provides for participants to view their own knowledge and practice reflexively. In addition to this emphasis on the complexity of interpreting classroom interactions when investigating the situation of mother tongue educators in a range of settings, IMEN affirms the following principles as crucial for comparative research on language education (cf. van de Ven, 2001, Herrlitz & van de Ven, 2007): – That mother-tongue education is a social construction, and a product of strong national educational traditions and complex policy environments – That those policy environments are shaped by cultural and ideological factors in tension with globalizing economic and social trends – That the focus of research should be on the complexities of teachers’ work, and researchers should avoid evaluative judgments about the professional accomplishment of participants. IMEN is also committed to ensuring that comparative research on classroom teachers should be owned by the teachers who participate in its projects and that it should convey a sense of their voices. Its goal has been to set up a dialogue between researchers and classroom teachers that in turn becomes a basis for an expanding dialogue between researchers of L-1 education across a variety of national settings. At the core of this dialogue are rich accounts of classroom practices that have been jointly constructed by teachers with ‘critical friends’ who observe their classrooms and then engage in discussion and reflection about the interactions they have witnessed. This is what Prue and Bella and Ramon and Mies have achieved by sharing their accounts of their work with one another. But the impulse behind the particular project that we initiated was never to limit the conversation to Dutch and Australian educators, rich though this conversation has undoubtedly been. Once the Dutch and Australian teachers had written the accounts of their professional practice that constitute Part Two of this book, our aim was to broaden the conversation, and to deepen the reflection by employing 5

VAN DE VEN AND DOECKE

strategies to bring in other viewpoints and perspectives, thus introducing other levels of interpretation. To achieve this aim we made three key editorial decisions: – We invited Prue, Bella, Ramon and Mies to write cases that were open-ended, prompting readers to reflexively consider their own frames of reference for making sense of each case, and to articulate differences between these examples of literature teaching and literature teaching in their own countries – We invited two leading language educators in the Netherlands and Australia to locate these cases within their national policy frameworks, reflecting on how those frameworks mediate the conversations and observations presented in each case. (See the contributions by Theo Witte and Graham Parr in Part Two) – We invited leading academics and educators from a range of national settings to reflect on the accounts of literature teaching presented by the Dutch and Australian educators, using these accounts to reflect on the teaching of literature in their own local settings. (See the contributions by Terry Locke, Laila Aase, Anthony Petrosky, Mark Howie, Anne Turvey and John Yandell, Irene Pieper, and Mary Kooy in Part Three). Consistent with IMEN protocols of classroom observation mentioned earlier, all contributors to this book have sought to avoid simple evaluative judgments about the so-called ‘quality’ of the literature teaching or learning in any one particular classroom or curriculum setting. Standards-based judgments, in any single country, assume that one can ignore the rich specificity of local educational settings and simply apply the same evaluative criteria. In such instances, a logic of sameness trivialises and tramples on diversity. What meaning can we ascribe then to PISA’s international comparisons, which must downplay vast cultural, social and linguistic differences between countries and apply the same mechanical criteria in order to compare the educational performance of one country with respect to others (cf. van de Ven 2007)? The rhetoric of international comparisons can seem so reasonable, so ordinary, and yet it is the very ordinariness of teaching and learning that such comparisons are incapable of reflecting. In contrast, the spirit of international comparative inquiry that characterizes this book has sought to understand and appreciate the particularities of the different local settings of literature teaching, particularities that are mediated by language, culture, history, politics, literary texts, etc. By foregrounding such particularities, we aim to facilitate an international conversation that is far richer than that reflected in the fetish that is currently made of PISA, and the kind of panic that is fostered by politicians and media pundits in countries when their educational performance is not deemed to be as high as that of other countries. The aim of this book has not been to capture examples of ‘exemplary’ or ‘highly accomplished’ teaching in either the Netherlands or Australia, as with the recent focus of standards-based reforms in Western nations. This would be to close down the conversation about language, about literature and about literature teaching that we are attempting to facilitate by conducting this inquiry. The aim might more properly be described as one of investigating the ordinariness of literature teaching as it is enacted from day to day in literature classrooms in different parts of the world. This has entailed making the familiar strange and teasing out assumptions 6

OPENING THEIR TEACHING UP TO SCRUTINY

that might otherwise remain hidden or taken for granted. Invariably, the different contributors to this volume, writing from their different international settings, provide other levels of interpretation that share the comparative spirit of this project. All in their own ways attempt to understand the examples of literature teaching presented and to use these examples as a prompt to reflect on how teachers teach literature in their own countries. The contributors to this book are each speculating about whether one can meaningfully speak about literature teaching as essentially the same activity everywhere, apart from some local variations, as though it unproblematically lends itself to comparative evaluations without any regard to the social, cultural and educational traditions that mediate what happens in classrooms around the world. By contrast, the contributors are asking: how can we understand and appreciate what happens in everyday literature classrooms within and across international settings? They are also asking whether we should always value sameness at the expense of cultural diversity. In the face of a globalised policy agenda, and standards-based reforms across the world that ignore the diverse intellectual and professional traditions of literature teaching, not to mention the richly specific nature of teaching as it is enacted in particular communities, we believe such questions well worth asking. The contributors to this volume are attempting, in the spirit of the best comparative research, to learn from each other, asking questions in order to understand, rather than measuring ‘effects’ in order to determine ‘what nation is best’. Acknowledgements A panel of scholars reviewed the chapters in this volume. Our thanks to Regina Duarte (University of Minho, Portugal), Margaret Gill (formerly Monash University), Vibeke Hetmar (Pedagogical University, Copenhagen), Larissa McLean Davies (University of Melbourne), Philip Mead (University of Western Australia), André Mottart (University of Ghent, Belgium), Graham Parr (Monash University), Wayne Sawyer (University of Western Sydney), and Geert Vandermeersche (University of Ghent, Belgium) for their work in helping us to bring this collection together. REFERENCES Anyon, J. (2008). Theory and educational research: Toward critical social explanation. New York: Routledge. Darling-Hammond, L. (2004). Standards, accountability, and school reform. Teachers College Record 106(6), 1047–1085. Herrlitz, W., & Van de Ven, P. H. (2007). Comparative research on mother tongue education. In W. Herrlitz, S. Ongstad, & P. H. Van de Ven (Eds.), Research on mother tongue/L1–education in a comparative perspective: Theoretical and methodological issues (pp. 13–42). Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. Jones, K. (2010). The twentieth century is not yet over: Resources for the remaking of educational practice. Changing English, 17(1), 13–16. Van de Ven, P.-H. (2001). Teachers constructing knowledge on mother-tongue. L-1 Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 1(2), 179–201.

7

VAN DE VEN AND DOECKE Van de Ven, P. H. (2007). Mother tongue education in an international perspective. In W. Martyniuk (Eds.), Towards a common European framework of reference for language(s) of school education. Proceeding of a conference Praag (pp. 131–142). Towarzystwo Autorów i Wydawców Prac Naukowych Universitas.

Piet-Hein van de Ven Graduate School of Education Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands Brenton Doecke School of Education Faculty of Arts and Education Deakin University, Australia

8

PIET-HEIN VAN DE VEN AND BRENTON DOECKE

2. A CONVERSATIONAL INQUIRY

Renske:

Everything comes back to that, yes, the bad view he has on the world. Of his past, especially. Because in his past, he was used to being less important and stuff. That’s why he is now … well, sad. Danique: Yes, he thinks the world is bad and that everything goes wrong. Aike: Like with that friend of his or something, what’s his name … The time they biked home and he would say: nothing wrong? So that kind of shows that he thinks everybody is that way, in a way. Everybody’s boring and … come on, what’s that word? Danique: A little like self-pity (‘zelfmedelijden’) Aike: Yes, there is no fun really. Or when he describes that party. He’s kind of saying that the party was no fun at all either. Anne Wil: Mariah Carey being played all the time … (Literature Classroom, Nijmegen, the Netherlands) Fiona:

Liz: Fiona:

[The writing] shows he knows oddities about her … her back door is described as ‘solid’, ‘open’. Could be a metaphor for herself? Vulnerable? She seems like an independent woman, but the man comes in and she breaks down … she becomes a detail in the house as inanimate and lifeless as the doors and the lightshades. Nameless. This is just why he only does it once.’ He doesn’t need to connect with her He stands, ‘cocky’, not hiding – unseen. [The] brazenness of his behaviour!

(Literature Classroom, Melbourne, Australia) Teachers listen attentively to the classroom conversations in which their students engage. This often involves delicate judgments about whether to stay silent or intervene. Should I move the discussion along by asking a question or making a comment? Or would it be better to allow the conversation to continue, however awkwardly the students might be expressing their insights? Awkward or not, there is value in providing opportunities for young people to find the words they need in order to converse with one another in classroom settings, building on each other’s sentences in an effort to jointly construct meaning and reach understanding. Talk is an especially vital medium for learning in literature classrooms, where the focus is likely to be on words and what they mean. The snippets of classroom dialogue above, involving students from secondary schools in the Netherlands and P-H. van de Ven and B. Doecke (eds.), Literary Praxis: A Conversational inquiry into the Teaching of Literature, 9–20. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

VAN DE VEN AND DOECKE

Australia, each turn on the meaning of particular words. Aike struggles to find the right word to capture her personal impressions of a character’s attitudes and values (‘… come on, what’s that word?’), while Fiona ponders the words the author has chosen to convey a certain tone or mood (‘her back door is described as “solid”, “open”’). These conversations – recorded in classrooms at opposite ends of the world – show young people self-consciously selecting words and weighing up their meaning amongst the range of possible meanings those words might contain. Such reflexivity is arguably a key disposition that interpretive discussions of this type are designed to cultivate in literature students. As editors of this collection, also living at opposite ends of the world, we read such classroom conversations and appreciate anew how we all live within language. Indeed, we are reminded how our sense of life’s potential (for both good and evil) is enhanced when we (teachers, academics and students) can trace the ways words mediate our exchanges and relationships with one another. ***

This book enacts a ‘conversational inquiry’ in much the same spirit as the interpretive discussions in which these young people are engaging. Our focus is on the teaching of literature in secondary education as it is practised and understood by teachers and academics in a range of settings around the world. We have invited educators in the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England and the United States to reflect on the value of a literary education within their respective cultural settings. We have specifically asked them to write ‘essays’ about literature teaching, using the word ‘essay’ as Montaigne first coined the term, namely as a vehicle by which they could each ‘trial’ or inquire into aspects of their practice as teachers of literature or as teacher educators and researchers who are committed to the value of a literature education (cf. Cohen, 1958/1970). We have been less interested in assembling a collection of papers that reported on research on the teaching of literature within their national settings (though such research constitutes an important reference point for each contribution) than in conducting an inquiry by bringing these voices together. Our aim has been to capture the learning that we have all experienced by participating in the conversation presented in this book. Rather than working toward a set of conclusions, we have tried to stage a conversation that remains open, one which readers will be able to take up in their own local settings in their own conversations with colleagues and other people interested in the teaching of literature. At the core of the book, as we have indicated in our prefatory remarks, are conversations between literature teachers from Australia and the Netherlands: Prue, Bella, Mies and Ramon. The snippets of classroom talk at the start of this chapter were recorded as part of the classroom-based inquiry originally conducted in both Australia and the Netherlands, when teachers in each of these settings invited critical friends to observe their lessons and then talk with them afterwards about their teaching. The purpose of these visits was to construct richly specific accounts of literature teaching in each country in order to better understand literature 10

A CONVERSATIONAL INQUIRY

education as a cultural phenomenon. This meant capturing the interpretive practices in which the students engaged (What books do they read? What do they do in class? What kind of writing do they produce in response to the texts they read?). It also meant exploring the teachers’ professional commitment (Why am I a teacher? Why do I believe that it is important to teach literature?), the knowledge they bring to this enterprise (What do I understand by reading? What are the key theoretical resources on which I draw as a teacher of literature?), as well as the challenges these teachers face in their day-to-day interactions with the young people in their classrooms (How can I engage students in reading so-called ‘literary’ texts when there are so many other things competing for their attention?). You can sense the comparative edge to these classroom investigations. We were not presupposing that literature teaching would mean exactly the same thing in the Netherlands and Australia. A motivation for this research was to enable participating teachers and academics to identify and articulate the philosophical frameworks in which they located their professional practice. When you are speaking to someone new to you, you sometimes find yourself spelling out things in a way that is unnecessary when talking to colleagues who share your everyday world. By becoming conscious of how the ‘same’ thing might be done differently in another part of the world, we – teachers and academics alike – expected to see our everyday practices differently. Bakhtin (whose understanding of ‘dialogism’ has shaped this book in powerful ways) emphasizes that language is not only a resource for jointly constructing meaning, but a sign of the mystery of otherness, of ‘the borderline between oneself and the other’ (Bakhtin, 1981/1987, p. 293). Language pre-exists us, showing how our lives are bound up with those of others. But by acknowledging that others share this world and this life with us, we also recognize that they have their own stories to tell. We need to resist any pretence of imagining that our words can fully comprehend other people, that they see the world as we see it or that we can speak on their behalf. We need to listen attentively to what they have to say and to monitor carefully the way our own values and beliefs frame what we hear. Such dialogue foregrounds the relationship between ‘you’ and ‘I’ – between ‘self’ and ‘‘other’ – rather than the first person plural (cf. Cavarero, 2000, p. 36). So although the literature conversations between the young people at the start of this chapter share many features in common, further inquiry will show how these exchanges are mediated by contrasting traditions and structures, revealing differences beyond those perceived commonalities. We feel that is timely to affirm such differences, when education in vastly different countries is being reduced to a standard measure of performance through the so-called PISA tests. This ‘new orthodoxy’, in the form of ‘a globalised policy agenda’ that increasingly holds sway across Europe and other Western countries (Jones, 2010, p. 14), conflicts with national traditions of education and educational reform. Comparative research of the kind enacted in this book takes on a new importance because of the way it resists the assumption that this orthodoxy can be ‘inscribed on blank and receptive national surfaces’ (Jones, 2010, p. 14). By contrast, the conversations presented in this book affirm the specificity of local settings as something that cannot be simply comprehended by the generalising logic of standards-based reforms. 11

VAN DE VEN AND DOECKE

Within a globalising world where English has assumed the status of a lingua franca, it is important to remind ourselves that the conversation between Aike and her peers occurred in Dutch. The very act of translating this exchange into English occurs at ‘the borderline between oneself and the other’, between the worlds of imagination and valuing named respectively by ‘Dutch’ and ‘English’. And even in acknowledging this linguistic difference, we are mindful of how inadequate such labels are to capture the richly specific character of languages as they are spoken and lived in particular locations around the world. At least for six of the contributors to this book, their reflexivity as literary educators is underlined by the fact that they are writing in English, and thus facing the challenge of expressing in a foreign language the nuances of thinking available to them in their own native languages. Yet it is also important to acknowledge that the status of English as a lingua franca does not get around the fact that there are many varieties of English, not simply the dialects that might be heard in so-called English speaking countries, but Dutch English, German English, Norwegian English. In editing the chapters in this book, we have tried to preserve a sense of those contrasting intonations and thus to foreground the complex ways in which language is mediating our inquiry and our exchanges with one another. We want to present contributors as each speaking out of distinct linguistic traditions and cultural settings, even while we strive to ensure that all the chapters are written in accessible English that will bring readers into the conversation being enacted here. ***

A key impulse behind the inquiry out of which this book has emerged has been to present writing in a style that conveys a sense of the complexities of classroom settings and of a literature education. Yet we know that words can never capture those complexities. Derrida taught us this years ago, when he paradoxically declared that ‘there is nothing outside of the text’ (Derrida, 1974/76, p. 158). Bella Illesca, an experienced teacher who acted as Prue Gill’s ‘critical friend’, attempts to convey a sense of the day-to-day world of the school where Prue works by casting her writing in the present tense and the first person singular: As I walk through the school grounds to meet Prue for our first meeting, it comes as no surprise to me that what I see and hear is very much governed by what was conspicuously absent from the government school, where I last worked as an English teacher … But Bella’s writing is infused with other purposes than simply to capture the hereand-now. She is attempting to foreground her standpoint as an observer, and the values or ideology that she brings to the situation into which she is entering and that shape her thoughts and feelings about what is going on there (cf. Smith, 1987). The fact that her formative experience as a teacher was in a government school means that she finds herself in conflict with the privilege she encounters in an allgirls private school, where parents pay several thousand dollars a year for their daughters to attend. This also mediates her reactions to the way literature is taught 12

A CONVERSATIONAL INQUIRY

in those settings. She is, at least, acknowledging this possibility, as she reflexively monitors the way her experience and values might frame (MacLachlan and Reid, 1994) her reading of the classroom settings that she is about to observe. Does the elite nature of the surroundings mean that literature itself is nothing more than the preserve of a cultural elite? Or will it be possible to detect signs of an alternative discourse, opening up dimensions of imagination and insight that point beyond the ideological world evoked by the notion of an all-girls private school? Even an ostensibly matter-of-fact account of entering a school turns out to be shaped by the values of the observer. Not only Bella’s writing, but the writing of all the contributors to this volume, might be said to ‘sparkle’ with ideology (Bakhtin, 1981/1987, p. 277). As Bakhtin remarks, the meaning of any utterance can only be grasped against the background of the views, values and beliefs reflected in the standpoints of other speakers (p. 281). The words which the contributors to this volume use to inquire into the teaching of literature – into what it means to teach literature within the context of their respective cultures, policy settings and traditions of curriculum and pedagogy – do not neutrally reflect the objects or activities they name. This is another way of saying that their essays do not simply describe what ‘is’, but emerge out of their critical engagement with the teaching of literature as a cultural practice, as an enactment of the very conditions of its possibility. And this moment of critical engagement is shaped by all that they bring to it, reflecting a play between past and future. The past is inescapable – their work as educators is powerfully mediated by their biographies as students and teachers of literature, and the traditions of curriculum and pedagogy in which they work. They are, however, confronted by a present that is increasingly shaped by standards-based reforms and other forms of control, such as those embodied in the PISA tests, opening up the prospect of the need to change their practice in order to achieve the educational outcomes that such reforms mandate. The future emerges at the intersection between the traditions in which they have been educated and current policy developments, raising questions about the continuing salience of the education which they have received as educators (Marx, 1969). Their continuing professional learning and experience occur at this intersection, embodying their struggle to negotiate a pathway in the policy environment that is forming around them. Conceived thus, the challenge of representing professional practice is more than a matter of providing concrete accounts of circumstances within particular classrooms, as though reality could ever be captured by a naturalistic accumulation of detail. Yet there are still good reasons why anyone who is describing the teaching and learning that occur in classrooms would wish to foreground the specific character of the situation being described. To take the trouble to record the details you encounter when you walk into a classroom is paradoxically to acknowledge the impossibility of capturing all the things presented to you. It is to foreground the irreducible nature of the particularities that constitute the here-and-now. This is a life-affirming recognition that reality is always richer than any set of categories that you might bring to an analysis of it. The impulse behind our own writing and the writing of the contributors to this volume can be differentiated from attempts to capture the ‘truth’ or the ‘reality’ of 13

VAN DE VEN AND DOECKE

the classroom exchanges described. Our aim might, instead, be said to move beyond the here and now, beyond representing what ‘is’, in order to arrive at a mode of analysis that might begin to do justice to the process of literature teaching – to ‘literary praxis’ – within the context of a world that has been swept up by significant social and economic change. This is to acknowledge the way the ‘present’ is always constituted by a play between past and future, between our sense of what might be and our existing practices and beliefs, between what we intend and what (on reflection) we feel that we have actually achieved, between what we feel we ought to do and what government policy tell us to do. ***

The contributors to this volume use language as a primary means by which to understand the complexities of teaching literature. This approach contrasts with recent claims about the value of multi-media for depicting classroom settings. The writing team that produced English in Urban Classrooms, for example, argue that ‘a multimodal approach to meaning-making provides a fuller, richer and more accurate sense of what language is, and what it is not … that what constitutes English is not to be found in language alone, but exists in many modes … ‘ (Kress et al., 2005, p. 2). What we quarrel with here is not the notion that (say) visual representations of classrooms can enhance our appreciation of the transactions that occur within them, or that English teaching is a cultural activity that is inextricably embedded in the social relationships and routines enacted in the physical space of classrooms, but that somehow a multimedia approach yields a ‘more accurate sense’ (our italics) of what constitutes English teaching. This privileging of a multimodal approach betrays a positivist logic that elides the question of how language and other semiotic modes mediate our engagement with the world. The notion that the complexities of classrooms can be captured by employing an array of technology, as though an observer can get closer to the ‘reality’ of classrooms by resorting to audio-visual recording, rather than writing about what he or she encounters, side steps the issue that such representations of classrooms remain interpretive acts that require acknowledging the voices and perspectives of those who may see a classroom differently. This is most obviously the case when it comes to comparing a practitioner’s standpoint with the researcher’s gaze (cf. Kincheloe, 2003, p. 9). In this respect, it is a tell-tale sign that the teachers who participated in the research project on which English in Urban Classrooms is based were the objects of the researchers’ inquiry. The book comprises accounts of classrooms from the point of view of academic observers, repressing the possibility of alternative readings, most notably those of the teachers whose classrooms were being observed (cf. Paré, 2005). But to foreground the mediating role of language is hardly to privilege it as giving special access to the ‘reality’ of the classroom settings which Prue, Bella, Mies and Ramon encounter every day, in comparison with other semiotic tools at their disposal. Rather, it is to acknowledge their ‘Bestaan’, to use a Dutch word. Unlike the English word ‘Being’ or ‘Existence’, ‘Bestaan’ embraces a notion of the 14

A CONVERSATIONAL INQUIRY

world in which you find yourself, of the relationships that pre-exist you and extend beyond your immediate apprehension (the same might be said about the German word, ‘Dasein’). And to enter this world is to enter the language that you find there, naming the world and acting upon it. Yet to accept this insight is also to acknowledge that language cannot give you direct access to the world or reveal the world in all its fullness. For to use language is always to engage in an interpretive act that is ‘this-sided’, ‘subjective’ rather than ‘objective’. Not that you should give up on trying to say anything meaningful about the world. As Terry Eagleton remarks, ‘being on the “inside” of a language is a way of being “outside” it as well’ – ‘it is a way of being among things in the world’. Eagleton thereby captures the complex manner in which language functions as a medium of our experience. His point is that to be ‘inside’ a language is not to be ‘shut off’ from ‘reality’, but to recognise language as an indispensable means by which to access the world around us (Eagleton, 2007, pp. 68–69). Language is more than simply one semiotic mode amongst others, as though you can choose to use language in preference to visual or other means of representation (and vice versa). You do not choose French or German or Dutch as your native tongue. Your language is ‘there’, an inescapable condition for engaging with the world. We have already noted in the Preface how Bella Illesca, who is herself a former secondary English teacher, and Piet-Hein van de Ven have respectively played the role of critical friends for the Australian and Dutch teachers. As their chapter reveals, Ramon and Mies could also be said to have played the role of critical friends for each other, offering each other insights about their teaching, in addition to the commentary that Piet-Hein provided. The dialogue that Bella and Piet-Hein have each sustained with the teachers whose classrooms they observed – with Prue, Ramon, and Mies – comprises email exchanges before and after the actual observations took place, the transcripts of conversations recorded at the schools, and finally a jointly written account that tries to capture the dynamic of teaching and learning in their classrooms. As part of these exchanges, the teachers and their critical friends also focused on the oral communication and writing in which the students engaged, thus acknowledging yet another layer of meaning-making that is crucial for understanding the nature of the exchanges that occur in classrooms. Our point, however, is that the teachers and their critical friends were reflexively using language at each phase of their work together, grappling with words and their meaning, with conflicting interpretations of their work as teachers of literature. The differences between their standpoints generates a multilayered account of their teaching, a far richer account of literature teaching as a meaning-making activity than that which might be achieved by the kind of multi-modal account we have just been considering. ***

Our emphasis on the linguistically mediated nature of this inquiry into the teaching of literature is before all else apparent in the writing in this volume. Both the collaborative writing that the teachers have produced in dialogue with their critical 15

VAN DE VEN AND DOECKE

friends and the essays written by commentators reflect an ongoing inquiry into the teaching of literature. The authors do more than report on research on the teaching of literature. They continue this research through the very act of writing. By choosing to use the word ‘essay’ to describe the kind of writing presented here, we mean something far removed from the formulaic writing produced by students in Anglophone countries in order to demonstrate pre-existing knowledge or skills (cf. Teese, 2000, Clyne, 2005). Montaigne first used the term to characterise a text that embodies a trial or attempt to tease out the significance of an experience or idea – a significance that can only be realised by writing about it. Rather than simply positing the teaching of literature as an object of analysis, these essays emerge out of the conversations enacted in literature classrooms and fold back into them, part of a continuing dialogue about culture as we enact it from day to day. Any inquiry worthy of the name combines a reflexive awareness that continually returns to the very conditions of ‘knowing’, that continually asks what it means to ‘know’ and ‘experience’ this world. The theoretical resources on which this study draws conceptualise writing as mediating inquiry. This is to suspend any preconceptions with respect to the content of life or experience. It also means resisting any attempt to prescribe the form that writing should take when it is being used for the purposes of inquiry. Another reason why we have chosen the word ‘essay’ to characterise the writing presented in this volume is that the form of an essay cannot be prescribed in advance, at least when it names the kind of trials or explorations in which Montaigne engages. An essay might combine narrative and argument, as well as providing space for the kind of heteroglossia or combination of voices that Bakhtin valued so highly (Bakhtin, 1981/1987). It is also a form of writing that is not hindered by the borders between academic disciplines. But clearly we are investing the word ‘essay’ with other meanings than those which Montaigne may have intended when he first used this term, meanings that derive from the work of more recent theorists. If we were to specify the characteristic features of the writing that Prue, Bella, Mies and Ramon have generated in their efforts to understand their professional practice as teachers of literature, we would start by noting its investigative character. But while this matches the spirit of Montaigne’s efforts to explore life as it presented itself to him, their writing is also driven by an impulse that is akin to the writing of people like Frigga Haug or Dorothy Smith. It might be described as writing ‘without guarantees’ (to borrow a phrase from Stuart Hall [Hall, 1996, p. 25]). Although Prue, Bella, Mies and Ramon are all committed teachers of literature, their commitment does not preclude the possibility of interrogating the assumptions underpinning their work. Indeed, such a critically reflexive stance might be said to be integral to their professional commitment. They are all prepared to suspend any belief in the value of literature and literature teaching and ‘to begin again at the beginning’ (cf. Benjamin, 1973, p. 97), interrogating the meaning of their work and exposing the assumptions behind their teaching to critical scrutiny. Rather than taking ‘literature’ as a given, they probe the very foundations of their work, in a way which is similar to the kind of inquiry that Frigga Haug performs through her concept of ‘Memory work’ 16

A CONVERSATIONAL INQUIRY

(Errinerungsarbeit) (Haug, 1990) and – more recently – her attempts to investigate the nature of education through the writing and reading of autobiographical narratives that reconstruct experiences of ‘learning’ (Haug, 2003). An equally salient frame of reference for understanding the writing of both the teachers and academics who have contributed to this volume is provided by Dorothy Smith’s notion of ‘writing the social’, expounded in her book with the same title, as well as other studies (see Smith, 2005, 1999/2004, 1987). Bella Illesca’s account of walking into the school where Prue Gill works brings to mind Smith’s arguments about the need to develop a style of writing that registers your entry into a site, whereby as a sociologist you situate yourself within the social relations you are about to explore (Smith, 1999/2004, p. 8). There is, as Smith observes ‘no Archimedean point from which a positionless account can be written’; ‘writing the social is always from where people are’ (ibid). Crucially – and this applies not only to Bella’s standpoint but to the approaches of other people who have participated in this inquiry – Smith understands writing as a process of ‘discovering dimensions of the social that come into view’, as we progressively ‘discover the lineaments of social relations in which our own lives are embedded’ (ibid). Although Mies, Ramon, and Prue all begin with the institutional settings in which they work, their dialogue with their critical friends takes them beyond the immediacy of the day-today, enabling them to acknowledge the way traditions of curriculum and pedagogy, mandated policies, as well as the social relationships in which their pupils participate, shape what they do in their classrooms. They have begun, in short, to think relationally, to understand how the here-and-now presented to them is the product of a wider network of relationships, not all of them visible to an observer. The same can be said about the essays written by the other contributors to this book. All have been engaged in a process of discovery that has taken them beyond the habitual practices and assumptions that constitute their everyday lives. They have all been engaged in a process of inquiry that has enabled them to view their existing knowledge and work reflexively. Smith’s understanding of ‘writing the social’ again seems pertinent. Writing the social profits from the dialogue between what we mean to say and what we discover we have said, and, of course, the work of rewriting to embrace what we find we have said that is beyond or other than our intentions. (Smith, 1999/2004, p. 9) Dorothy Smith’s words serve to capture the joint inquiry that is enacted in this volume, including the iterative process that we have experienced as we have sought to refine our writing through our dialogue with ourselves and with each other. Each draft of the essays in this book has been a process of ‘discovering’ what we have said and then seeking to build on the insights that have become available to us. ***

Rather than supposing that representing classroom practice involves aspiring to some kind of ‘objectivity’ that captures what ‘is’, we see ourselves as performing 17

VAN DE VEN AND DOECKE

an alternative task: of constructing accounts of teaching that explore the differences between our intentions as teachers and researchers and what we actually achieve, between our individual aims and the meaning of the whole process as we collectively enact it. As Douglas Barnes shows with respect to lesson planning and curriculum development, the difference between our intentions and our actions does not necessarily signal a failure on the part of teachers, but the discovery of richer dimensions of language and learning than they may have originally envisaged (Barnes, 1976/1992, p. 14). The difference between intention and enactment opens up a space for imagination and play, for thinking otherwise, for entertaining possibilities that exceed the present moment. The interactions that occur within classrooms always have the potential to go beyond the designs of teachers and policy makers. As Barnes remarks, ‘a curriculum made only of teachers’ intentions would be an insubstantial thing from which nobody would learn much’. For a curriculum to be meaningful, it ‘has to be enacted by pupils as well as teachers’, forming part of an ongoing conversation between them as they all participate in the social life of the classroom (p. 14). To imagine that schooling should be solely directed towards achieving outcomes that have been specified in advance – that it is always a matter of measuring what individual students can do, rather than what they are potentially capable of achieving by participating in the social relationships that constitute any classroom – is a radically impoverished view of education. The cases written by Prue, Bella, Mies and Ramon, all reflect a cycle of planning, implementation and evaluation that forms a context for practitioner inquiry. These teachers are doing more than weighing up the effectiveness of otherwise of their teaching strategies. Such a concern has its place within the world of educational practice – teachers are always seeking out ways to refine their teaching, to expand their repertoire of strategies in order to enhance the learning of their students. But the trouble with reflection when it focuses narrowly on ‘effective’ teaching is that it precludes any questioning of the meaning of what we do and whether the learning outcomes that we are trying to achieve have any validity. This is especially the case with standardised testing, and the dreadful practice of teaching to the test that is occurring in countries like the United States, England and Australia. Such tests purportedly measure literacy achievement, but what they really do is construct culturally loaded versions of literacy that devalue the literacies and cultures of whole communities. By contrast, the teachers involved in this project are weighing up their approaches with respect to how they contribute to their ongoing conversations with the students in their classrooms. They obviously have a sense of what they would like their students to learn: Prue is endeavouring to enable her students to engage in a close reading of the text; Mies is encouraging her students to empathise with the main character of a novel; and Ramon is committed to exploring the potential of literary-theoretical frameworks for enhancing his students’ reading. These are dimensions of reading which, as teachers of literature, they believe are important if students are to meaningfully engage with the texts presented to them. Yet the type of engagement they are envisioning goes beyond any notion of reading as a 18

A CONVERSATIONAL INQUIRY

technical skill, locating it within multiple contexts beyond the classroom, including the lives of their students, the communities in which they live, and the larger society in which they will eventually take their places. They conceive of reading, in short, as a socio-cultural practice that should be the subject of continuing inquiry and reflection. For them, engaging with texts requires readers to draw on the personal, social, historical and ethical dimensions of their lives, constructing readings that go beyond the surface level of the words on the page and their dictionary meanings. As Bakhtin remarks, speakers do not find their words ‘out of a dictionary’, but ‘in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions’ (Bakhtin, p. 294). Out of those living situations, people take words and attempt to make them own. Mies, Ramon and Prue all conceptualise their classrooms as dialogical environments, both with regard to the way their students engage with the shifting meanings of literary texts as they might be constructed within classroom contexts (i.e. with respect to the complex interplay between texts and contexts that has been a focus of contemporary literary theory) and as a way of reading the classroom itself and all that occurs within it. They thereby speak back to the reductive and superficial way that standarised testing constructs teaching and learning within classroom settings. This is why they have participated in the inquiry enacted in this volume. As teachers of literature, they see such inquiry – such ‘praxis’ – as integral to their work. And we hope ‘Dear Reader’ that you too will find that the conversation they have to offer you is worthwhile, that by engaging in this conversation you too can enact a critical ‘praxis’, reflecting on the assumptions that shape your own work as teachers as literature, and the histories, traditions, cultures and policies that currently mediate your professional practice. We hopen dat dit boek bijdraagt tot reflectie over het eigen literatuuronderwijs en tot een hernieuwde discussie over het ‘waartoe’ van literatuuronderwijs, een discussie die in Nederland te lang is uitgebleven (Van de Ven, 2004). REFERENCES Bakhtin, M. M. (1981/1987). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (M. Holquist, Ed., C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Barnes, D. (1976/1992). From communication to curriculum (2nd ed.). With an Afterword by Kathryn Mitchell Pierce. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers. Benjamin, B. (1973). Understanding Brecht (A. Bostok, Trans., Introd. S. Mitchell). London: NLB. Cavarero, A. (2000). Relating narratives: Storytelling and selfhood (With an Introd. P. A. Kottman, Trans.). London and New York: Routledge. Clyne, M. (2005). Writing, testing, culture. In B. Doecke & G. Parr (Eds.), Writing=Learning. Kent Town: Wakefield Press/AATE. Cohen, J. M. (1958–1970). Introduction. In M. de Montaigne (Ed.), Essays (M. Cohen, Trans.). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Derrida, J. (1974/1976). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Eagleton, T. (2007). How to read a poem. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Hall, S. (1996). The problem of ideology: Marxism without guarantees. In D. Morley & K-H. Chen (Eds.), Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies. London: Routledge. Haug, F. (1990). Errinergungsarbeit. Hamburg: Argument-Verlag. 19

VAN DE VEN AND DOECKE Haug, F. (2003). Lernverhaeltnisse: Selbstbewegungen und Selbstblockierungen. Hamburg: Argument Verlag. Herrlitiz, W., Ongstad, S., & van de Ven, P.-H. (2007). Research on mother tongue education in a comparative international perspective: Theoretical and methodological issues. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Jones, K. (2010). The twentieth century is not yet over: Resources for the remaking of educational practice. Changing English, 17(1), 13–16. Kincheloe, J. (2003). Teachers as researchers: Qualitative inquiry as a path to empowerment (2nd ed.). London: RoutledgeFalmer. Kress, G., Jewitt, C., Bourne, J., Franks, A., Hardcastle, J., Jones, K. (2005). English in urban classrooms: A multimodal perspective on teaching and learning. London and New York: RoutledgeFalmer. MacLachlan, G., & Reid, I. (1994). Framing and interpretation. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Marx, K. (1969). Theses on Feuerbach. In K. Marx & F. Engels, et al. Selected works (pp. 13–15). Moscow: Progress Publishers. Paré, A. (2005). Review of English in urban classrooms: A multimodal perspective on teaching and learning. Changing English, 12(2), 350–358. Smith, D. (1987). The everyday world as problematic: A feminist sociology. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Smith, D. (1999/2004). Writing the social: Critique, theory, and investigations. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Smith, D. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Teese, R. (2000). Academic success and social power. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Van de Ven, P. H. (2004). Vontooid verleden tijd – een beschouwing over cultuur en communicatie – met een knipoog naar het nieuwe leren uit 1580. Moer, 4, 112–123.

Piet-Hein van de Ven Graduate School of Education Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands Brenton Doecke School of Education Faculty of Arts and Education Deakin University, Australia

20

PART 2: TEACHING AND REFLECTING

PRUE GILL AND BELLA ILLESCA

3. LITERARY CONVERSATIONS An Australian Classroom

This essay arises from an ongoing discussion about the teaching of Literature which followed after a ‘critical friend’, Bella Illesca, spent a series of consecutive lessons observing the action in Prue Gill’s year 12 Literature class. By examining, interpreting and exploring the events of the classroom as students discussed the short stories of contemporary Australian writer, Beverley Farmer, we were led to articulate our aims as teachers, our puzzles, and our concerns in ways that helped each of us think afresh about teaching. We collected transcripts of class discussions, our own observational accounts of the classes, and further email reflections and discussions between students. Then we reflected on this material in further taped conversations together, trying to identify the matches and mismatches between the planned curriculum and the curriculum that was actually implemented, as Prue interacted with her students in the course of the lessons (cf. Barnes, 1976). In writing this account, you might say that we are writing interpretations of interpretations, or having a continuing conversation about what it means to teach literature. We are also affirming an approach to the teaching of literature which runs against the grain of the English teaching that is currently being championed by many commentators and decision makers in Australia. The account slips between journal entries, conversation, class transcripts, email discussions, student written work, and reflections looking back, some years later (the initial classroom observations and dialogue between us commenced in 2004). Some sections are written by Prue, others by Bella. We felt that it was important to preserve a sense of our individual voices, in the dialogical spirit in which this inquiry has been conducted. FROM PRUE’S JOURNAL: ON BEING OBSERVED

It is the idea of a ‘conversational inquiry’ that wins me over. Would I be prepared to have a critical friend come to observe my year 12 Literature classes over an extended period of time? And would I then be prepared to participate in an ongoing conversation about those classes, conversations which would have a public dimension, a version being published, and hopefully taken up in a whole range of different circles? It is a daunting prospect, but also compelling. For years I’ve attended conferences, participated in workshops, listened to international speakers, been a member of reading groups, completed short courses and post-graduate work. All of these activities draw on outside expertise to help us think about our P-H. van de Ven and B. Doecke (eds.), Literary Praxis: A Conversational inquiry into the Teaching of Literature, 23–41. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

GILL AND ILLESCA

own pedagogical practice, but they are not located in one’s daily world. The idea of sharing one’s own classroom experiences in an intimate way, of thinking through one’s role with purpose and rigor is, for me, both difficult to agree to and impossible to refuse. I see it as a way of pinning down my interior world, of undertaking to make it available to myself in new ways, and to others, of having it enriched by the thinking of another. Professional learning is very much at the heart of educational discussion here in Australia, and that is good. We all know, intuitively as well as through research, that teacher engagement and enthusiasm for their discipline and their classroom work is a positive influence on student engagement and intellectual development. We know that an inquiring teacher is likely to be a good teacher. In the state of Victoria in which I work, teachers must now account for at least 100 hours of professional learning every 5 years – this is a requirement of our on-going registration. A significant aspect of the discussion is how to make this learning rich, and much more deeply integrated than the filling out of logs and records and the ticking of boxes will ever be able to register. I have already been involved, through the Association for the Teaching of English, in many conversations about teaching practice. I have been involved in the group moderating of student work both in my workplaces and at the statewide level as part of Year 12 assessment. I know that a conversation about student work leads to much professional learning. And, like most teachers, I am constantly involved in snatched exchanges with other teachers about what is going on in my own classroom. This proposal to converse with an observer is an opportunity to do something similar, but in a different, much more extended way, and directly related to my own classroom. It would be, I am told, a sustained, thoughtful observation of what happens in the classroom, followed by reflection, note taking and discussion. And yet, there is something so intimate about the classroom, this public/private space, that at a deep and irrational level, the idea of an observer, even a ‘critical friend’, is unnerving. This lurking desire to be left alone goes against all I value, as both teacher and professional. I believe that talking about what happens in the classroom is an excellent way of making sense of it; I know that my head holds only one version of the class, which will be different from the eighteen other versions in the room; I believe that, as Shulman puts it, reflection and analysis are essential for the scholarship of teaching (Shulman, 2000), and I know that this often comes last in departmental meeting agendas. I also believe in accountability, in my obligation to accept scrutiny. And I love team teaching. But I know too, that the unspoken pact one makes with a class is one thing, and the face one presents to the observer is another. It is Bella who will observe. I know Bella through the English Teachers’ Association – I admire her work, her politics, her brave resolve to challenge certain conventions in schools. This paradoxically makes it both easier and more testing. I take a deep breath, knowing that it is a good thing to do. I think about what I am teaching at the moment, about what to warn Bella to expect. This is a group of year 12 students, at the beginning of their final semester of schooling. Ours is a relatively elite private girls’ school, and parents pay substantial 24

LITERARY CONVERSATIONS

fees for their daughters to attend. There are 16 students in the class, most of them turning 17 years of age during the year. As with all year 12 subjects other than English, Literature is elected. In other words, all who are here in the class have chosen to be here. This does not mean, of course, that they are confident of what they’ve undertaken, and some have little background in literary analysis. One of the features of the year 12 Literature course, as it is mandated by the state, is the underlying premise that meaning is derived from a relationship between the text itself and the reader – in other words, there is an acknowledgement that the ‘truth’ of the text is inevitably negotiated rather than ‘given’. There is an expectation that students will build confidence and skill in developing an interpretation of their own which is based on sound analysis. So unlike some Literature courses taught, students are not ‘receiving’ an orthodoxy about the meaning of the studied texts, rather they are asked to speak in their own voice, of their own response. They need to be prepared to be questioned on this response, to draw on the text to give evidence for why they read the text as they do, to convince us that their view is plausible. In doing so, they need to have taken into account the views of others, not only their classmates, but those who have published critical reviews or essays about the texts. My aim, in these classes, is to help the students build their analytical and interpretive skills, and right now we are in the very early stages in our study of Farmer’s Collected Stories (Farmer, 1996). I tell Bella in email correspondence with her prior to her visit: At this stage I am trying to get students to approach a discussion of the stories via a close examination of short passages – to increase their confidence in moving from the particular to the general – the approach they need to demonstrate in the passage analysis task in the end of year exam. Students have chosen a story from the collection and their task is to read it, to identify a passage for discussion – and to use that passage as the basis for a discussion of the whole story. The students will work in pairs or threes, and they are to make a class presentation. My prediction is that this will be quite difficult for them, that they will not find a great deal to say via the passage, and that I’ll have to move them along quite a bit. I’ll be interested to see whether they draw on language and stylistic features of the writing in their discussion, as well as ideas. I imagine that my role will be to ask the questions that help them move from passage, to story, to work as a whole. What I don’t tell Bella yet, though it will clearly emerge as she spends time with us in the classroom, is that my teaching focus at this time is on talk. Students might spend a whole class talking, with almost no formal note taking or ‘quiet’ work happening at all. Thinking about it now, I can see that I want to develop the same sense of conversational inquiry in the classroom, that Bella and I will be using ourselves. I want to get students to make their own thinking process visible not only to the rest of us in the class, but to themselves. I am asking them ‘what do you 25

GILL AND ILLESCA

think is happening here?’ ‘what makes you think that?’ ‘where in the text can you locate this idea of yours?’ I want them to be able to work out how it is that they are drawing conclusions, and to be prepared to test those conclusions. In a staff discussion group at the school where I work, we have been talking about the work of Ron Ritchhart and others stemming from the Ground Zero project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Ritchhart, 2002), and I have given my students a reading which might help us have a discussion about this idea of thinking. I add something of this in my comment to Bella: I’m also going to ask the students to reflect on what is happening in the classroom. Last class I gave them an extract from Ron Ritchhart’s ‘Intellectual Character: What It Is, Why It Matters and How to Get It’ and I’m hoping that they can use the framework of intellectual dispositions to help them think about the classroom process. Where do they see these in action? I also mention to the students that an observer will come to the next class. It makes them as self-conscious as it makes me, and I understand that already something of the atmosphere of the room will alter, although I cannot quite predict how. FROM BELLA’S JOURNAL: THE LENS OF THE OBSERVER

As I walk through the school grounds to meet Prue for our first meeting, it comes as no surprise to me that what I see and hear is very much governed by what was conspicuously absent from the government school where I last worked as an English teacher: students with laptops, a café style school cafeteria with an adjoining bookshop, art show postcards for an on campus art show exhibition and colourful consumer products around the school and in classrooms. I even walk past an area where professional photographers and artists are setting up, and I feel that there is something exciting and exclusive about it all. At a glance, what strikes me about the students who I see here compared to the students that I taught at my old school is an almost intangible sense of place and social cohesion; it is in the way they talk, the way they walk, in their gazes, in how they make use of the school’s physical resources and in how they wear their uniforms. In fact, the school prospectus markets the school in precisely this way. The caption on the front cover reads, ‘i want to be’ and goes on to tell us that at this school every child is encouraged to ‘be free’, ‘be inspired’, ‘be surprised’, ‘be empowered’, ‘be involved’, ‘be creative’, ‘be bolder’, ‘be connected’ and ‘be at home’, ‘be with us … always’. This school prospectus, the school website, the façade of the school – these are the externalization of particular values and interests that proclaim a nurturing of each individual (signified by the ‘i’ in lower case), and ultimately leading to an affirmation of the right of a certain ‘I’ to exist and name the world. Whilst I try to mentally disentangle myself from the seductiveness of this seemingly civilized world of lively chatter and pleasant activity, I think about my students in a coeducational government school on the urban fringe and I wonder to myself, what about responsibility, responsiveness and commitment to justice? In this moment, from where I am standing ‘there is nothing mysterious or natural 26

LITERARY CONVERSATIONS

about authority’ (Said, 1978:19) and I can’t help but think to myself that social engineering does exist and I tell myself that I must try to not let my personal views about the deliberate erosion of public education by successive governments here in Australia cloud my classroom observations and experiences here with Prue. Still, when faced with stately trees, grounds and turn of the century buildings, I can’t help but remember the damp portable classrooms or the mottled, uneven dustbowl that was the sports field at my previous school. I make a note of these things at this point not as a way of re-hashing the important ongoing concern about educational inequality in Australia, but as a way of reflecting on the question of ‘representation’ i.e. how the way in which what we see and hear is shaped by our habitualised discursive practices and the ideologies that inhere within us and around us (Reid, Kamler, Simpson & Maclean, 1996). We all refer to and rely on that untidy thing called memory, previous knowledge and experiences, to understand ourselves in relation to others and make sense of the past, present and future. I am no different. (And, to illustrate a point I remind myself to tell the reader that I have spent some time working in a private girls’ school not far from this school.) And I think that to give an account of a classroom that doesn’t see the ‘observers’ and the ‘selves’ in it as social beings who are the product of the ideological networks and normative relationships in which they operate is to provide the reader with a false representation of the life of the classroom, one that ignores the importance of the personal dimension in the public lives of people (Doecke, 2001). Research of the kind that abstracts the personal from the classroom seems to be what our current government is intent on pursuing. It seems that to meet the accountability measures that the government is imposing on us we need to estrange ourselves from ourselves and from the lives of our students. As the government sees it, student data from standardized tests are all we need to show whether we are performing effectively I am pleased that it is Prue whose classes I will be observing. I know Prue through the Association for the Teaching of English and I have admired her critical stance and views on issues in education over the years. She also has extensive teaching experience in both government and private schools in Australia and I am looking forward to sharing and exchanging ideas. This idea of talking for the sake of talking about education feels a little different: no workshop activities to structure our thinking or outside experts to talk to us about how teaching happens and should be done. We are two colleagues who share a passion for English teaching and we have this unique opportunity to talk to each other about what we know and do, from a unique perspective – the inside of a classroom. It is a privilege to be allowed into another teacher’s classroom. THE FIRST CLASS – PRUE’S VIEW

Things do not happen as I expect, and later I talk about this with Bella. The class filters into the room in desultory fashion, the only group who’ve not photocopied their chosen passages for the rest of the class is the group scheduled to start. I run out of the room, do the photocopying and leave Bella to witness the skylarking and 27

GILL AND ILLESCA

play that goes on between students not yet harnessed for action. It is not as if such a beginning is unusual, but with an observer present, I am aiming to give a different impression. The students themselves are not up for charade. Bella’s presence spurs me to stop and think about whether the ragged beginnings characteristic of my classes are purposeful, and therefore professional, or happenstance, and therefore unprofessional. How might they be seen by others? Strict boundaries are so ‘naturalised’ in schools that we become nervous of blurring them, but I like it when I do. Students bring their recess talk with them into class. They flick in and out of personal chat as they prepare for the day’s lesson. I see such informality as a way of learning about each other, and hence contributing to our ability to have a conversation about an idea or a text or a piece of writing. One of the things I say to students at the beginning of the year, when they are new and fresh, is that my first aim is that they enjoy walking through the door. I picture them thinking, as the bell goes for the end of the class before, ‘Oh good, it’s Literature now’ and that is certainly what I am thinking myself. On this day it takes ten minutes to set up the class, which is 75 minutes long. In the context of the institution, this can make me uneasy, though it’s not difficult to justify the fluidity as a relinquishing of authority. And so we move into the content of the class. We sit with our chairs in a circle, text in hand, and a pencil for annotations or jottings. It is the students who lead the talk. Each group will start their discussion of Farmer’s writing by the reading of a passage to which we will pay close attention. Once the discussion of the passages begins, the students are immediately focused and very reflective in their comments about Farmer’s writing. I’m pleased by their attentiveness, but, as I predicted, they are more comfortable making general rather than particular comments (this and subsequent excerpts from conversations in class were recorded by Bella in her observation notes, August, 2004): ‘There’s heaps of dialogue.’ ‘She often uses Greek language as well … ‘ ‘… and she uses Greek-English like “you hev” and “womans never paint their hairs here”.’ ‘That’s cute. And, and what about “you mek fool”!’ The first passage we discuss comes from a story called ‘Pumpkin’ and it reveals the emerging tensions in the marriage between a rather intellectual young Australian teacher, Barbara, and Andoni, her Greek husband. They are staying together in Andoni’s family home in a Greek mainland coastal village. This is their first trip to Greece together, and so each is seeing the other in a new context, and inevitably, each is feeling destabilized by what they see. Andoni is shocked to find that Barbara dyes her hair – even though, she promptly tells him, his sisters do too. One of the students has just used the term ‘good woman’ in her comment, and I question her about this – what might Farmer be saying? Bec: Prue: 28

That [for Andoni] it’s what people think that matters. Not what you do … it’s what seems that matters. What might Farmer think about this attitude?

LITERARY CONVERSATIONS

Jo:

Would Farmer be angry because of his lack of honesty? You can’t judge a person because of dyed hair! There’s a sense of where two principles are juxtaposed … Natasha: The principle of being a good woman … Clare: The principle of being the woman who is seen to be a good woman … Laura: The Greek is automatically a good woman. Barbara has to assimilate – to become good. Stephanie: Her honesty and goodness [versus] keeping up appearances … Prue: For her, the openness is a virtue. For him it’s … Prue/ Natasha: A shame (Natasha and Prue finish the same sentence). I question continually: what in this passage makes you say that? Where can you locate your idea? How do you think Farmer positions us here? Why might she be doing that? Gradually, as the students respond to this prodding, they shift in focus and start to point to detail in the writing. We move on to discuss a dark story about a serial rapist – ‘A Woman with Black Hair’. The students presenting this story have chosen the very opening passage to discuss. It is the view of a sleeping household that a rapist has as he slips through an unlocked door. It is a cold and detailed observation. As we first read we have no idea that it is a predator’s view that we are reading, although any reader would be struck by the clinical detail in the account. But for each of us as we talk together now, we have the knowledge of hindsight, and it colours the way we attend to tone and atmosphere. The observations are more detailed: Fiona:

Cara: Prue: Kim:

Farmer paints a picture in colours. Very striking and disturbing; ‘red velvet’ and ‘quilt’, ‘ink’ all foreshadow blood … the children’s essays and poem tell us she’s a teacher … but he hasn’t made a connection. She’s just a woman with black hair. The tone is very detached. It’s unsettling … How do you locate ‘unsettling’? Through detachment … [He is] not emotionally engaged with this at all …

I want to ask the question one more time – ‘where, in this passage, can you pin down the way Farmer uses language to unsettle?’ I want even closer attention. I want them to use their own language with more particularity, to look for ease or eloquence, patterning or rhythm, sarcasm or grace, resonance, ambiguity, image, or figurative language. Their evidence lies in how they read, and I am asking them to make the interpretive nature of their reading visible. This is challenging, because if such processes are to become visible to us, we must inevitably confront values and prejudices which are ‘naturalised’ in our thinking. Perkins refers to this as ‘making thinking visible’, and he talks of the many ways we can use the language of thinking with students: we can ask them to hypothesise, to reason, to suggest, to imagine, to give evidence, to counter an argument (Perkins, 2003). 29

GILL AND ILLESCA

The students’ talk about this passage continues: Claire: Fiona: Cara: Natasha: Bree: Bec:

Weird … she uses brackets like that. What’s the purpose? Unnecessary information … Like a side note … in the first person. Makes it more intimate don’t you think? Do words in brackets give a different view into his psyche? Maybe it’s the narrator? I think it’s like a monologue … I think it’s like a play. Like stage directions … to set the mood …

There is an exploratory aspect to this talk. Four questions are asked, but these questions are directed to each other, not to me. Cara, Natasha and Bree are testing out an idea in their questions – openly hypothesising. Fiona and Bec are asserting, but not as though they have the only answer to the questions being asked, simply as though they are confident in offering an interpretation. I comment now that it is clear that the rapist has been watching the woman, and someone takes this point further: Fiona:

Liz: Fiona:

[The writing] shows he knows oddities about her … her back door is described as solid, open. Could be a metaphor for herself? Vulnerable? She seems like an independent woman, but the man comes in and she breaks down … she becomes a detail in the house as inanimate and lifeless as the doors and the lightshades. Nameless. This is just why he only does it once … ‘ He doesn’t need to connect with her He stands, ‘cocky’, not hiding – unseen … The brazenness of his behaviour!

Students are also beginning to draw some conclusions about the perspective Farmer brings to her work. I don’t agree with these conclusions, but I’ll wait for them to test them out for themselves. They say: ‘Farmer is anti-men’ ‘The only time men are OK is when they take on a woman’s role’ ‘She’s annoying, so bleak … just because she came from a traditional background’. One student implores of Farmer: ‘Men are not all that evil … get on with your life’. Later, their thinking will become more complex. Later I will push them further: ‘what is the implication of your interpretation?’ … ‘have you a theory about what Farmer is doing in this story?’ … ‘what conclusions are you beginning to draw about Farmer’s writing?’ I want them to be talking about language and meaning. Later too, I will talk to them, about the feminist notion that the power of all men is reinforced by the fact that some men rape. It is a challenging idea, but thinking about it in relation to this story, rather than in relation to their own personal world, 30

LITERARY CONVERSATIONS

provides a safe context for discussion. I do not push them to accept or reject the idea. I simply want them to know that it is an idea, and if they are studying literature like this, it is one worth grappling with. We can also talk about whether such an idea might be ‘dated’ now, superseded. Similarly, Farmer’s stories (‘Inheritance’, ‘Melpo’, ‘Ismini’) give the opportunity to talk about the Freudian notion of ambivalence towards the mother, and idealization of the father by the daughter. By introducing students to theory in the context of their reading, I am hoping to tantalise them, to think of themselves as able to participate in the to and fro of analytical discourse. I find that the conversation I have with Bella after the class is thoroughly invigorating. I realize that this conversation does, for me, what I am hoping that the classroom discussion will do for the students. I am forced to pin down my thinking, to articulate thoughts which generally float un-embodied. I am putting ideas together in a fresh way. I think again about the process of writing and reflection and how easy it is for such activities to slip off the agenda for teachers. And I think about how little we help students reflect before they write – how regularly we throw topics and tasks at them, like exercises, and simply expect them to get on with it. We underestimate the idea that thinking is hard and takes practice and that it is something that we ought to do with others. The things I say as I talk to Bella, my own surprising words, lead me to conclude that what might pass for intuitive behaviour on my part is actually more mindful than I have admitted to myself. At the end of this first class, I ask the students to make some observations about the discussion themselves. They have done their short reading on ‘intellectual character’ (Ritchhart, 2002) and I’m thinking that this might help them reflect on their learning, although I’m wary of the neat categories that Ritchhart delineates between intellectual dispositions. Because the class ends in a rush, I email the students, asking them to post their responses on a discussion list for others to read: 1. Could you think back over the discussion we had in class today, and jot down a note about a moment when you saw one of the dispositions of intellectual character (curiosity, open-mindedness, metacognition, truth/understanding seeking, strategic thinking, scepticism) at play. You might need to refer back to the reading I gave you. 2. Thinking about your own approach to learning, with which of these dispositions do you most identify, or alternatively, which do you think best describes your style? Justify your response. Their individual responses are a little self-conscious, lacking the playfulness they use when writing for each other. They make me wish that I’d asked a different question: ‘is Ritchhart’s theory helpful for you as a learner, for understanding what intelligence might look like? Nevertheless, reading one after another, they are interestingly different and open up the possibility of a conversation. One student, reflecting on the long discussion we had teasing out our responses to Andoni, the husband in the story ‘Pumpkin’, says: ‘Mostly, I saw the disposition to be’ truth-seeking and understanding’ – that is, we all tried to work out the importance of using ‘copper’ instead of 31

GILL AND ILLESCA

bronze, or the importance of the aside in the brackets in the ‘A Woman with Black Hair’ passage. I think during the ‘Woman with Black Hair’ passage we each tried to pinpoint why it made us feel the way it did … But it’s very difficult to pinpoint specific actions or thoughts because many of the things we discussed in class can be classified in several ways.’ Another student takes the same moment in the discussion but uses it in a different way: ‘I thought there was some strategic thinking involved when we discussed why Farmer used “copper” to describe Andoni. Some people used chemistry knowledge about the properties of copper to theorize about this image. Maybe there were signs of metacognition when everyone gave their own opinions as to whether the descriptions within the brackets were Farmer’s or psycho stalking man’s thoughts. People explored how the section made them personally feel; looked into their own minds.’ For a third student, a different disposition is at play. ‘During the discussion many people were obviously thinking critically about Farmer’s work, and looking beyond what Farmer had written, especially about the imagery used in ‘Pumpkin’ and the narrative style of ‘A Woman with Black Hair’. I think that people were generally open minded and willing to accept and discuss other people’s ideas to try to understand both the meaning Farmer had intended and what the stories meant to us.’ Later, we discuss the differences expressed in the reflections, and conclude that it is very difficult to neatly identify intellectual qualities at play. But we decide to keep working with the ideas. The second question seems easier for students to respond to, and they are quite eloquent when writing about a sense of their own learning styles. The following extracts are glimpses into their much longer comments. I am interested by the emphasis on scepticism – we are using the term, as Ritchhart does, in its Socratic sense, referring to one who is unwilling to believe without questioning: ‘I think that my main approach is using curiosity, scepticism, and … truth seeking? I love to collect details, string them together and then argue about them (usually changing my mind about them halfway through). I think everyone uses scepticism we don’t just accept things at face value but try to find out more. Unfortunately I’m not very good at metacognition … and sometimes I abandon logic for emotion and intuition.’ ‘I definitely have a curious nature, but this is mostly due to the fact that I seem to be sceptical of almost everything. Despite this, however, I am moderately open-minded when it comes to certain aspects of my learning (e.g. new study/memory method) … Overall I believe all I really want to do is find the truth, in whatever I’m doing. That is usually why I’m so curious and ask too many questions!!’

32

LITERARY CONVERSATIONS

‘I think I am naturally very sceptical about most things, but I am also very interested in understanding what I am learning, as I really don’t like just accepting things just because that’s the way they are. I think that being metacognitive would be very valuable, but I don’t think this is really a skill that I possess, although I think Lit is a subject that really makes you do this. I think I am fairly open-minded, although it’s very hard to really know of course.’ This is a good point, I think to myself, and take note of it. We should talk about it further. How can we recognise our own blind spots? Can we help each other become more aware of the assumptions beneath the conclusions we draw? Another student raises similar questions about the difficulty of self analysis: ‘I think I use a lot of strategic thinking and truth seeking in my work, especially when doing subjects like Literature and History where you need to examine writing critically and question work very carefully. I find that there is a lot of open mindedness required to properly do the tasks set, such as passage analysis. However, something like metacognition is difficult, because I think it requires you to examine yourself in a way that may be difficult. Reflecting on your way of thinking I believe is something easier to do when you can be more objective.’ And this final extract focuses on the interplay of the dispositions: ‘I believe we display all of these characteristics at various times – they are aspects of human nature so it’s a hard question to work out which best describe us. I reckon I’m quite a mixture of these qualities – some more that others sometimes – but fairly evenly distributed. I’ve got a good dose of the bad qualities too, like procrastination, not caring, grumpiness, lack of motivation – we can’t forget these either because i think it’s harder to overcome these things than to develop the others. When I get over boredom and closed-mindedness, it automatically leads to the good intellectual qualities we have been discussing.’ These personal reflections made public, journal style, serve several purposes. The comments draw on a shared pedagogical language which we can use through the rest of the year, and thus add a dimension to the discussions between us all in the literature classroom. They also affirm the value of including student talk in my own thinking about teaching and learning. Both the theory and the students’ response to it reinforce the potential of collaborative learning. ENSUING CLASSES

And so a pattern develops of Bella coming into the class over a full two weeks. Each class is 75 minutes long. After each class we write and then we talk. I am unnerved by some of the observations she makes, heartened by others. I stop feeling as though there is a ‘watcher’ in the room and start to relax into conversation after conversation about our classrooms, what else we might do, what we wished we’d 33

GILL AND ILLESCA

done. We share our different worlds of teaching, we clarify for ourselves and each other the sort of teaching relationships that interest us, our purpose in teaching, our pleasure, our frustration. It seems a luxury to be so mindful. Talking our way, group by group, through passages from Farmer’s stories takes up several of the classes Bella observes. We become more skilled at making particular observations about a passage, thinking of the significance of the passage for the story as a whole, and making linking or interpretive comments about Farmer’s writing across the stories. These steps become a framework for student note-taking. Students begin to make assertions: ‘Farmer is exploring the cycles of life – birth, mortality, ageing, acceptance of death.’ ‘Farmer’s writing has a honesty about it, she includes confronting detail about the ageing body for example, that is ordinarily left out.’ ‘Farmer creates strong women.’ ‘Farmer explores notions of masculinity.’ I ask them to think about the underlying values implicit in the writing, the view of the world that is being challenged or endorsed in the stories, how these values might reflect the context within which Farmer is writing. Fortunately for us, Beverly Farmer is both generous and lives only a half day’s travel from our school. She kindly accepts our invitation to come and talk to the class about her writing. Students anticipate the event in a range of ways: ‘Maybe we should ask Beverly what was on her mind when she wrote this?’ ‘I said, like yeah, hello. Men are not all this evil.’ ‘I have an issue with the way everything is so different, alienating.’ ‘Oh my god. I’m worried about her safety this afternoon.’ ‘What was going through her head? She drives me mad. Life isn’t that bad.’ ‘Oh my god, I love her. I want to read more of her stuff.’ After a rather shy afternoon tea together, we sit around in a circle, and listen to some readings. Farmer answers question after question from the students, in a quiet and honest and gentle way. She tells them about her own student experiences, in particular about her close, but naïve relationship with her European French teacher. She draws them in with her funny stories against herself and paints a picture of a young woman with whom they can all identify. The students are in awe. They find that she is not a rabid, man hating feminist at all. This is arresting for them, some comment that they need to rethink their hasty conclusions, that they might read her work differently now. REVIEW OF A REVIEW TASK

Then we move on to a task designated by the state curriculum authority as part of the school assessed coursework. The task asks that the students ‘reflect on their interpretations and evaluate others interpretations’ by responding to a critical analysis or review of the work they are studying. We colloquially refer to this as a 34

LITERARY CONVERSATIONS

‘review of a review’. I remind students of the way that academic debate works: one argues with something that has been said or alternatively, inserts some new idea where there is a space/gap in an existing interpretation. ‘Either way’, I tell the students, ‘you must show that you have an angle on the article to which you are responding. You don’t need to focus on every aspect of that article, but you need to take an idea from the article, and write in response to it. The academic debate that occurs about literature is ongoing. Imagine that you’re inserting yourself into a public discussion about Farmer’s work.’ I have earlier emailed the students the links to three quite challenging articles, and have asked them to glance through each one. The first is ‘The Fiction of Beverly Farmer’ by Lyn Jacobs (Australian Literary Studies, May 1990), the second is ‘Dramatising the Self: Beverley Farmer’s Fiction’ by Xavier Pons (Australian Literary Studies 17, 1996), and the third is Brenda Walker’s ‘Fingers of the hand of motherhood: Mothers and Sons in Beverley Farmer’s Fiction’ (Southerly No 3/58, 1998). Now I give some strategies for reading an academic article: – read the introduction and the conclusion, and aim to identify the argument the author is taking – read the first sentence of each paragraph and get an overview of the terrain of the article – scan each paragraph and highlight a point that strikes a chord – finally, approach from beginning to end. I group students into three, with each group working on a different article. This will be a slowish process. I assume that the students will read the articles differently, that each will latch on to different aspects of the article, and that by sharing their readings, they’ll help each other come to an understanding of the writer’s perspective. I am hoping that once each group reports back to the whole class, their view of Farmer’s work will expand. A reading across the articles will help each student to clarify the particularity of the single article they choose to review for their assessment task. ONE STUDENT MAKES SENSE OF THE TASK

Each time I prepare students to complete this assessment task, no matter what text we are studying, I am struck by how good it is. It is an academic apprenticeship of a kind, but even for those who don’t think of themselves as ‘academic’, being encouraged to question or quibble with the views of another writer is empowering. Furthermore, the task raises the students’ awareness about different ways of reading, and gives new ways of thinking about the writing they are studying. I think about the ‘student guide’ publishing industry, which is competitive here in Australia. Such guides give potted summaries, lists of themes, analysis of key characters, and a single perspective on the text. Because of their stated purpose (‘your exam preparation guide’), the views are comfortingly authoritative. This task, on the other hand, asks students to think for themselves, often making them uncomfortable in the process. 35

GILL AND ILLESCA

It certainly enlarges their view, as one student shows when she summarises Lyn Jacob’s view of the context in which Farmer writes. This leads to a comment of her own about Jacobs’ use of intertextuality, a point she may not have arrived at on her own: One of the major writing techniques explored by Jacobs is Farmer’s use of ‘texts within texts’ – the use of well known stories to shed light on aspects of her own story. It is interesting to note that Jacobs too refers to numerous texts and authors throughout her discussion, achieving a similar effect. Jacobs begins by placing Farmer into literary context, noting she has often been reviewed ‘in tandem with other women writers like Helen Garner and Olga Masters’. As the discussion develops, Jacobs compares Farmer at various times to Patrick White, Vance Palmer and Hal Porter, authors who have obviously shaped the way Jacobs responds to Farmer’s writing. Jacobs also draws on her literary knowledge and cites other texts to lend credibility to her arguments – she considers how David Malouf and White have previously dealt with the idea of ‘the prowler’, and closes with a quote from Eliot about ‘home’. Another student writes of a ‘gap’ in Jacob’s analysis, and adds something of her own to Jacob’s reading: Jacobs fails to deal with the physical deterioration of the body over time, a common subject of Farmer’s stories. In ‘Milk’ Yiayia’s health deteriorates over the course of the story as she’s emotionally affected by her friend’s illness and by the closing passages, she’s described as ‘a listless stranger, her cheeks pale and yellow, and her white bun loose in wisps.’ Farmer presents an even older woman in ‘Melpo’ – a once strong mother now bedridden, her children rubbing rosewater on ‘her whimpering throat, the loose, spotted skin of her forearms.’ Perhaps the most graphic description of a destroyed body is in ‘Inheritance’, where cancer and old age combine to form a ‘sagging belly grinning with crooked lips’ above ‘frail shaking legs’, ‘slack knees’. All of these women are affected by time and change in the most physical way, as Farmer demonstrates the transience of life and the unstoppable cycle of birth, life and death. ‘Yes’, this student is saying, ‘what Jacobs writes seems plausible, and we could take her point further’. DIALOGICAL INQUIRY

Bella and I return, in our last discussions, to think about the planned curriculum compared with the curriculum as we see it implemented in these 7 or 8 hours of classes. The planned curriculum is outlined in the Year 12 Literature course, and it occurs to me that even the students would agree that these aims direct our study in quite overt ways. The course should enable students to: – develop an enjoyment of literature through reading widely, imaginatively, critically and independently; 36

LITERARY CONVERSATIONS

– gain an understanding of the variety of human experience; – develop a critical awareness of cultures past and present, as they are represented in literature; – read closely and engage in detailed critical analysis of the key literary features; – develop interpretive skills by hypothesising about and drawing inferences from texts; – extend their understanding of the different ways literary texts are constructed; – reflect on their interpretations and evaluate others interpretations; – develop the capacity to write confident analytical and creative responses to texts. But as Bella and I talk about what we want to happen in the classroom we are using a different language. We want our students to read with greater awareness of the way we frame texts ourselves, we want them to develop their conceptions of the relationship between language and ideas, to confidently express their ways of seeing, to think in increasingly abstract ways, to be open to challenge, to understand the value of evidence and argument. We want them to marvel at the way people use language to help us see anew and to experience unknown worlds in intimate ways. We want them to step into the shoes of the other. Texts become reference points for students to think critically about their own world, how they might change it, the life they might lead. School curriculum is insufficiently informed, it seems to me, by the idea that democracies must be continually reinvented rather than taken for granted, or unquestioned. My aim is that everyone develops a voice in the class, everyone knows that others will be attentive to their views. I hope to engender an attitude to authority that is respectful, but questioning. I do not wish to be the central voice in the classroom. There are some issues on which we may collectively agree – there are others on which we will remain divided and in this way we can consciously model values of democracy through classroom process. Gunther Kress (1995) in Writing the Future: English and the Making of a Culture of Innovation, argues for an English classroom that is not only deconstructive, but reconstructive. He suggests that the classroom can give students a conception of what it is to be a citizen of democracy, because at one and the same moment it can encourage them to consider their voice simply as one of many, and yet foster their agency as individuals (1995) (cf. Knight 2004; Grossman, Wineberg and Woolworth, 2000). Like Grossman et al., I want the classroom to be a space where ‘meaningful social interaction broadens people’s sense of self beyond the “me” and “I” into the “we” and “us”’ (2000:8). These are the conclusions I arrive at with Bella as we talk about why we teach. I realize they are not aims that I could have easily articulated without our long discussions. I think about how to characterise what it is that I am learning as I write this long account, and I am struck by an old cliché about the difference between having the experience and understanding the experience. The fact is that it is our conversation that has enabled me to think, and I’m hoping that this is what the students experience too. Talk, writing, and talking about writing, are not ends in themselves but also a way of helping us to construct our futures – both public and private. 37

GILL AND ILLESCA

A FINAL REFLECTION FROM BELLA

As I sit in Prue’s classroom with her students, I am reminded of Ian Reid’s description of the ‘Workshop’ approach to the teaching of Literature, as distinct from teaching the literary canon (or what Reid calls the ‘Gallery’ approach). Here is how Reid describes it: Imagine, if you will … a room for making. As soon as you enter this one you can see and hear that it’s quite different from the Gallery. It’s messy and noisy, because lots of people are busily at work. There’s argument, joking, gossip; there’s activity on all sides. One talkative group seems to be either dismantling something or piecing it together; another is intently mixing ingredients, several individuals here and there are bent absorbedly over benches, machines, easels, desks … a multi-media experiment seems to be underway in one corner. A few are silently preoccupied with their reading – or is it their writing? And if there are curators here, it’s hard to distinguish them from the rest (Reid, 1984:13). Prue’s lessons are very much reminiscent of this kind of ‘integrative and interactive’ (Reid, 1984:13) approach. Reid describes it as combining ‘the world of play with the world of work; of literary utterances with ordinary uses of language; of verbal communication with other media of cultural expression; of reading with writing; and of cultural products with their means of production.’ (Reid, 1984:3). When you enter Prue’s classroom, what is immediately evident is that ‘exploratory talk’ (Barnes, 1976) is at the heart of her pedagogy. Through their conversations, students are encouraged to think and create their own meaning from the texts they are studying. The task that Prue sets her students during the first lesson which I observe makes this a possibility: Students in pairs or threes were allocated a story to read and discuss together. Then they were to do a class presentation of the story, based on an analysis of a passage that they were asked to attend to in great detail. The aim is to get them thinking about the detail, the story as a whole, and then to make links with other stories in order to make broader, interpretive statements about Farmer’s writing. (Prue Gill, Reflections on Literature class, 9 August, 2004) During this activity, Prue’s voice is present, but it doesn’t dominate conversations. What she says sometimes blends in with the students’ voices, affirming their responses in an understated manner: ‘I love that idea Lucy about the … !, ‘… yes, I feel like Gemma …’. At other times her voice is clearly guiding and challenging her students to clarify: ‘go further …’, ‘Lisa is saying that … how does it make you think about this argument?’ ‘… Can I go back to … how do you think it works to draw attention to …?’, ‘Where do you see that … ?’, ‘Are you saying she dispels … ?’. Barnes reminds us that students’ ‘ability to play an active part in the formulation of knowledge is partly controlled by the intentions and expectations they bring to the lesson, and partly by the patterns of communication set up by the teacher’ (Barnes, 1976:115–116). I see this kind of productive interaction happening in Prue’s teaching. 38

LITERARY CONVERSATIONS

Prue does not rely on a formula to shape the conversations that are happening in her lessons, but there is still a strong sense of her intentions mediating the activities that take place. Prue arranges the chairs in a circle, invites her students to lead the discussions in their small groups, seats herself amongst the students and moves around occasionally joining in the conversation. Arguably, the re-arranging of classroom furniture displaces the more familiar, traditional and commonly accepted classroom social order. Prue has dislodged herself and her students from their traditional roles as teacher and student, giving her students the space to try out ideas and develop their own analytical skills through conversations with her and each other. What is also deliberate and self-conscious about Prue’s pedagogy is her commitment to working with her students in a way that stretches beyond the single lesson, beyond the mandated English literature curriculum and beyond the examination at the end of the year. For Prue the teaching of literature is about connecting with the lives of others. She encourages her students to reflect on the ‘important questions about self, other, politics, values, context, understanding …’ (Prue Gill, Reflections of Friday’s class, 8 August, 2004). Or, as she has observes, in an article that we have written together: I think my greatest responsibility as a teacher is to help students develop a consciousness of the values, the responsibilities, the behaviours underpinning a democratic process. I want them to understand the fragility of democracy, the way in which it must be consciously helped and shaped if it is to avoid being co-opted, becoming illusory … (Doecke, Gill, Illesca and Van de Ven (2009:22) We are aware that our position in society is a highly mediated one. What constitutes the real world from the steps of Prue’s school is very different from the reality experienced by students elsewhere. But Prue is critically aware of the ideological work that she is performing, indeed that we all do as teachers when we teach – whether working in an elite private school or in a down trodden government school. Giving students access to understandings of language that see words and meaning as dynamic and constantly changing helps shape their thinking about the world around them in the present and into the future. Through her classroom practices and her reflections Prue demonstrates that she encourages her students to work with language, that she wants them to think beyond the confines of established language forms and structures. In this sense, language is understood as a ‘lived event’ (Bakhtin, quoted in Gardiner [1992: 191]). Through the conversations that take place in these lessons we can see that when students speak, they borrow words from each other and from elsewhere: the words they utter are both theirs and not theirs – showing how they are always involved in some kind of productive struggle with language and meaning (Bakhtin, 1984). In the students’ written and oral exchanges with Prue and each other, their choice of words and intonations provide the reader with a glimpse into their material lives, as well as showing us how their individual lives are intertwined with the lives of others from other times and places. Prue’s words and practices show us that she sees her students as complex and contradictory 39

GILL AND ILLESCA

individuals whose words are split in productive dialogue between themselves and others, between the individual and the social: ‘I live in a world of others’ words’ (Bakhtin 1986:143). Here is what Prue had to say in reflections which she sent to me: One way in which I feel that my students have benefited from my interest in literary theory is that they begin to feel validated and empowered because of the way their view of the world is both developed and acknowledged. This does not happen quickly, but over time. Many of my year 12 Literature students have not done literature before, and in the beginning they are swamped by a feeling that this is a hard subject, it is a bit mysterious, they’re not sure what they’re meant to be doing – when they do a passage analysis from one of the texts they’re studying, for example. They feel they’re on unstable territory, as if I have some secret which I’m not quite revealing about what I want when I ask for a theory about what the author of the text might be ‘doing’ (consciously and unconsciously) in this moment in the text. (Prue Gill, Reflections after Classroom Observation, Tuesday 10 August, 2004) Prue tells us that she does not think that there should be anything ‘secretive’ or mysterious about language and literature, and that to this end she encourages her students to interrogate accepted discursive norms and to think of themselves as authors who also have something of worth to contribute to the public debate. In the current climate, including reforms in Australian education such as the national curriculum and nation wide mandated literacy and numeracy assessment (The National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy [NAPLAN]), these are potentially dangerous things to say and dangerous acts for students and teachers to perform. However, I find that Prue’s critically reflexive stance offers me hope and dares me to believe that teaching of this kind, as an act of praxis and resistance, is the best way to respond to a political machinery that is shutting down the conversation about language and literature and is instead intent on creating a common culture by establishing ‘canons of taste and value’ and ‘forming, transmitting and reproducing’ certain ‘perceptions and judgments’ (Said, 1978: 19–20). REFERENCES Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (M. Holquist, Ed., C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1984). The hero, and the position of the author with regard to the hero, in Dostoyevsky’s Art. In M. Bakhtin (Ed.), Problems of Dostoyesky’s poetics (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans., Ed.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (W. McGee, Trans. & Ed., Emerson and Holquist, Eds.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Barnes, D. (1976). From Communication to Curriculum. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Doecke, B. (2001). Public and personal domains: Professional standards for teachers of English in Australia. L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 1(2), 163–177. Doecke, B., Gill, P., Illesca, B., & Van de Ven, P.-H. (2009). The literature classroom: Spaces for dialogue. L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 9(1), 5–33. Farmer, B. (1996). Collected stories. Queensland: University of Queensland Press. 40

LITERARY CONVERSATIONS Gardiner, M. (1992). The dialogics of critique: M.M. Bakhtin and the theory of ideology. New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall. Grossman, P., Wineburg, S., & Woolworth, S. (2000). What makes a teacher community different from a gathering of teachers? An occasional paper. In Centre for the study of teaching and policy. University of Washington. Knight, T. (2004). The classroom: Democracy and citizenship. Curriculum Perspectives, 3(24). Kress, G. R. (1995). Writing the future: English and the making of a culture of innovation. Sheffield: National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE). Jacobs, L. (1990). The fiction of Beverley Farmer. Australian Literary Studies, 14(3). Perkins, D. (2003). Making thinking visible. New Horizons for Learning. Retrieved from http://www.newhorizons.org/ Pons, X. (1995). Dramatising the self: Beverley Farmer’s fiction. Australian Literary Studies, 17(2). Reid, I. (1984). The making of literature. Norwood: AATE. Reid, J., Kamler, B., Simpson, A., & Maclean, R. (1996). ‘Do you see what I see?’ Reading a different classroom scene. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 9(1), 87–108. Ritchhart, R. (2002). Intellectual character: What it is, why it matters and how to get it. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Said, E. W. (1978 rpt. 1995). Orientalism: Western conceptions of the orient. Ringwood: Penguin. Shulman, L. (2000). ‘Inventing the future’ in opening lines: Approaches to the scholarship of teaching and learning Carnegie Foundation for the advancement of teaching e library. Retrieved from http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/elibrary/inventing-future-opening-lines-approaches-scholarshipteaching-and-learning Walker, B. (1998). Fingers of the hand of motherhood: Mothers and sons in Beverley Farmer’s fiction. Southerly, 58(3).

41

RAMON GROENENDIJK, MIES POLS AND PIET-HEIN VAN DE VEN

4. ‘I’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT IT IS LIKE TO BE PREGNANT’ Teaching Literature in a Dutch Secondary School

INTRODUCTION

The statement in the title was uttered by René, a fourteen-year-old in one of Mies’ classes. It will serve as our title, because it represents an important goal as well as a problem for Mies and Ramon: how to get students to look at the world from different perspectives by teaching them about literature. While reading Blauw is Bitter (Blue is Bitter) (Bracke, 2006.) René tries to put himself in the position of the protagonist, a girl his age. The fact that a boy is trying to empathize with a girl is unusual in itself (see Van de Ven, 2005), even though his statement seems to be one of powerlessness, conscious powerlessness. Perhaps René struggles with his reading of the novel. We will assume that identification and recognition of personal experiences can grant access to a text, so the text can be used for further personal development (Malmgren, 1986). The question arises what it is that René will learn from reading Blauw is Bitter. It is impossible for him to identify with the story, yet in realizing this he may be provided with a key to further personal development. We will not go into this now, later perhaps, for this text is not entirely finished. Or rather, our conversation about literature and literary education is not finished. This text is merely a snapshot of our ongoing conversation that is our research. The object of this study is us, the way we teach literature, our ideas about literature and literary education, as well as our conversation about all this. In short, through our conversation we study ourselves. Bakhtin (1986, p. 161) writes: ‘a subject as such cannot be perceived and recognized as a thing, for as a subject it cannot, while remaining a subject, become voiceless, and, consequently, cognition of it can only be dialogic’ (emphasis in original). Through our dialogue, we are each constructing an understanding of literature and literary education. As Bakhtin remarks: ‘After all, our thought itself – philosophical, scientific, and artistic – is born and shaped in the process of interaction and struggle with others’ thought, and this cannot but be reflected in the forms that verbally express our thought as well’ (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 92). This essay is more or less a snapshot. We write this text in order to better understand our thinking, to try and organize our search for a definition of what we think literary education might be. Apart from this conceptualizing function, our writing also has a communicative function. We write in order for readers to respond. We hope P-H. van de Ven and B. Doecke (eds.), Literary Praxis: A Conversational inquiry into the Teaching of Literature, 43–67. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

GROENENDIJK ET AL

that they will be able to offer us new insights to incorporate into our conversation – after all, learning, including our own professional learning, is a social activity (Vygotsky, 1986). At the time of writing this, we have already been talking for quite some time. We are not exactly certain when it all started, but we can at least provide some relevant data. In 2005, Ramon was a student teacher under Piet-Hein’s supervision. For his university studies, he researched his own methods for teaching literature (cf. Van Veen and Van de Ven, 2008). Ramon continued his research when he became a teacher and was joined by others from his school, like Mies, who has now been Ramon’s colleague for five years (Pols and Groenendijk, 2009). Mies was a teacher in the late sixties and early seventies, and after that she taught at the University of Pretoria for eighteen years. Five years ago she returned to the Netherlands and became a teacher once again. The school has had a partnership with the university where Piet-Hein works, involving support for classroom based inquiry by teachers into their own professional practice. Piet-Hein was invited by Mies and Ramon to become acquainted with the study. Piet-Hein then invited Mies and Ramon to contribute their findings to a mini conference about literary education that was held late 2008. At the conference, Ramon and Mies met Mary Kooy, contact with whom is ongoing. In the meantime, Ramon has developed his research into a PhD, which is supervised by Mary and Piet-Hein. So we share a common ground that provides a certain symmetry to our relationship which is reflected in the conversation we have been enjoying. At the same time, however, the relationship between PhD student and supervisor, and between the experienced teacher Mies and the relative novice Ramon have their asymmetrical dimensions as well. We try to deal with the paradoxes or contradictions that this situation creates as they emerge. Still, despite our differences in status and experience we see the conversation as an ‘open ended’ dialogue (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 155), a dialogue with an endless chain of comments, questions, counter questions, replies, assessments and discriminations. This dialogue has no ending, no conclusion, no right answer to any of the questions we have asked ourselves. This dialogue is, as Nystrand et al. (1997, p. 8) present it: Continually structured by tension, even conflict, between the conversant, between self and other, as one voice ‘refracts’ another. It is precisely this tension – this relationship between self and other, this juxtaposition of relative perspectives and struggle among voices – that for Bakhtin gives shape to all discourse and hence lies at the heart of understanding as a dynamic, sociocognitive event. CONTEXT

In the Netherlands, historical (Van de Ven, 1996) and empirical research (Janssen & Rijlaarsdam, 2007) of literary education knows four paradigms: Cultural literacy, Aesthetic Awareness, Social Awareness, and Personal Development. In the exam curriculum for secondary education, these four paradigms are combined to form 44

I’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT IT IS

three subdomains of literature: history, literary analysis, and the development of literary competence on the part of the reader. Study books for literary education typically cover literary history, explain literary concepts, and provide trial exercises that invite the student to focus and reflect on their reading experience. The Netherlands do not have a national curriculum, hence in practice, the exam requirements function as such. These requirements are broad to the extent that teachers are free to design their literary classes as they see fit. They are obliged to take into account that every student has to read 8––12 literary works, including classics written before 1880. The student compiles a list of books that he or she will read, which then has to be approved by the teacher. The student does most of this reading outside the classroom, as part of homework. Students have to hand in a report on the books they have read, and the form that this response takes is determined by the teacher and the department. In past years, a public discussion has taken place in the Netherlands about the book list, at times flaring up, at times falling silent. Demand for teaching a recognized literary canon is getting stronger, arguments for which derive from the fact that the Netherlands have become more multiracial, and are experiencing other effects of globalization. The demand for historical knowledge, including knowledge of literature, reflects a concern about losing the Dutch identity – whatever that may be. At the same time, the teaching of literature is losing ground to a focus on linguistic competence and fluency, which is considered more important, because it is more explicitly focused on equipping students with skills they need as citizens in a 21st century society. The latter type of education is concerned with economic growth rather than a transfer of culture. Ramon and Mies work at a secondary school in a small town in the south of the Netherlands. Their school offers pre-vocational, general as well as pre-university education. It tries to incorporate a pedagogic approach in which activity and independence are central didactics in every school subject and it functions as a training school for the university where Piet-Hein works. Since 2008, training schools can offer teachers extra time to do research in school. Mies and Ramon have been using that time in order to participate in this project. Mies and Ramon are part of a department of Dutch that gives individual teachers the freedom they need to design their own teaching methods. This freedom implies a great deal of responsibility. As part of their collaboration with one another, Mies and Ramon justify their teaching practice and their choices of goals and approaches in light of their teaching. Piet-Hein has been asked to join in as a conversation partner from the training institute, and in turn, he has asked both to collaborate in producing this publication. METHODS

Our conversation about literary education is a type of hermeneutic research. Mies and Ramon discuss their visions of literary education, they examine their classes, and the goals they intend to reach and the problems they encounter during those 45

GROENENDIJK ET AL

classes. The conversations between the three of us are based on numerous sources, such as videos of classroom teaching, observations among ourselves during classes, student texts (such as Reader Response Logs) (Kooy, 1996), transcriptions of our conversations and our e-mail communication. So in this chapter Ramon and Mies reflect on their lessons, but also on our foregoing reflections. In our conversations, we look at data from a personal viewpoint as well as in relation to theoretical concepts, so that they form a recursive data analysis. We reconsider our statements, confirm interpretations and put them up for discussion again. Then perhaps we choose a new approach. It is for this reason, too, that this text is only a snapshot. We are merely documenting the current moment from which we are continuing to engage in renewed conversations. This moment is part of our ongoing reflections on our experiences both as teachers of literature and researchers into the teaching of literature. The design of this contribution is as follows. In the next section, Ramon will present several short fragments from the transcriptions of one of his lessons. He will then reflect upon these by focusing on the discrepancy he encountered between his initial goal and the actual realization of the lesson. To do this, he will use quotations taken from our conversations that prove to be valuable for his reflection. In the section that follows, Mies will reflect on her own teaching. Her reflection focuses also on the relation between her goals and her realization. Finally, PietHein will reflect on both previous contributions. RAMON: OVER INTENTIE EN REALISATIE – ON INTENTION AND REALIZATION

De liefde voor literatuur is bij mij bijgebracht door mijn leraar Nederlands. Die heeft mij geholpen met mijn smaakontwikkeling, door bijvoorbeeld Vestdijk, Nescio en Hermans aan te raden en daar raakte ik helemaal verzot op. Daarom ben ik Nederlands gaan studeren en uiteindelijk ook literatuurwetenschappen. Kijk, ik ben erg beschermd opgevoed en heb wat betreft levenswijsheden nog weinig meegemaakt. Maar ik heb wel gemerkt, dat je juist door veel te lezen je wereldbeeld kunt verbreden. Dus daarom heb ik zoiets van, ik wil die leerlingen ook in laten zien dat lezen heel erg waardevol kan zijn, dat het je heel erg kan verrijken. A love of literature has been instilled in me by my Dutch teacher. He has helped me to acquire a certain taste by recommending writers such as Vestdijk, Nescio and Hermans, whom I came to absolutely love. It is why I decided to study Dutch and, eventually, Literature studies. You see, I have had a very protected upbringing, so I do not have an awful lot of worldly wisdom. What I have noticed, however, is that it is possible to broaden your world view by reading literature. And that is why I’m like, I want to show those children that reading can be invaluable, that it can be enriching. (Conversation 8 April 2009) As a teacher, I have been shaped by my own education. I notice it in my teaching methods. Dutch and Literature studies have provided me with many different 46

I’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT IT IS

approaches for analysing and grasping texts better. The various courses I completed taught me different ways to analyse a story, based on various literary theories that have been prevalent in literature studies over the years. Apart from an historical approach, I was taught how to look at a novel from a structural-analytical perspective. Reception theory, also called the reader-response theory, as well as sociological approaches and intertextual analyses were also a feature of my university education. From the knowledge I have gained from these ideas, I believe that combining these different approaches when reading and analysing a text is most rewarding. I want to pass this capacity on to my students. I want to make sure that by the end of their secondary school education they are able to read a book in different ways and that they are able to use different approaches. I tried to explain these insights to a group of fourth-year students (15––16 years old) in pre-university education. In the preparation sheet for my lesson, I wrote down that my goal was to introduce students to different approaches to literature. I wanted to give them some insight into the opportunities that a ‘multiform’ approach to literature has to offer. I wanted students to be aware of the way they read a book and that their approach to reading it correlates with what they are asked to get out of the book. RAMON’S LESSON

My students and I read a short story: Fam, by Thomas van Aalten. The protagonist, who is around thirty years old, describes how he and his homosexual brother have to empty the home they grew up in, because his mother is placed in a mental hospital. The story is comprised mostly of flashbacks to the protagonist’s youth. It turns out that since an early age he has been left to fend for himself and has been emotionally neglected. The story displays an existential outlook on life. The protagonist does not have the slightest idea of where his life is going. The reason I picked this story is that I for one think it is beautiful, and I feel that the register which is used could appeal to the young people in my classroom. Although the existential questions in the story may be too challenging for them, the fact that the protagonist’s youth is a central theme in the story could incite their interest. The protagonist looks back on his high school years and his family, and those are things that students in form 4 of secondary education can connect with. I split the class into five groups of five students each. Each group is given a different reading instruction: Group 1:

Group 2:

While reading the story, pay attention to the way in which the author wrote the story. Write down from what perspective the story is written and what effect it has on you, as a reader. So: who describes the events and how does this influence your way of reading the story? Also write down the characters who are in the story and whether the author tells you anything about their characters. While reading the story, pay attention to the way the author presents the world to you. What moral values (what is good and what is bad?) can you distil from the way the characters act? Are there certain 47

GROENENDIJK ET AL

Group 3:

Group 4:

Group 5:

values that are attached to certain types of behavior? Does the author call some groups of people good and others bad? It is also worthwhile to have a look at the family bonds. How is family looked upon in this story? What can you deduce from this? While reading the story, try to write down what the story does to you as a reader. How do you feel about the actions of the protagonist? How do you feel about what he thinks? Could you compare yourself to the protagonist? Do you think you could live in the same house? Is the world these people live in similar to your own world? Where would you rather live? How do you think other readers may interpret this story? Why? Are there things the author could have done differently? Below you will find some information on the author of this story (Thomas van Aalten) – biographical information – While reading the story, pay attention to elements you could connect with information about the author’s life. Be careful! You can never assume that the author is the protagonist! The protaganist is always just a character in a story. Still: could you explain why Van Aalten decided to write this story? Are there any elements in the story that can be traced back to the author’s life? Do you think Van Aalten is writing from personal experience? While you are reading, pay attention to the time and space in the story. Try to find out how these elements contribute to what you think Van Aalten is trying to say. When is this story situated? What events, objects, names or other clues are given that are typical of the time in which it is set? ( … ) Where is the story situated? How can you tell? Are there any spaces that have special meaning to Van Aalten? Why do think so? Do external factors (the weather, day and night, sounds, etc.) have special meaning in the story? Why?

Every instruction ended with: write down your findings and discuss them with your group members. Eventually, together you should be able to put into words what you have learnt from reading the story in this specific way. Every instruction represents a certain approach to literature: Group 1: Group 2: Group 3: Group 4: Group 5:

text-oriented approach, structural analysis sociological analysis of world view, social repertoire of a text reader-oriented approach, reader response author-oriented approach, biography and work text-oriented approach, structural analysis

The students have been introduced to these approaches in foregoing lessons. When the groups of students had finished their inquiries, new groups were formed that contained one ‘expert’ from each of these initial groups. These ‘expert groups’ were asked to discuss the answers they had reached in their former groups. Fragment 1 below is an excerpt from the conversation of one these ‘expert groups’. 48

I’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT IT IS

fragment 1: group work Renske: Everything comes back to that, yes, the bad view he has on the world. Of his past, especially. Because in his past, he was used to being less important and stuff. That’s why he is now … well, sad. Danique: Yes, he thinks the world is bad and that everything goes wrong. Aike: Like with that friend of his or something, what’s his name … The time they biked home and he would say: nothing wrong? So that kind of shows that he thinks everybody is that way, in a way. Everybody’s boring and … come on, what’s that word? Danique: A little like self-pity. (‘zelfmedelijden’) Aike: Yes, there is no fun really. Or when he describes that party. He’s kind of saying that the party was no fun at all either. Anne Wil: Mariah Carey being played all the time … Danique: And that holiday on Cyprus. Yeah, outside there’s like this war going on. Anne Wil: (laughing): Yeah, pieces of soldiers flying around! Yes, I mean if you talk about it like that, I don’t think you really care that much. Renske: He was living in a mist or something. Danique: Yes, he really thought the entire world was a bad place. After the group work I discussed the students’ answers and their different approaches. I tried to bring these together and to distil them into an understanding that we could all share (fragment 2). fragment 2: class discussion Teacher: Alright, I am going to ask you a few questions. To see how we can enhance the connections between the different approaches to the story even more. We have noticed that the main character has a certain outlook on life. Who could tell me how he sees the world? Aike: Bad. Teacher: Bad, explain. Aike: He’s completely negative. Nothing’s fun really. The holidays, that party, it was all equally boring. Teacher: Everything is stupid and it doesn’t amount to anything? (…) If we look at time and space. Where is this story situated? Deniece: In the city. Teacher: In the city. Which city? Danique: I think a big city or at the outskirts of a big city. Because he is near an airport. And an industrial area. Teacher: Very good. There is even mention of a prison tower nearby. Paul: The Bijlmer1! (Laughter) Teacher: Well, that’s an excellent remark, Paul! Airplanes, prison towers, lots of apartment buildings, it might just be the Bijlmer. That gives us a chance to make a connection with the author, Thomas van Aalten, he 49

GROENENDIJK ET AL

Danique: Teacher:

also lives in Amsterdam. So we have this big city, airplanes, apartment buildings, but the author also talks about this small room in the attic … He had bad memories about that. It is dusty, everything is crooked, it is a very desolate place. All very discomforting. You could say that this room in the attic represents his youth, more or less. (…) So what am I trying to say? When you read a book at some point, you will notice that your goal in reading requires a certain reading strategy. And being the smart people you are, you will have to gradually develop in order to be able to apply these different ways of reading, different ways of approaching literature. Basically you already do a lot of these things automatically: when reading books for school, you pay attention to certain things. And realizing that can give you a lot of advantages. And actually, that is what wanted to share with you today. RAMON’S REFLECTION

In one of the conversations with Mies and Piet-Hein I mentioned I was hoping and expecting that the students would see that there are different approaches, and that you gain more insight into a story when you put these perspectives together. Actually, I don’t think I reached what I was hoping for. Why was that? It was especially hard for me to apply my idea in practice. Piet-Hein noticed that in the transcript of the lesson, I was focused on the structural analysis of the story. In hindsight I agree with him, even though I did not work it out as such in my lesson plan. It proved to be very difficult to incorporate different approaches to literature into one lesson, which was one of the reasons finding a suitable text proved to be so hard. In the end it turned out that I had not been able to implement all approaches into the reading instructions that I gave to each group. I did not see a way to incorporate the historical approach, for example. Practice was getting in the way of the theory. By giving each group specific reading instructions, I tried to make the students approach the story from a different perspective. Since the text is fairly recent, not too much room is left for a historical approach. Two out of five reading instructions are structural analytical, partly because literary concepts are an important aspect of the examination. In fragment 1, the students are especially preoccupied with understanding the protagonist. In their original groups, all have paid attention to specific elements, as the reading instructions required. Now, they are sharing their findings, as ‘experts’ in approaching a text in a specific way. In an exploratory manner, they try to form an image of the protagonist. However, I feel they get stuck at this point. Apparently, they are still at the level Witte (2008) calls the level of recognition or identification, where the reader tries to identify with the protagonist. But in this case the students do not understand the protagonist and cannot get past that point. So the story remains obscure for them. The teachers who participated in Witte’s research determined 50

I’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT IT IS

that the level of literary competence in form 4 of secondary education students is level 2: reading and recognizing. Students at this level are assigned the following characteristics: – Limited literary competence; can read and understand very elementary literary works. – Some judgment of character with which the inner life of more or less familiar people in more or less familiar situations can be understood. – Simple genres (crime, problem, war). – Texts with many long but structured sentences; mostly literal, but at times metaphorical language. – Texts with a simple perspective, a storyline with a closed ending and few open spaces, chronological timeline with few leaps in time. – Texts with an emphasis on actions, but also, to a certain degree, thoughts, descriptions, and dialogue. – Concrete meaning with unambiguous theme and very concrete and explicit motives. – Well-rounded characters that experience a logical development. When I look at Van Aalten’s story, the characteristics in italics above may indicate areas where problems would arise for my students. Van Aalten’s protagonist is thirty. He has reached a certain point in his life where he does not know which way to go. He is not a more or less familiar person. Oftentimes, he uses abstract imagery in his speech. At one point in the story the image of an elevator is used, where the elevator appears to remain stationary while the building is moving past it: it is symbolic of the protagonist’s situation, who feels as though life is passing him by. For a reader at level 2, this image would be too complicated because it is so abstract. The story has an open ending and leaves a lot of room for different interpretations. Furthermore, Van Aalten uses flashbacks, so the storyline is not chronological. When you add the fact that the existential theme of the story is never made explicit, but can only be deduced from the remarks and actions of the protagonist, I find myself thinking that perhaps the story was too difficult after all. The approaches specified in my reading instructions are not covered very well in the group discussions. The students talk about their reading experience and about their own world view, but the concepts I presented them do not really provide a framework for them to engage with the novel. They do not seem to be able to draw on their experiences to understand the main character, but seem to struggle to understand a persona that is apparently far (perhaps too far) removed from them. Still, Mies noted that in my instructions for group 3 I did try to encourage them to compare the protagonist to themselves. The second fragment shows an exchange between me and some students. My ‘teacher text’ (Malmgren & Van de Ven, 1994) is directive: I want the students to hear my interpretation of the text, I want them to understand the message. Initially I had intended to have the groups present their findings, but I was afraid that the students would come up with these short presentations that only listed some bullet points, and then I would not have known if my lesson had conveyed a message at all! Eventually, I opted for a class conversation to discuss the answers of the 51

GROENENDIJK ET AL

different groups, so that I would have a chance of summarising all the different approaches. Unfortunately, the focus of the lesson thus moves from a dominant student text when they are working in groups to a dominant teacher text in the class discussion. I try to keep the discussion exploratory: I want to show the students how to think freely about literature when they are exploring a text. In demonstrating this process, I want them to understand that all they have to do is think about the text. They can come up with different interpretations, as long as they can ground these in evidence. However, since I am operating at an intellectual level they have not yet reached, I find that I become frustrated: they are not yet ready to read a story in the way that I read it. Although I wish it were not so, my reading of the text will probably be regarded by the students as the norm, purely because I am the teacher. During the conversations with Piet-Hein and Mies I realized that I am very directive in the class discussion. I leave room for interpretation by the students, but it is my interpretation that remains the dominant one, especially when I try to connect the loose ends. Piet-Hein wondered if the class discussion could be described as a ‘teacher’s lecture with various roles’ (Ehlich & Rehbein, 1986): sometimes a student is allowed to join in, but I remain the dominant character. I personally think I was slightly more open to the students’ input, but I do recognize that I am the one who keeps bringing up new elements, not the students. When I compare my classes to Mies’, I think the text is more dominant in mine. I want to provide students with tools with which they can get more out of a text. In the discussion with Piet-Hein and Mies after my lesson, it occurred to me that I hold a view of aesthetic awareness that is somewhat different from theirs. It is not that I believe in l’art pour l’art, as Piet-Hein and Mies initially characterized my view on literature. For me, the aesthetics of a text go deeper than that. I interpret l’art pour l’art as the appreciation of a work of art, a story in this case, which focuses on the way it is constructed and written. But a book could very well be beautiful because of the message or its view of the world or the emotional idea of it. The most important thing is that I give the students the tools with which they can distill this beauty from a book. RAMON’S GOALS

And that is what I consider the core of my method for teaching literature: providing the students with tools. I think that is why I put the focus on textual analysis, be it consciously or not. A structural analysis of a story gives the students the tools that are most practical for literary analysis. In my lesson, I also try to provide tools relating to other aspects of my definition of aesthetics: on the world view conveyed by the text and the reader’s experience or emotion. This is in line with my view on literature in general. I see a text as a product of an author who has a certain message that he or she tried to convey in a certain way at a certain time. I think it is impossible to fully capture that message, so what I try to do with my students is to distill the author’s possible message. It is not the message I am after, as though a text only has one meaning. I merely look for messages that can be substantiated. My goal of providing tools for the students to improve their reading skills stems from my dissatisfaction with the reading portfolio in which students are expected 52

I’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT IT IS

to write down what they have read and how they feel about what they have read. It is my experience that these portfolios mostly consist of reading experiences with rather minimalistic argumentation. The conversation with Piet-Hein and Mies strengthens this idea. Piet-Hein pointed out that the reading file does not provide any tools; it does not give the students anything to work with, which is why most of the time the students stick to parroting the text. I could not agree more. The negative image I hold was consolidated even more when I talked to my students of 5 vwo. I asked them how they had benefited from their literature classes. They could only think of the lessons about literary history (Middle Ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romanticism). To them, the reading file is just there, just something they have to do, which is interesting: they do not regard it as part of their literary education. Or, to put it differently: literary history can be learnt, but reading and reflecting on literature apparently cannot. Piet-Hein once characterized me as a teacher of literature who wants to ‘educate’ his students right up to the end of their final year to become ‘pragmatic readers’ (Appleyard, 1990): a reader who has developed an extensive interpretive repertoire on which he or she can draw in order to identify important elements in a text. The reader can choose the right tools when reading a book. I agree. I realized that for me those tools are the core of my way of teaching literature. The tools are meant to help students to better understand a text and could eventually lead to a more enjoyable reading experience. Still, I do not achieve this in the lesson I discussed. The students seem emotionally detached from the text and this may be the reason they are stuck. Piet-Hein and Mies wondered if perhaps I should put more emphasis on emotion and empathy. As far as that is concerned, I can learn a lot from Mies. The conversation with her and Piet-Hein has given me a clear view of the strong social engagement that is present in her way of treating literature. Students get involved in a text more easily, which may help them to find different interpretations faster and more effectively. If I have an opportunity to do my lesson on the five approaches to literature again, I will keep this in mind. At the end of the lesson, I will put much more emphasis on the reading experience. MIES: OVER IDENTIFICATIE EN WERELDBEELD – ON IDENTIFICATION AND WORLD VIEW

Het doel van kunst is ‘door het aenhooren en lezen … mededoogen en schrick uit te wercken, op dat het treurspel zijn einde en ooghmerck moght treffen, het welck is deze beide hartstoghten in het gemoedt der menschen maetigen, en manieren, d’aenschouwers van gebreken zuiveren, en leeren de rampen der weerelt zachtzinniger en gelijckmoediger verduuren.’ (Uit: Voorbericht van J. van den Vondel, bij diens treurspel ‘Jephta of Offerbelofte’ uit 1659). The goal of art is ‘to induce compassion and fear by listening and reading, so that the tragedy may reach its ending and aim, which is to temper both these 53

GROENENDIJK ET AL

emotions in the people’s minds and release the spectators of their shortcomings, and teach them to endure the disasters of the world with more mildness and equanimity.’ (Taken from: Preface by J. van den Vondel, to his tragedy ‘Jephta or Promise of Sacrifice’, 1659) Weten hoe je moet leven door een boek te lezen: een ideaal van een bevlogen docent? Zestien jaar lang gaf ik in Pretoria aan masterstudenten college over Vondel. Hij laat in z’n treurspel Jeptha zien hoe een vader zich kan vergissen door ongewild z’n dochter op te offeren aan z’n eigenbelang. Jeptha is één van de richters van het volk van Israël. In de strijd tegen de Ammonieten doet hij aan God een zogenaamde offerbelofte: uiteindelijk moet hij z’n dochter offeren. De toeschouwer volgt de handeling met schrik en voelt mededogen voor de arme dochter Ifis. De vaders die dit zien of lezen nemen zich voor om nooit hun dochter kwaad te berokkenen en dat is wat ik denk dat Vondel met zijn Bijbelse tragedie wil bewerken. Identificatie met de dader: heel modern eigenlijk. To know how to live by reading a book: an inspired teacher’s ideal? For sixteen years, I have taught master students in Pretoria about Vondel. In his tragedy Jephta he shows how a father makes a mistake by unwillingly sacrificing his daughter for his own self-interest. Jephta is one of the judges of the people of Israel. In his battle with the Ammonites he promises God to make a sacrifice: he will eventually have to sacrifice his daughter. The audience is filled with fear and feels for his poor daughter Ifis. Fathers who see or read this swear they will never harm their daughters, which is what I think Vondel wants to achieve with his biblical tragedy. Identifying with the perpetrator: how modern. I want my students (2nd grade, 13–14 years old) to identify with the protagonist in youth novels as well. Many researchers believe that in the first three years of their secondary education, students like to read to escape reality. They are focused on plot and storyline, identify with the characters, and quite vividly imagine the fictional world that is described. Most of the time, these readers do not connect the text they read to elements of their own lives in order to gain new insights (cf. Appleyard, 1990; Witte, 2008). I wanted to study whether this was true, and, if so, if it could be changed by choosing certain books, presenting engaging lessons and using a new didactic lesson plan. Since teachers are now being encouraged to conduct research at our school, I was able to free myself of the burdens of the strict curriculum and focus on this issue for six full weeks. In my classes, I cannot help but emphasize the social context in books and stories, because it is exactly my goal to engage in a discussion of social topics by means of youth novels. I recognize that I am not so much interested in whether the students like the book, but rather that they identify with the main character. During the moment, at least, in which they engage with the text, the miserable situations 54

I’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT IT IS

that many of their peers are in should not seem light years away. I tell them ‘What would you do were you in her situation?’ and ‘You should consider yourself lucky with the life you’re leading!’ Sometimes I should curb my enthusiasm, something that has dawned on me through our conversations. Piet-Hein once said: You want to set an example on how to think freely. And your students have to follow that example. You want them to adopt your approach to reading, but at the same time you might say that your style is limiting because it is your style, not theirs. You read ‘Sold’ or ‘Blauw is Bitter’ and you ask your students to realize how lucky they are. You recognize the emotions of the students, you involve them. But you will not let them break free from that message. This is a typical dilemma for teachers: on the one hand, you want to enable your students to grow both personally and intellectually, in reading books for example, you want to show them every possible angle … but at the same time, as a teacher, you have a standard. You have an ideal: I want them to get to this point. You can go via any route you like, but you have to end up here. There is this tension. And that is when you start using persuasive techniques which change the conversation into a one-way street. After all, the lesson ends after fifty minutes and you have to make sure that your message has come across (Conversation 21 October 2009). In one of our earlier conversations, Piet-Hein mentioned something similar: ‘You have a story to tell, and sometimes you involve your students’ (Conversation 8 April 2009). Still, I like to think that I sometimes do manage to realize a far-reaching identification with the protagonist, even though I see that I direct or shape the students’ reflections. This was the case when I read to the class the passage about Lina’s first sexual experience with a customer. The assignment I gave the students was: imagine you were the protagonist, what would you think or wish to tell your mother? Please finish this: ‘Mama, if you could see me now …’ One of the students’ responses was written in English, in verse, like Lakshimi does in Sold (see below): If you could see me now, mum You will see how lonely I am How dirty and embarrassed But I know you will understand it And know that I do this for you I push myself not to cry But it’s hard mum, not to cry They hurt me, I’m broken I wish I was home, but I remember That I do this for you. (Lilian van Kempen, 14) Today, many writers of youth novels discuss current themes to bring conflicts and wars closer to youngsters, like is done in Blauw is Bitter. Schoolbooks like Dutch 55

GROENENDIJK ET AL

Nieuw Nederlands (New Dutch) contain excerpts from such books. Unfortunately reading a single fragment, however poignant, and then writing down the answers to the questions that accompany the text, does not induce ‘fear and compassion’. For this to happen it is vital to read the entire book, preferably in class and out loud. And after that an in-depth discussion should follow, similar to what happens in book clubs outside of school. It is not just the Dutch-speaking region that pays attention to the misery of young children who live in a world of prostitution. Mary Kooy and her bookclub at a school in Toronto read Sold. BLAUW IS BITTER

In Blauw is Bitter, the naïve Phillipino girl Lina lives a fairly happy life in a small village until one day Max shows up in a Mercedes. He gives out sodas and Lina’s dad is given a handful of 500–peso-notes in exchange for his daughter. Unsuspectingly, Lina goes with him. Lina is abused by Max; she is forced to sleep with men for 30 pesos. Enter Jim, an American soldier who seems to care about Lina’s fate. Lina hopes to escape her pimp, but Jim turns out to be a psychopath who seeks revenge for a disappointment in love. Lina is beaten up horribly. She has to have an abortion because she is impregnated by a customer. She saves money to buy her freedom, but when she finds out her baby sister is sold as well, she uses the money to buy her out. Lina then maims herself with a shard of glass and cuts off almost all of her hair. In doing so, she gets her pimp to fire her. She goes to Sergio, a local admirer, and together with his blind father they live a woeful life. Of course, Dirk Bracke exaggerates the situation in his book. On his website, he explains to students that he deliberately added certain situations: I added Galo to the story, because otherwise it may have seemed that I suggested that it is only girls who are subjected to prostitution, which is definitely not the case. Furthermore, Galo and Inez gave me a chance to emphasize that some customers (who are afraid of being infected with HIV) want younger children still. The younger they have entered the trade, the less chance of Aids, seems to be the idea. Student Anna writes the following in her Reader Response Log: ‘I did not know that boys can also be prostituted, how awful!’ Bracke, who is Belgian, continues: And then Lina has to deal with an unexpected (unwanted) pregnancy. It is also no accident that one of Lina’s customers is from Belgium. It might as well have been a Swiss, a German, an Arab, a Japanese or whatever. But by explicitly opting for a Belgian customer I wanted to show that child prostitution is not that far away at all. In fact, one of the hardest things about writing this book, was to not cross that line of what could be talked about with young people and what could not. During my research I often encountered issues that made me think: how is this possible, these people are sick, this is madness. Those things have not made it into the book

56

I’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT IT IS

Right now, the book is in its sixth print and was translated into German and Danish. We have also talked about this in our conversations. Piet-Hein said, for example: Is Lina really as naïve as the writer portrays her? Did she really have no idea what was out there? Had there never been any other girls that were recruited? Is there no talk in the village about girls being recruited? (Conversation 4 March 2009) Because there were only enough books for half of the class, I filmed myself while reading the book. I gave the students the DVD so they could listen to it in the Christmas break. This is an excellent tool for dyslexic children, by the way. I noticed that reading the book aloud connected us: it probably reminds the students of being read to in bed when they were younger. It is very important to me that my lessons exude trust and intimacy: because I assume they will be willing to show their more intimate feelings and their gut reactions (conversation 4 March 2009). The text was supported by a powerpoint presentation that was projected on a smartboard. It displayed images of children who live on a garbage dump (Smokey Mountain), but also of young hookers wearing numbers on their outfits who strike sexy poses for the tourists. Right after the reading, in the circle of trust that was created, I continue to talk about the miserable life of the protagonist, Lina. I ask the students to write down everything that comes to mind. I wanted students to note the similarities between Sold the book that Mary Kooy used in a book club in Toronto, and Blauw is Bitter, so I asked a very artistic student to read Sold at home. I knew she also wrote English poems, so the fact that it was partly in verse greatly appealed to her. Miriam wrote about both books: You’re trying trying to reach them but it seems impossible you are yelling screaming crying But it seems like you’re invisible you’re just a piece of their gallery It’s just a waste of time How long would it take? How long, before they’re done with you? When you aren’t good enough anymore and they’ll dump you like some old trash You’re just a priceless work of art and you know but you cannot help it You’re just a thing for them and one day 57

GROENENDIJK ET AL

they’ll trade you for someone better But then then it is too late then, you are already lost. It is striking to see that Miriam’s words are aimed directly at both novels’ protagonists: ‘you are just a priceless work of art’. Both protagonists are beautiful girls – and that is their fate, being beautiful they lose their identity in the eyes of the men who use them. READER RESPONSE LOGS

The powerpoint presentation I had made to accompany Blauw is Bitter was distributed as a handout, as a variation on the Reader Response Logs (Kooy, 1996). These RRLs give the students something to hold on to during our discussions, and they give the teacher a chance to monitor the development of students individually in the process. I have noticed that the students really imagined they were the fictitious character Lina: because her father also sold her baby sister, she uses the money she had saved to buy herself out to pay her sister Theresa’s pimp. She cuts her face with a shard of glass. Danielle van der Steen writes: ‘I was almost crying’. Danielle Dekkers writes: ‘How awful to do something like that to yourself. I am speechless. I am very quiet and I almost feel tears rising’. On the father, who sold both his daughters, Davy says: ‘Nice dad … ‘. René writes: ‘To be informed that your little sister is a hooker as well. I would start wondering what God’s plan was with me.’ Like Jephta in Vondel’s tragedy, the father sacrifices his own daughters for his own good. But can their situations really be compared? The biblical father actually sacrifices his daughter on an altar. And perhaps western fathers and daughters/sons cannot imagine what the situation in the Philippines is like. Piet-Hein wondered: to what extent is it possible to ask questions about the father’s motives and choices? What do we know about the status and honor of a Philippine father who loses his cockfight? Honor as a man, status as head of the family? Did the father have much room to act any differently? What options does he have?’ (Conversation 21 October 2009) The students’ remarks above show that I have not been entirely successful in unlocking the full context for them. The Philippine father had lost all his money in a cockfight and thus sells his daughters one by one. Because the students identify with Lina, they expect her father to act in the way a western father would. Max says: ‘I was speechless, it was just too awful. It really is a bad thing the father sells yet another daughter.’ I feel I have explained the situation in Manila quite extensively. About that, Renza writes: ‘You learn more about the situation over there so you can identify much more.’ Kelsey indicates: ‘It is pretty intense, but you do stop and think about it’ and ‘It had a lot of impact on us.’ 58

I’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT IT IS

Another situation that was discussed in class is the episode where Lina finds out she is pregnant from one of her customers. Sex club owner Max orders her to have an abortion. A student whose name is Floor completely identifies with this complex emotion, and she uses the first person as she writes: ‘I feel guilty towards the baby in my belly. Should I keep it or not?’ Lieke also writes in the first person: ‘Max wants it gone, but I don’t. It is mine’. Kelsey: ‘I think it’s totally awful!’. Brigitte writes in verse: ‘The child is mine, but it looks like a crime.’ And René, a boy, writes: ‘I will never know what it is like to be pregnant. Anyway, it seems horrible to have to murder your own child when you don’t want to. It burdens you with guilt’. The above quotations prove that at least the 14–year-old girls imagine what it would be like to experience unwanted pregnancy and have to undergo an abortion. Whether René manages to do the same, remains a mystery. My intention to have the students identify with the protagonist of a youth novel has at least worked with the girls, and the boys were definitely highly involved. One of the girls mentioned in her reflection file that it does not hurt to talk about this every now and then to find out how boys feel about abortions and the like. Identification and empathy is a means to an end here. I care about teaching them to put things into perspective: Yes, but you see, if you were that Lina from ‘Blauw is Bitter’ or that suicide bomber from ‘Treacherous friends’ whose only goal in life is to blow himself up … think about how easy your life at this school is. What do you have to complain about? Look at your human existence from a different perspective for once! (Transcription lesson MP). When students talk about the book with their classmates, their teacher being their coach, knowledge is built; it is a process of ‘independent to interdependent reading’ (Mary Kooy via e-mail to Mies). THE PLACEMAT METHOD

The next didactic tool I used after all the RRLs were completely filled out, was the placemat method. Students were divided into groups and each group was given a large sheet of paper. They were asked to put their own ideas in the corners and their joint conclusions in the middle. Sergio, the poor wretch, was discussed first and then we looked at Lina’s emotional development. I noticed the students were very conscientiously brainstorming about Lina’s range of emotions: from naïve to desperate to her eventual brave decision to take matters into her own hands. After filling out the placemats students embarked on a group expedition. Based on the Reading Response Logs and the placemats, group members went for a chat with other groups and came back to report to their original group. Anna writes: The group expedition was interesting because our group had created a placemat that was very different from that of other groups. It was the same for the turning point and if you discuss it, you sometimes end up with a different turning point. 59

GROENENDIJK ET AL

Anna’s final remark deals with yet another assignment, based on my dealing with Vondel’s Jephta in previous methods: find the moment of agnitio. Anna calls it a turning point. In one of our first conversations, I initially said: The group expedition was fun, but did not actually provide the students with new insights. Perhaps a group discussion would have been more useful, although that would be highly challening as far as the seating is concerned (notes based on converation 2 September 2009). According to literature on the subject, group expeditions are mostly used to unite ‘experts’ (members of another group who were given a different assignment). What happened during this group expedition? Studying the video of this lesson with Ramon, it turns out the students have found different turning points. One group concludes: ‘When she was in love with Jim and then it turns out he was using her and she had to sleep with a lot of strangers in the meantime.’ Another group says: ‘When Lina finds out that Theresa is in prostitution’. Point blank, another group says: ‘Maim face, cut off hair’, which was the ‘right’ answer. It is interesting to note that the peer-to-peer interaction in the ever changing groups provides so much food for thought for the students. Kelsey tells Max: ‘That isn’t a turning point at all, that’s a summary’. Immediately, Max formulates a new turning point. Thus it appears that students can teach each other a lot without the teacher’s help. Students are discussing the definition of a turning point and as they go along they learn that the protagonist in a novel can have a gradual insight into his or her situation, or even a sudden agnitio (an epiphany about their own situation, after which they turn their life around). They also learned that the secondary characters (father, Sergio, sister) are rather flat at times and their motives unfathomable. All in all, this can be considered quite an achievement for second graders! CONCLUSION

In conclusion, I would like to share a note from my most diligent student: You start looking at things differently. First, you have this opinion on something and then you read the book and it changes. Marieke says: When you just read a book, you think: okay, so I read it and I write about it and then I put it aside. But if you really delve deep into the story you empathize more and think about it and you will remember it and then it will no longer be just another book. This day, for example, will stick to my mind (Piet-Hein and Mary Kooy visting the class) and I will think about this subject often. Thank you for this special day. This comment aptly illustrates something that other students mentioned as well in their discussion of this teaching method involving the RRLs and the placemat idea. They feel they have thoroughly absorbed the subject matter and had meaningful discussions about it. They point out that they have learned how to listen during a 60

I’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT IT IS

discussion (it was especially the boys who felt they had learnt to listen to the girls). They felt very priviliged compared to other children in this world. They also commented that they learnt a lot from the lessons and greatly enjoyed them. One of the guiding lines this enterprise was based on was Piet-Hein’s observation that, in the literary discourse, personal social repertoire is often ignored, and because of this the opportunity to encourage students to reflect on their own attitudes and beliefs, their upbringing, dogmas and (lack of) freedom – in short, a critical scrutiny of their own world view – is also ignored (Van de Ven 2007a, p. 194). ‘A teacher, a book, should allow students to ‘verstaanbaar werkelijkheid ontvreemden’ – to comprehensibly thieve reality’. Here, Piet-Hein paraphrases a beautiful line from a poem by the Dutch poet Bernlef. In the class discussions, the students’comfortable situation, growing up in a middle class society in a rural environment, was compared to the situation of a thirteenyear-old girl in Manila. Bassou said: ‘We have many opportunities, but sometimes we just don’t feel like learning, while Lina (the main character of the book) would happily live our lives.’ In conclusion, in order to create a rich contextual environment and break free from the strictly separated domains that exist within Dutch as a subject, I had the students write a letter addressed to the head of charities at Zwijsen College, in which they suggest donating money to Terre des Hommes, an organisation that saves children from their pimps. The class also designed a flyer to be handed out during the geranium campaign. (The geranium campaign is held at our school every year, when first and second-year students sell geraniums to raise money for charity.) In the flyer, Kelsey wrote: ‘we have all talked about it together and we were asked to write down questions and ideas. There was also a professor from Toronto named Mary Kooy who had come here to hear how we dealt with these kinds of things in the Netherlands. It had a lot of impact on us.’ For Blauw is Bitter the students were free to pick a charity for which they would then raise money themselves. The letter Marieke wrote strongly conveys her involvement. (Notes taken from a conversation between PH, RG en MP, 2 September 2009.) This letter fills me with a deep sense of satisfaction: Dear Mrs van den Oever, Fat people in tiny knickers! Girls and boys aged six to fifteen raped! Removed from their homes! Sold by their fathers! Beat up without pity! Self-harm to escape! I have read about all this in a book we had to read in our Dutch classes: Blauw is Bitter. As I was reading the book I thought about throwing it away. I thought: How can you write about this! But if you read on and things get even worse, you realize that this is really happening! You get ashamed of yourself! And wish you could save those children today! Thank god there is a charity that helps these children: Terre des Hommes. Now I want to ask you, since I heard that you are looking for charities for the geranium campaign, if you could please send some money to this charity! 61

GROENENDIJK ET AL

That way the children can be taken away from those horrible conditions so they at least have a chance to live a normal life! Yours Sincerely, Marieke Meijer (2vwo) I have reached my goal, ‘schrick en mededoogen bewercken’ – ‘to induce compassion and fear’. And what is more, I have incited an actual willingness to get up and do something against social evils. They will be peddling geraniums to help ‘Linas’! Literature adds to the social development of students. It teaches them to critically scrutinize society and strive for a better world. I want to show students how the world works by means of texts. (Notes from conversation, 2 September 2009.) I am a teacher who wants to develop social awareness with my students. Marieke’s letter makes me feel that I have succeeded in doing so. PIET-HEIN: REFLECTING ON REFLECTIONS

My purpose here is not to have the last word, but to reflect on the learning that we have been experiencing together. Parts of this reflection are taken from our conversations, but I add some more reflection in this section. In research about teachers, teachers are typically positioned as the object of the inquiry; they are not seen as playing any active role in seeking answers to questions that they themselves have formulated (Furu, 2008; Van de Ven, 2007b). I feel it is important to note that I did not initiate the collaboration that I have enjoyed with Mies and Ramon by presenting my questions to them. Instead, I tried to understand the questions that they asked about their professional practice as teachers of literature, and to complement their work as a co-investigator. In doing so, I came up with my own questions, but not in a way that displaced theirs. Thus, I hoped to create a context in which knowledge was being (and continues to be) developed, in which ideas about change ripen and have a chance of being tested. Newell, Tallman and Letcher (2009, p. 92) say that ‘the process of teachers reflecting on and struggling with the development of their own pedagogical knowledge and personal identities has to be studied within the framework of both their individual development as well as within the social contexts of their classrooms, their academic departments, and other contexts which mediate change’. I agree with this view, although it poses challenges for me as an academic. Mies and Ramon openly discuss their teaching methods, and they welcome my comments, although there are moments when I think they are being polite and that they could question what I am saying more vigorously. Yet overall I do not feel that they are simply accepting what I say and treating my word as final. There is, without doubt, a certain degree of inequality since my teaching at the university is not the object of our conversations in the way that their school teaching is. Nevertheless, I am learning just as Mies and Ramon are, and our conversations are quite valuable as a means of exploring the challenges and dilemmas of teaching. The fact that I am free to walk in and out of their classrooms – be it in reality or by means of a video-recording – genuinely fills me with gratitude. The mere fact that Miriam, one of Mies’s students, offered me– a complete stranger – spontaneously to read her 62

I’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT IT IS

collection of poems that were at times very personal, shows the impact of Mies’ teaching, and of the trust in me that Mies has developed during my class visits. Our conversations fascinate me. Re-reading the transcripts, I see our work as a research cycle in which knowledge is constructed through collaboration (Rönnermann, Furu & Salo, 2008). In my reflections on our research cycle I try to contribute to the construction of our knowledge about literary education. I regard our collaboration as exploring something Newell et al. call the ‘other contexts’ that mediate professional practice (see above). We have ourselves tried to relocate the professional practice of Ramon and Mies within a new context, a context where teachers and reseachers come together, and through reflecting on ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ they try to bridge the gap that has traditionally existed between the two. The gap is one between two discourses that have developed separately throughout the centuries because of the division of ‘learning’ and ‘living’, research and education (cf. Thavenius 1981). In our discussions, we try to generate a joint discourse on literary education, in which personal experiences and perspectives are linked with more theoretical notions. I reflect on our collaboration, and on Ramon and Mies’ reflections. Langer (1995, p. 6) differentiates between ‘objective experience’ and ‘subjective experience’. By ‘objective experience’ she means: ‘a discursive way of reasoning that occurs when people treat meaning as if it were an object to be viewed and held apart, scrutinized with a keen and distant eye’. ‘Subjective experience,’ on the other hand, ‘occurs when we look within ourselves for meaning and understanding, when we bring new experiences and ideas closer to ourselves in ways that let us “see” them from the inside’. Langer argues both should be combined, since ‘together, they invite a fuller and more complex understanding’ (ibid., p. 7). I see my own reflections as a combination of an objective and subjective experience. I enter Mies’ and Ramon’s classrooms, and I share their teaching experiences, and engage in my (and their) professional learning through my conversations with them. This is ‘subjective’ experience, involving both an emerging awareness of the values and beliefs that frame Mies’ and Ramon’s practice and a heightened sense of the values and beliefs that mediate my work as a teacher and researcher. But at the same time I try to read their professional practice in relation to my knowledge about the teaching of literature – which I also try to share with them in our interaction. And it is in interaction that the social aspect of learning (Vygotsky, 1986) is present, taking form in other discussion partners, be it in private conversation or in a public form. What strikes me about the reflections of both Ramon and Mies is how their lives are bound up with their day-to-day teaching. To borrow from Langer, their reflections ‘are a function’ of their ‘personal and cultural experiences’, their relationship to their ‘current experience’, to what they ‘know’, to how they ‘feel’, and to what they are ‘after’ (Langer, 1995, p. 9). Mies as well as Ramon combine subjective with objective experiences. But there are some personal accents. RAMON

Ramon’s subjective experience is characterized by a certain disappointment. He feels he has not reached his goal in the lesson, and he is especially frustrated that 63

GROENENDIJK ET AL

he is unable to give the students what he so badly wants them to be able to use: a broad repertoire for reading literature. He says that this is why he finds himself dominating during the class discussion which he organises. With his teacher text, he tries to employ the power of persuasion to put the students on what he believes is the right track after all. Unfortunately, such tactics barely ever work (Malmgren &Van de Ven, 1994). Ramon objectifies his experience by questioning his lesson plan, by reading his students’ comments against Witte’s developmental stages (2008), by evaluating his own contribution to the class discussion. He uses the concept of ‘teacher’s lecture with various roles’ (Ehlich & Rehbein, 1986) as a ‘sensitizing concept’ in the analysis of his lesson (Malmgren & Van de Ven, 1994). However, Ramon takes it further. He speculates on how his own ideas on literature should be characterized. He states that aesthetic awareness is highly important to him, describing ‘aesthetics’ as a very broad concept. But this aesthetic awareness is not all there is. He wants to provide students with handles that take them from an analysis of a text’s literary repertoire – the aesthetic awareness – to an analysis of a text’s social repetoire – social awareness – (McCormick & Waller, 1987) eventually leading to personal development in each student. Ramon seeks to combine different approaches to literary education. As a foundation for combining these dimensions, he takes literary analysis, because of a didactic belief that students should have something to hold on to before they can start analysing. To me it is unclear if he allows students to enjoy a text, and even its aesthetic dimension, before analysis. To Ramon it is yet unclear how emotion, empathy and involvement should be incorporated in this format – concepts that Mies uses quite well in her classes. For him, this is an area that still needs to be explored. MIES

Mies also reflects on the connection between her intended lesson and the results that she actually achieves. Like Ramon, she turns to the students’ comments to determine whether she has reached her goal. She is very positive. Using quotes from Reader Response Logs, she shows how the students empathize with especially Lina’s situation. Their emotional involvement is very important here. However, based on our conversations, she concludes that her teacher text might be too dominant as well. Still, all three of us feel the students’ responses have an authentic quality that does not simply echo the teacher text. Perhaps the dominance of the teacher text does not have a negative influence here, although we perhaps did not listen to possible ‘silent voices’ that could not identify with her message. Ramon tries to combine different approaches, while in Mies’ class, social awareness is the key. It seems that in both lessons their personal biographies play an important role in the development of their views about the value of a literary education. Ramon mentions the importance of his university education, a positive experience he wants his students to enjoy as well. Mies remembers her life in South Africa, and she uses this experience to point out to her students how fortunate they are. However, Mies notices that she finds it hard to go past the point of empathy. The students show no understanding for the Philippine culture, and so they cannot relate the empathy they 64

I’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT IT IS

feel for Lina with the culture in which she lives. Their social awareness is based on subjective experience, but an objective counterpart is lacking. Indeed, we are presented with an interesting translation problem. In Dutch, there is ‘belevend lezen’ (experiencing what one reads), which is what Mies and her students do. Taking it one step further, one can have a reading experience and subsequently reflect upon it in writing. Earlier, I referred to the work of my late colleague and friend Lars-Göran Malmgren. In his research in Sweden he distinguishes between ‘upplevelse läsning’ – reading for the experience – and ‘läsning som erfarenhet’ – reading leading to learning. Experience, identifying important aspects of a text, and interpretation facilitate each other. Perhaps ‘upplevelse’ and ‘erfarenhet’ relate to each other in the same way ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ do. I would love to ask him. In Dutch, ‘erfarenhet’ is not quite covered by the term ‘ervarend lezen’. We do use ‘ervaren’ (experience) in terms of a person’s skills: ‘he is an experienced … (player, teacher, manager, violinist …)’. In English, ‘experience’ can be a skill as well as a discovery of something new. It may be the reason that Langer’s concept pair is so interesting to me: they may be the equivalents of ‘upplevelse’ and ‘erfarenhet’ respectively. CONCLUSION

Mies and Ramon have much in common. Both deliberately use group exercises and student interaction as teaching methods, from a Vygotskyan perspective on learning through interaction, from social talk to inner speech. Neither of the two throw their students in at the deep end, but rather give them scaffolds by means of reading instructions (Ramon), reader response logs, and placemats (Mies). Ramon’s focus in the reading instructions lies in applying different approaches to literature, with Mies it is agnitio and the exploration of this ancient concept as beautifully modelled by Vondel. Mies especially wants her students to work with the term in their responses to Blauw is Bitter. Where Ramon is caught between the different paradigms that has been depicted in the second paragraph of this chapter (context), Mies choose for the paradigm of Social Awareness. Ramon’s resolve to combine an aesthetic approach with Mies’ socially critical approach is very interesting to me. What is at issue here is the relationship between the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of literature and literary education. I adopt the following standpoint with respect to these issues: a text’s literary repertoire constructs its social repertoire, and language shapes the world view expressed in the text. Literature is not an imitation of reality, but constructs a reality more or less derived from actual reality. I want to point out something that Bracke mentions on his website: ‘I could only write down that which was not too repulsive’. That construction is created by means of literary, aesthetic procedures. The construction can focus on what ‘is’ and can give a sharp and revealing presentation of that, but it can also focus on what ‘can be’ or ‘could have been’. Reading a text from an aesthetic point of view can emphasize the way a world view is shaped, but also what world view is presented. The literary procedure of agnitio while reading Blauw is Bitter evokes strong emotions in the students, emotions that bring to mind 65

GROENENDIJK ET AL

a hostile world because of the empathy they have for Lina. It is a world that is against the story’s protagonist. Perhaps, however, this agnitio obscures a more objective experience in which a father is judged against a Philippine society, which may not justify his acts, but might explain them. Analysing the way the father figure is positioned in this story may help in doing this. In fact, it is what Ramon tries to do by focusing on the way the main character of his story is portrayed. Unfortunately, he is unable to bridge the gap between the students and the story, because the literary repertoire does not elicit any emotions. Could it be that Ramon’s problem can be reduced to a wrong choice of text? For the moment, my reflection leads to a recognition of the fact that in our ‘research cycle’ the construction of new knowledge, of new knowing, is based on a ‘transformation of understandings’ (Nystrand et al. 1997) and fed by conscious and conscientious reflection, and by a ‘fight’ between existing and plausible new ideas. The outcome of such a process may lead to a change of my (our) ideas about myself, ourselves and our (own) positioning in the discourse on literary education – we are like René, who tries to see things from a different angle. It is unsure whether we have succeeded, or whether we can. Our chapter is a snapshot of an ongoing cyclic process of thinking, reading and discussing literary education and the texts we produce about it. NOTES 1

The Bijlmer is a notorious neighbourhood in Amsterdam.

REFERENCES Appleyard s.j., J. A. (1990). Becoming a reader: The experience of fiction from childhood to adulthood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bracke, D. (2006). Blauw is bitter. Leuven: Davidsfonds. Ehlich, K., & Rehbein, J. (1986). Munster und institutionen. Untersuchungen zur schulischen kommunikation. Tübingen: Narr. Furu, E. M. (2008). Teachers regaining their power: Professional development through action learning. In Rönnerman, Furu, & Salo (Eds.), Nurturing praxis: Action research in partnership between school and university in a Nordic light (pp. 139–156). Rotterdam, Tapei: Sense. Janssen, T., & Rijlaarsdam, G. (2007). Describing the Dutch literature curriculum: A theoretical and empirical approach to describe the perceived and the actual curriculum. In W. Martyniuk (Eds.), Towards a common European framework of reference for language(s) of school education (pp. 205–226). Proceedings of a conference. Praag: Towarzystwo Autorów i Wydawców Prac Naukowych Universitas. Kooy, M. (1996). Reading response logs. Inviting students to explore novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and more. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann. Langer, J. (1995). Envisioning literature: Literary understanding and literature instruction. New York: Teachers College Press. Malmgren, L. G. (1986). Den konstiga konsten. Om litteraturläsning och litteraturpedagogik. Lund: Studentlitteratur. Malmgren, L. G., & van de Ven, P. H. (1994). Democracy, space, refugees, environment, love … A case study on thematic literature teaching in a Swedish school. A report on the IMEN research project

66

I’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT IT IS reading literature in comprehensive school ( 11–13). Occasional Papers in Mother Tongue Education 6. Nijmegen: IMEN. McCormick, K., & Waller, G. (1987). Text, reader, ideology. Poetics, 16(1), 193–208. Newell, G., Tallman, L., & Letcher, M. (2009). A longitudinal study of consequential transitions in the teaching of literature. Research in the Teaching of English, 44(1), 89–126. Nystrand, M., Gamoran, A., Kachur, R., & Prendergast, C. (1997). Opening dialogue. Understanding the dynamics of language and learning in the English classroom. New York, London: Teachers College, Columbia University. Pols, M., & Groenendijk, R. (2009). Lezen en leven: Het nut van matschappelijke bewustwording bij het lezen van boeken. Levende Talen Magazine, 96(3), 12–15. Rönnerman, K., Furu, E. M., & Salo, P. (Eds.). Nurturing praxis. Action research in partnership between school and university in a Nordic light. Rotterdam, Tapei: Sense. Thavenius, J. (1981). Modersmål och fadersarv. Svenskämnets traditioner i historien och nuet. Stockholm: Symposion Bokförlag. Van de Ven, P. H. (1996). Moedertaalonderwijs. Interpretaties in retoriek en praktijk, heden en verleden, binnen- en buitenland. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff. Van de Ven, P. H. (2005). Planet Isis: The gender specific reception of a youth book. L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 5(1), 75–93. Van de Ven, P. H. (2007a). Literaire competentie: Een beschouwing. In D. Schram & A. Raukema (Eds.), Lezen in de lengte en lezen in de breedte. De doorgaande leeslijn in wetenschappelijk perspectief. Stichting Lezen reeks (Vol. 7, pp. 185–206). Delft: Eburon. P. Van de Ven, P. H. (2007b). A collaborative dialogue – Research in Dutch language education. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 6(3), 112–132. Van Veen, K., & Van de Ven, P. H. (2008). Integrating theory and practice. Learning to teach L1 language and literature. L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 8(4), 39–62. Vygotksy, L. (1934/1986). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT. Witte, T. (2008). Het oog van de meester. Een onderzoek naar de literaire ontwikkeling van havo- en vwo-leerlingen in de tweede fase van het voortgezet onderwijs. Stichting Lezen Reeks 12. Delft: Eburon.

67

GRAHAM PARR

5. TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF LITERATURE TEACHING IN AUSTRALIA Hanging On and Letting Go

The most important thing as far as I can tell is knowing how to let go. And here fiction … can be a teacher … We must learn to let go, remember that it is the singular unverifiability of the literary from which we are attempting to discern collectivities. (Spivak, 2003, p. 34) INTRODUCTION

In conceptualising this collection of essays in Chapter 1, Brenton and Piet-Hein begin with student voices, fragments of conversation from two secondary school literature classrooms. These student voices and conversations are embedded within ‘conversations between literature teachers’ generated ‘at opposite ends of the world’, Australia and the Netherlands. These diverse professional conversations, in turn, are part of a larger international conversation about literature teaching. I imagine an organic network of research conversations reaching out across the world, building from and linking back to the two ‘original’ literature teachers’ conversations, in what I see as a Bakhtinian ‘chain of utterances’ (Morson & Emerson, 1990). My contribution to that chain is informed by my background as a teacher educator and a past teacher of literature in secondary schools. I have written extensively on policy issues relating to neoliberal reform and the teaching of literature in Australia, and I’ve just published a book, Inquiry-based professional learning: Speaking back to standards-based reforms, which investigates the professional learning of a small group of literature teachers over a period of 14 months in a school in Melbourne, Australia. In this chapter, one of my aims is to examine Prue’s teaching of a senior literature class, and to inquire into Prue and Bella’s deeply reflexive account of their conversation together. Methodologically, my approach draws on the institutional ethnographic work of Dorothy Smith (e.g., 2005). Smith typically examines richly specific accounts of individuals and groups working and learning in institutional settings, and in the process she traces some ‘bigger picture’ policy contexts, never losing sight of the specificities of the accounts she is examining. My larger aim here is to locate Prue and Bella’s detailed and nuanced account of Prue’s teaching within the bigger picture policy context in which we are all working in Australia. P-H. van de Ven and B. Doecke (eds.), Literary Praxis: A Conversational inquiry into the Teaching of Literature, 69–87. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

PARR

THE LUXURY OF PROFESSIONAL CONVERSATION?

Prue observes early on in her chapter that she values the opportunity to participate in her professional conversations with Bella, both the spoken and written dimensions. She feels these conversations have enabled them to ‘share our different worlds of teaching, [to] clarify for ourselves and each other the sort of teaching relationships that interest us, our purpose in teaching, our pleasure, our frustration’. Clearly, she appreciates the opportunity, and the word she initially uses to describe her sense of engagement is ‘mindful’: ‘It seems a luxury to be so mindful.’ Interestingly, for one particular literature teacher in Australia, the opportunity to set aside a professional space and time to be ‘so mindful’ of her practice and her professional identity feels like ‘a luxury’. The implication is that the professional dialogue that Prue and Bella are engaged in, this work, is something Prue as an Australian literature teacher rarely has time for. I read this, and I wonder: is this a common experience? During my own fourteen years as a teacher of English and literature in secondary schools in Australia (and for a single year in the US), I recall an ongoing dilemma: the exhilaration of being engaged in a rich professional conversation, actively involved in ‘literary praxis’ as Brenton and Piet-Hein have described it. I knew that this was crucial to my work as a teacher of literature, and yet I remember feeling there was never enough time for it. While I enjoyed moments of professional learning, or perhaps even extended periods of professional learning in association with a particular project, it was always a struggle to find time for this aspect of my work. Almost twenty years ago, sociologist, feminist and educator Frigga Haug (1992) asked about the nature of professional work in contemporary western societies. In that study, she explores the ways in which individuals, collectives and organisations understand and experience work on a day to day basis. She wonders, ‘Is the time spent learning also work? Is the search for solutions, trying things out, work, or does it prevent work being carried out?’ Decades ago, Australian researchers were explaining and illustrating how professional conversations and professional development (as it was then called) can be and should be central to English and literature teachers’ work (e.g., Reid, 1984; Boomer et al., 1992; Thomson, 1992). Focused professional conversation, they argued, should most definitely not be considered time away from the ‘real work’ of teaching. It was something literature teachers should fight to hang on to, even at the cost of letting go some of the everyday ‘imperatives’ of institutional, administrative, pedagogical, assessment and various relational demands of their work. One might pose the same questions of literature teachers in Australia in 2010. Is the time spent in professional dialogue with colleagues a fundamental part of being a literature teacher? Or does it ‘take away from’ the time required to prepare for the next literature class, for the ‘real work’ of literature teaching? Is it a luxury? An indulgence, perhaps? Across the world, governments and education authorities are demonstrating a greater preparedness in the twenty-first century to support professional development, sometimes with quite generous funding (see Darling-Hammond et al., 2009; Doecke, Parr, et al., 2008). But often this ‘pd’ must be of a fairly circumscribed kind, one which is narrowly targeted towards enhancing centrally prescribed student learning 70

LITERATURE TEACHING IN AUSTRALIA

outcomes. In my own state of Victoria, the government expects, indeed requires, teachers to learn, as Prue points out, and this learning should be consistent with the government’s published set of ‘professional learning principles’ (DE&T, 2005). These principles are suspicious of professional conversations that might be a luxury or a self-indulgence for the individual teacher. The finger-wagging warning that accompanies Principle 1 is typical of the patronising tone underpinning this policy document: ‘Professional learning is focused on student outcomes (not just individual teacher needs) [emphasis added]’ (DE&T, 2005, p. 14). Actually, as I explain below, this government is willing to fund some richly open-ended, inquiry-based professional learning projects involving partnerships between networks of schools and universities, and yet the language of this policy document appears to show that they are unwilling to let go their imagined control of teachers’ professional learning. They are unwilling to trust to the uncertainties of rich professional learning dynamics. In many ways, this chapter documents and inquires into a very different understanding of literature teachers’ professional learning practices as enacted in not just Prue and Bella’s conversation, but also in literature teaching conversations across Australia. It is an understanding that identifies some powerful connections with traditional notions of literature teaching, researching and professional development. It draws attention to some fresh and lively classroom approaches and some contemporary professional learning practices that both draw on and challenge some of those traditions. The one thing that is absent from this understanding is claims of certainty with respect to literature classroom practices or literature teachers’ professional conversations. In referring to the mindfulness prompted by her conversations with Bella, Prue speaks almost wistfully. Literature teachers from within Australia may read her account and yearn for such a positive professional learning experience, an experience that does not lead to greater certainty but that inspires her to want to engage in further inquiry and further collaborative reflection. Readers from outside Australia may wonder whether such an experience is widely experienced as a luxury in Australian literature teachers’ lives. Perhaps they presume there is a correlation between the privilege and affluence of Prue’s school setting and the richness of her professional dialogue. Bella’s perspective is telling, here. Her account of walking through the school grounds is moving and provocative as she observes the ‘stately trees, grounds and turn-of-the-century buildings’ and contrasts these with the ‘damp portable classrooms’ and the ‘mottled, uneven dustbowl that was the sports field’ at the school where she previously taught. From Prue’s perspective, though, despite the wealth oozing from the materiality of her school setting, she experiences this professional conversation as a luxury. ENCOURAGING EVIDENCE ACROSS THE NATION, AND YET …

Recent research studies have shown that across Australia such ‘luxury’ in terms of professional learning may be more common than one might first imagine. Over the last ten years there have been some exciting practitioner inquiry projects for collaborative groups of English and literature teachers. In 2001–2, the STELLA project 71

PARR

brought together teachers of English, literacy and literature from across the country to develop a set of national professional standards for their discipline, and the process prompted rich and varied professional learning conversations. The experiences of these teachers have been well documented: many of them speak about their involvement in language which is close to Prue’s notion of ‘mindful’ engagement (cf. Doecke & Gill, 2001; Doecke, 2006; Hayes, 2007). More recently, Doecke, Green et al. (2007) highlighted the valuable work of Australian practitioner researchers in the area of English and literature teaching who collaborate over extended periods of time to ‘develop accounts of their professional practice vis-à-vis constructions of their work from other standpoints’ (Doecke et al., 2007, p. 4). My own research investigating the professional learning of a small team of literature teachers documents the everyday minutiae of ongoing collaborative dialogic inquiry and records the teachers’ enthusiasm for this dimension of their work (Parr, 2010, 2007, 2004, 2003). Also, a three-year long government-funded project in my own state of Victoria drew together multiple teams of professional learning leaders from under-funded state schools, engaged in rich and ongoing professional learning conversations, often focused on improving literacy and student well-being in their respective schools (Monash Professional Learning Research Group [MPLRG], 2008, 2009, 2010). There is strong evidence at the national level, too. A federal government funded project, published in 2008, mapped the professional learning of all teachers in all sectors and disciplines across Australia – English and literature teaching groups were well represented in the research. The report of this project recognizes that rich teacher professional learning is no longer experienced as an ‘add-on’ to teachers’ professional practices in Australian educational settings (Doecke et al., 2008). It also observes that teacher professional learning in Australia is now more likely to be embedded within teachers’ day-to-day professional practices and institutional lives, and that practitioner inquiry is becoming a significant part of the learning of teachers in all manner of teaching contexts. There is abundant and particular evidence of this in state (public) schools, in private (independent) schools (such as the one where Prue was teaching), in colleges of Technical and Further Education (TAFEs), and in partnerships across and between schools from different schooling systems. I have no reason to doubt that Prue’s experience of dialogic inquiry with literature teaching colleagues within her privileged school setting is ‘a luxury’ for her, but importantly it is not a luxury that is given to her, or that any individual or group necessarily inherits. It is not given, and it is not ‘a given’ for all English or literature teachers who work at Prue’s school either. Although Prue mentions a ‘staff discussion group at the school where [she] work[s]’, it would be wrong to assume that all English and literature teachers who work at that school proactively participate in, and so help to generate, the same professional learning ‘luxuries’. As one reads Prue and Bella’s account one cannot set aside one’s awareness of the privilege of schools like Prue’s. There is plenty of research to remind us of the scandalous and immoral inequity in funding for different schools and school systems in Australia (e.g., Connell, 2006; Teese, 2000, 2003). Often the impoverished funding for particular schools has a direct impact on the energy and capacity of teachers to 72

LITERATURE TEACHING IN AUSTRALIA

engage in rich professional dialogue (Reid, 2005). When Bella tells us that she comes to her conversation with Prue having worked in a very different school, we cannot fail to be disconcerted. In some respects Bella’s school seems to have a very different professional culture, one mediated by lack of funding, limited resources and often low professional morale. And yet, Bella, like other literature teachers around Australia, is not obliged to operate as if she were in an institutional vacuum. In fact, she knows Prue through their active membership and participation in the same English teaching association over many years. Perhaps it says something distinctive about literature teaching collectives that rich professional dialogue is neither the preserve of those who teach in economically privileged settings, nor is economic privilege any guarantee of such conversations. What we can learn from Bella and Prue’s conversation is that literature teachers from a wide range of schools and school systems in Australia can and do engage in such dialogue. We see how professional dialogue can be genuinely exciting and even inspiring, as much for the culture of teaching and learning in a particular institution as for the individuals within it. I have the highest admiration of Prue and of Bella as literature teachers, as colleagues and as interlocutors in a professional conversation, and I do enjoy reading their professional writing, in the different forums that they have written (see for example, Illesca, 2003, 2005, 2007; Gill, 2005, 2008; Doecke, Gill et al., 2009). However, my interest in their individual insights, in their dialogue, and the knowledge that they generate through their dialogue, goes beyond a sense of wonder at what each of them as individuals or as a team is able to achieve here. AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE TEACHING AS A COLLECTIVE?

I am particularly interested in this chapter to examine the historical and professional contexts within which Prue and Bella’s dialogue and Prue’s work with her students are located. And I want to explore the social, philosophical and policy frameworks in which one might understand Prue’s work as a literature teacher in a particular school and as a member of a broad, but loose collective of Australian literature teachers. I use the term ‘collective’, here, partly in the terms gestured at in the epigraph to this chapter. In the book from which the epigraph is drawn, Spivak is talking about a collective understanding of what constitutes a literary text. She appreciates the value of a shared understanding or belief, but she emphasizes that any shared understanding must be acknowledged as unstable and provisional. She advocates letting go of the need for certainty in any sense of a collective. Another writer whose theorization of collectives I find helpful is the German Marxist philosopher, Siegfried Kracauer, who talks about a collective as distinguished partly by a shared willingness of a group to work together and to have key beliefs in common. But willingness is not enough. Kracauer talks about a shared identity that emerges over time, one which is distinguished by collaborative ownership of the knowledge and practices that a group generates amongst themselves (Kracauer, 1929/1998, p. 106). He is saying that a genuine social collective, the sort of collective worth hanging on to, does not follow along uniformly in response to a directive from outside or from within the group. Like Spivak’s notion of a collective, Kracauer’s is dynamic, full of tensions and contradictions, and always already subject to change or even dissolution. 73

PARR

As I attempt to trace out the bigger picture policy context in which Prue operates as a teacher of literature in Australia, I should remind international readers that Australia is a federation, and that educational systems in different Australian jurisdictions have historically had a fair degree of autonomy within this federation. States and territories have always published, funded and managed their own curriculums; until recently they have controlled their own assessment practices and professional accountability regimes. With governments’ increased enthusiasm for standards-based reforms (clearly a world-wide phenomenon), neo-liberal policies have sought to exercise more control and certainty with respect to educational ‘outcomes’ and the professional practices that are seen to ‘deliver’ these outcomes. The prospect of a newly instituted national curriculum in Australia in 2012 may offer politicians and media pundits a tantalising prospect of greater uniformity and sameness across the country, especially when combined with a new national testing regime, and a single set of national professional standards for teacher registration and teacher performance. However, this push for nationalising and standardizing educational practice is unlikely to lead to the sort of certainties that the politicians and media pundits appear to desire (Reid, 2010). For this reason alone, it would be folly for me to attempt to summarize what Australian literature teaching essentially entails, or what Australian literature teachers all look like and sound like. I will go on to show that any collective called Australian literature teaching, before or after the implementation of a new national curriculum and standards-based reforms, can be seen to share some dimensions of a common professional culture. However, I will also argue that the present cultures and practices of literature teaching in Australia, like their history, are characterised by rich diversity, ongoing tensions and an always-already propensity for change. NEGOTIATING CHALLENGING POLITICAL AND PROFESSIONAL LANDSCAPES

In the opening paragraphs of Prue and Bella’s chapter, they allude to some of the acute tensions that characterise literature teaching in Australia and the English speaking world. These tensions are the direct result of politicians, and media mouthpieces for these politicians, seeing the English and literature curriculum in Australia as their business. Prue goes on to speak as an individual with a distinctive and eloquent voice of her own, but she is also keen to speak in the first person plural as part of a collective – not just herself and Bella, but a national collective whose members see themselves as the English and literature teaching profession in Australia. Sometimes, it sounds as if she is speaking from the barricades, advocating a view of the teaching of literature ‘which runs against the grain of the English teaching that is currently being championed by many commentators and decision makers in Australia’. She echoes the frustration of English and literature teachers who feel that they are being treated like political pawns, manipulated by their political masters to achieve government objectives, and yet they are also supposedly the potential saviours of the human race (as in rhetoric about the teacher being the most important ‘factor’ in a child’s education). Over the last three decades, the very same people who accuse English and literature teachers of not fulfilling their professional 74

LITERATURE TEACHING IN AUSTRALIA

duties, the same people who have called for teachers to be disciplined and for teacher autonomy to be curtailed, have at the same time tried to argue that when this happens the full potential of the teaching profession will be realised (e.g., Kemp, 1996; Caldwell & Hayward, 1998; NITL, 2005; Rudd & Gillard, 2008). Later in the chapter, Prue makes it clear that she sees her professional identity as located within a strong collective of English teaching professional associations – at state and national levels. And she goes on to confidently invoke the sense of a collective of literature teachers: ‘We all know … that teacher engagement and enthusiasm for their discipline and their classroom work is a positive influence on student engagement and intellectual development’ and ‘We know that an inquiring teacher is likely to be a good teacher [emphasis added]’. Notwithstanding any power that might come from teachers speaking and acting as a collective, English and literature teachers in Australia have traditionally been seen as easy pickings by politicians for, on the one hand, political points scoring about crises in literacy education (cf. Doecke, Howie & Sawyer, 2006; Green, 1998) but also, when the occasions demands, crowing in hyperbolic terms about Australia’s ‘performance’ in international literacy tests (cf. Freebody, 2007). And yet it would be a mistake to imagine a collective of Australian literature teachers and educators speaking as one voice, acting with one mind, against a single political or even ideological foe. The situation is a very complex one, full of many voices, ranging from passionate pleas to bring back the classics (cf. Mitchell & Parry, 2005) to claims about the importance of postcolonial literature within the secondary English curriculum (e.g., McLean Davies, 2008). In Australia, literature teaching is currently a site of a particularly acrimonious intellectual and ideological struggle among those who see themselves as part of the teaching profession, and those who see themselves more peripherally related to the discipline of literature education or literary studies. John Frow, a professor of an English department in an Australian university, declares that literary studies is ‘in disarray as perhaps never before’, setting this against an ironic backdrop of Oprah’s book clubs and what he calls the café culture of upmarket bookshops. Frow believes that Australians still hold on to a belief in the ‘literary’ – whether it takes the form of the ‘classic’ texts of Oprah’s book clubs (an American popular culture institution that has well and truly colonised multi-national book ‘supermarkets’) or the public displays of customers in trendy bookshops as they knowingly browse the latest offerings – while literary studies struggles to theorise the conditions for making such discriminations and to justify its existence as a discipline (Frow, 2001; cf also Frow, 2005). In the meantime, young people (and some not-so-young people) get their pleasures from You Tube and other multimodal texts. Debates within the English teaching profession are grappling with the uncertain relationship of literature to broader notions of English and or literacy curriculums, and the history of literature teaching in Australia is punctuated by stoushes over how to respond to the heterogeneous mix of ‘high brow’ and ‘low brow’ texts and cultural practices. Then there are the self-justifying claims that Professor Frow gives for literature study, offering a richer perspective on literature than what he refers to as the merely ‘untutored practice’ of reading (Frow, 2001, p. 14). 75

PARR

Over the past few years there are signs that secondary English teachers, particularly those engaged in forms of practitioner inquiry or ongoing professional learning conversations, have embraced the opportunity to revisit the theoretical foundations for the teaching of literature and to reaffirm the place of literature within an English curriculum. Teachers like Prue have not been overwhelmed by a sense of ‘disarray’, but have quietly got on with the business of exploring the complexities of texts within classroom settings, and inviting their students to develop a heightened sense of ‘framing and interpretation’ (MacLachlan & Reid, 1994). Or, at least, the very best teachers have seized this opportunity – for I am not suggesting that there isn’t also abundant evidence of the perpetuation of more traditional practices in classrooms. How could it be otherwise? If we look at the writing of some other leading exponents of the teaching of literature in Australian secondary schools (Howie, 2006, 2008; Bellis, 2004, 2006; Bellis, Parr & Doecke, 2009; McClenaghan, 2006; McLenaghan & Doecke, 2010, 2011), we get glimpses into classrooms where the contrasting ‘regimes of value’ (to borrow Frow’s term) provide a focus for discussion. The writing of these teachers is populated with students at work in classrooms. They may be engaged in the imaginative play of interpreting literary texts; they may be exploring the multiple ways in which those texts can be read. They may be seeking to connect with a particular reading offered by a peer or a teacher, or they may be challenging this reading. In this respect, the moment of ‘theory’ (e.g., Culler, 1983; Eagleton, 1985) as it was experienced in Australia in the 1980’s has undoubtedly constituted a significant intervention in the way English teachers think about curriculum and pedagogy, generating rich debates and rich curriculum resources (cf. Reid, 1984; Mellor & Patterson, 1991). Prue is one of many teachers who have self-consciously used theory (in one form or another) as a resource for opening up texts for new readings and new understandings. One of the pleasures I derive from writing about Prue and Bella’s chapter is in bearing witness to the way literature teachers such as Prue can negotiate competing and contradictory demands of the highly regulated professional spaces in which they work. Like teacher educators working in universities, teachers working in schools can not, as it were, step outside the intellectual and ideological struggle that constitutes their industrial and professional worlds. Day by day, they are grappling and coming to terms with different curriculum imperatives (at the state level and at the school level), and they are responding to edicts handed out by regulatory authorities that relate to their ongoing accreditation as teachers. They are reading texts, assessing work, engaging in some level of collaborative work with colleagues in a professional association (which may itself be ridden with ideological and industrial tensions), interacting with parents. And they are attempting to get to know the interests and needs of students in their classrooms. Invariably, they must navigate and to some extent muddle through the multiple contradictions and tensions in their professional lives (Parr & Doecke, forthcoming). Literature teachers in Australia are not just dealing with contradictions; as Haug puts it, they are living the contradictions (Haug, 1987). And this state of living contradictions enters into their professional practice, their professional identity and their very being. It is not surprising, therefore, 76

LITERATURE TEACHING IN AUSTRALIA

to see contradictions and tensions evident in the way teachers describe and enact their classroom practice. How does a literature teacher promote rich dialogic classroom practices, with space and time for imaginative play and intellectual risk taking, and then turn around and deal with imperatives associated with high stakes exams, for example, or professional standards, or some other neoliberal agenda? STUDENT VOICES AND TEACHER INTENTIONS: A CLOSE STUDY OF PRUE’S LITERATURE CLASSROOM

Prue and Bella invoke Mikhail Bakhtin and Ian Reid and the rich polyphony of voices that constitute Prue’s literature classroom, illustrating the imaginative play of ideas in her students’ talk (and in some of the students’ written exchanges). These are the voices that are not just acknowledged, but valued, as students are given spaces to ‘flick in and out of personal chat’. Prue stresses the importance of the ‘exploratory aspect’ of her students’ talk in contradistinction to any urgency to pin down meaning, or even stake out the themes for study of a particular text, at this early stage of their connecting with the text and with each other. It is very clear that Prue sees ‘such informality’ as a way of ‘learning about each other, and hence contributing to our ability to have a conversation about an idea or a text or a piece of writing.’ She explains how she often begins study of a new text through close engagement with particular passages in that text. I sense that these students are engaging in dialogue with each other and with the text, appropriating words from each other as they try to make sense of the whole and jointly construct interpretations of Farmer’s stories. Prue’s presence in these classroom conversations is not at all a dominating one. It is mostly the case that the students ‘lead the talk’, and even when Prue offers a ‘new’ theoretical frame to the students, which she appreciates is ‘challenging’, she still ‘does not push [the students] to accept or reject the idea’. It may be surprising for a reader to observe a literature teacher who appears to be saying so little in these discussions, then to see that same teacher write in such demonstrative and forthright prose about her pedagogical purposes in these conversations. Speaking about her intentions in these early lessons, Prue writes: I want them to be talking about language and meaning … I want to ask the question one more time … I want even closer attention. I want them to use their own language with more particularity … I am asking them to make the interpretive nature of their reading visible. It’s possible to interpret these words and the fragments of classroom dialogue we read from the early stages of studying a new text in many different ways. I want to explore what I see as three inter-related dimensions of Prue’s teaching, each of which plays with notions of holding on and letting go. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, Prue’s pressing list of ‘wants’ in the quote above might be seen as in tension with her approach of allowing the students to lead the talk. She might appear to be letting go of teacherly control of classroom discussion or literary interpretation. And at one level, I suppose, she is. It would seem Prue is drawing on Dixon’s (1967) ‘personal growth’ models of English pedagogy, 77

PARR

and some reader response theories of literature pedagogy (e.g., Fish, 1980, 1995) which emphasise the importance of the teacher encouraging students, at least initially, to make meaning in and with texts in terms of their own personal and social worlds, in and outside school. And there is a strong flavour of James Britton’s philosophy of the teacher making time to value and appreciate the knowledge and ‘expressive’ language that students bring to their study of texts (Britton, 1970). And yet Prue’s is not a romanticised interpretation of Britton’s or Dixon’s or Fish’s ideas. When she says she wants her students to hold onto their language but to ‘use their own language with more particularity’, Prue is drawing on the Bakhtinian (1981) notion of all language being ‘half someone else’s’. She values her students’ own language, and yet she is also working to enable that language to draw more richly on a range of other literary discourses that might inform their language. This is tricky territory and there are tensions involved in juggling these competing intentions. Secondly, Prue consciously models a sort of ‘letting go’ of the need to conform to any particular ideology or any sense of a correct way of interpreting a text. She expresses this in terms of the value of opening up and connecting with others’ ideas. This raises interesting questions about the moral agenda or the values communicated in and through her literature teaching. Back in the 1980s, Terry Eagleton was writing in very uncertain ways about the positive potential of a ‘moral technology’ of literature teaching. It was a technology that might be part of a broader moral agenda for schooling, and yet he acknowledged that: ‘the workings of the particular moral technology known as literature … are a good deal more subtle and elusive than the simple communication of a range of particular moral values, such as authority is good or evil …’ (Eagleton, 1985–6, p. 98). Robert Scholes is highly suspicious of such an agenda, noting the connections between the contradictory values inherent in any literary text and the complicated relationship between the values seemingly ‘inherent’ in a literary text and the values seemingly communicated in and through a literature classes. He points out that a particular literary text being studied in a class may provide a vision of moral or virtuous behaviour, ‘but because virtue itself is seen in social and political terms, different literary texts become means to different virtuous ends’ (Scholes, 1999, p. 22). Gyatri Spivak is just as dismissive of cause-and-effect understandings of the teaching and learning of literature and the production of moral citizens, stating simply ‘the literary is not a blueprint to be followed in unmediated social action’ (Spivak, 2003, p. 23). Nevertheless, some contributors to Australian literary conversations such as Ian Hunter (1988, 1997) continue to conceptualise literature teaching as a powerful ‘tool’ of governmental policy, and these arguments are persuasive to some (e.g., Goddard, 2009). Hunter sees literature teaching as ‘a governmental apparatus … to achieve a certain “humanisation’ of the population’ (Hunter, 1988 p. 3). For Hunter, the literature teacher should be an ‘ethical exemplar’ who subtly but purposefully, through ‘uniform moral training’ (p. 102) of students’ oral language and written expression, produces the sort of moral citizen that a public education system, and the government that funds it, wants to produce. Interestingly, Prue might be seen as advocating the teacher as a sort of moral exemplar, but in a very different way from that which informs Hunter’s views. She sees her role as one of building democratic 78

LITERATURE TEACHING IN AUSTRALIA

classrooms, of developing and sustaining democratic processes. However, she places some considerable importance on the teacher modelling intellectual humility and openness to others’ ideas, which is a far cry from Hunter’s crude advocacy of moral certainty and his lack of reflexivity with respect to questions of morality and culture. Thirdly, there is a sense in which Prue is not necessarily letting go at all. Rather, by ensuring that multiple voices of her classroom (and the text) are heard, she is a significant presence in the weaving of what John Yandell (2007) calls ‘the discursive fabric of the individual lesson’ (p. 258). The fabric doesn’t just weave itself. It is woven according to a particular and well thought-out agenda, or series of agendas, and it involves the literature teacher reading not just the text but the classroom, and the social worlds in that classroom. She is responding to what she ‘reads’ as the particular social, literary, aesthetic, intellectual and emotional needs of her particular students at this particular time in relation to this particular literary text. Later, when students have tested out ideas, when they have developed some genuine momentum in their exploratory talk with each other, when they have struggled and grappled with some of the challenging resources and secondary readings the teacher provides, then there will come a time when Prue will take a much more explicit and dominant role in the dynamic. In fact, I see elements of all three of these dimensions in Prue’s language and in her practice, even when she talks about ‘slip[ping] into’ her more ‘authoritative’ teacherly voice. Bakhtinian scholar, Gary Morson (2004) draws a distinction between a ‘testable authoritative’ voice, which is expressive, which almost ‘demands attention’, but which also looks forward to a response, an alternative view, further dialogue. He contrasts this with the notion of an ‘authoritarian’ voice which seeks to establish and maintain dominance, and to avoid all dialogue, if possible. In another place, Prue writes that she believes her students are ‘not looking for agreement with each other; they’re looking for a conversation with each other, a discussion’ (Doecke et al., 2009, p. 16). In the conversations (face-to-face in the classroom and online) that Prue and Bella present in their chapter, I do not see the students looking for agreement with each other or with their teacher. I see them looking for a conversation with the class, with their teacher and with the text. But I want to emphasise that this does not mean harmonizing the tensions and the contradictions in this classroom or in Prue’s practice. One of the moments of acute contradiction, in my interpretation of Prue’s teaching, is the moment where she is beginning the study of a new text, the collection of short stories by Australian author Beverley Farmer. It is interesting to observe that the genesis of this activity is an exam that the students will complete at the end-ofyear high stakes exam. (The exam is high stakes for these Year 12 students because their ‘performance’ on it, as well as their exams for the others subjects they are studying – usually three or four subjects – will determine whether and where they will attend university, and which particular course they will qualify for.) Bella and Prue tell us that the activity is closely related to the main task in their end of year literature exam, and one might imagine a dour, serious classroom in a privileged girls’ college where heads are bowed over the task determined to make every rehearsal for the final exam performance ‘count’. And yet what we read is a ‘messy’ 79

PARR

beginning, with some students not having done what they had been required to do in preparation for the class, the teacher out of the room and some students apparently ‘skylarking’. When the time seems right, Prue begins, taking up an informal position with respect to her students, ‘chairs in a circle, text in hand, and a pencil for annotations and jottings’. In this seemingly informal setting, Prue chooses to appropriate this perhaps most formal of tasks, an exam reading practice, because from the outset she wants her students to learn to value the pleasures of working closely with texts, with ideas and with language. At this stage, the contradictions are in rich interplay with each other, and one wonders (as perhaps Prue’s students wonder) where this is heading. Prue chooses not merely to rehearse an exam reading practice as if to affirm the naturalness of exam reading practices. Rather, she takes the fundamental idea of the task and re-imagines it. She reworks it so that it becomes an opportunity for students to get to know each other, to test out ideas, to speak aloud what might in other classrooms remain as written jottings in the margin of the text (‘That’s cute’, ‘Weird!’, ‘She’s [ie. the author]is so annoying’ and ‘Get on with your life!’), as well as to engage in some insightful and sometimes quite sophisticated close readings of the text. In reflecting on moments like this in Prue’s classroom, Bella quotes Ian Reid’s (1984) description of what he calls a ‘workshop model’ of a literature classroom. This model is characterised by ‘argument, joking, gossip … activity on all sides’. There is a sense in the conversations that Prue quotes early in her chapter of students both ‘dismantling’ the text as well as ‘piecing it together’ in the richest traditions of literature pedagogy. The overall picture is one which involves combinations of imaginative and analytical engagement with a text, both deriving and creating meaning in the one space and time, the one richly social conversation. As Terry Locke observes in his chapter, the ‘long shadow of Bakhtin stretches across the writings of the Australian and Dutch teachers’; and if it is a shadow then its impact is visible here in the presentation of conversations such as these with Prue’s students. As I read each student’s words in the early conversations in the chapter, in the act of speaking they seem to be sharing half the meaning of these words with the words of the students who spoke before them. They are actively involved in meaning making, and this involves struggling (yes, sometimes awkwardly) to make each word their own. The conversation is flexible and yet focused, as students attempt to achieve some level of distinctiveness in their interpretation, even as they anticipate future conversations including the rather more regulated and less dialogic conversation that is their end of year literature exam. And so the understandings of the students develop in often rich and social ways. There is a sense that individuals in the group are generating and sharing some collective knowledge of the text with others in the class, and yet the collective that is the class provides space and potential for some diversity and argument in their readings. Another way of making sense of this is Honneth’s (2005) notion of the social and affective ‘antecedent act’ of ‘recognition’. In the context of a literature classroom this notion constitutes the combination of activities and utterances when students and teacher come into contact with one another as public and social readers 80

LITERATURE TEACHING IN AUSTRALIA

of the text, at the very time that they are coming into personal contact with the text in various ways (see also Sumara, 1996). I read the sorts of student conversations that Prue and Bella present from Prue’s classroom as rich examples of this notion of recognition. For Honneth such dynamic acts of recognition must come before ‘cognition’ in the personal and social sense of meaning making. In that act of literally ‘hanging on to the text’ as Prue and her students sit in a circle, it seems important for students and teacher to ‘recognise’ the text, as Prue says, as a ‘reference point’ in the potentially ‘risky’ act of connecting with each other and with the text. Despite Prue’s avowals, and her account of the ways in which her students seem not to lose their sense of community or their lively ‘dialogic potential’ (Bakhtin, 1981), it remains a disturbing question in my head as I read further into the chapter what impact the impending end of year exam practices and discourses have on this particular literature classroom. At the time when the sense of the collective might be at its strongest, how does anticipation of the discourse of exams, how does the anticipation of the language one will be required to speak in that space, diminish the rich polyphony of voices in the classroom? As Prue and her students journey toward the always anticipated end of year exam, and Prue becomes more ‘authoritative’ (by her own judgement) in her contributions to the students’ online dialogue, how much is Prue ‘forgetting’ the recognition that enlivened the sociality of her classroom (Honneth, 2005, p. 128). How much is she compromising something of the liveliness of Reid’s workshop model? How much of the rich heteroglossia of voices in her classroom (Yandell, 2007; cf. Bakhtin, 1981) is being lost to the more contrived or managed dialogue that is required in the end of year high stakes exam? I pose these questions not to criticise Prue’s practice but to draw attention to concerns that arise when one thinks about literature classrooms and the effect on students’ literature classroom experiences of looming exam regimes. How else is it possible for a literature teacher to help students make the transition from a multivoiced, richly dialogic classroom, to the much less dialogic space of a high stakes exam, where students will attempt to ‘perform’ their literary understandings, their close readings of texts, according to the required exam practices, and so stake out their place on the competitive ladder of university entrance scores? Prue’s account of the lively dialogic interactions between her students, with only occasional (if authoritative) interventions by her, in the lead up to their final exams, is compelling. The students’ dialogue in those later engaging and lively literary discussions would suggest that they have not completely ‘forgotten’ the ‘antecedent acts of recognition’ that preceded this cognition. I am left wondering, though, whether to affirm this cognition as a triumph over the effects of high stakes exams or whether to express concern as to how much richer the students’ learning may have been without the constraining influence of those exams. LITERATURE TEACHING IN AUSTRALIA: LOOKING AHEAD

When Spivak (2003) comments on the ‘unverifiability of the literary from which we are attempting to discern collectivities’ (p. 34), she is speaking from within the 81

PARR

discipline of literary studies as it is sometimes practised in universities. Her concern is a little different from Frow’s concerns in Australia, although they are both responses to worthwhile questions such as: ‘what is literature’? ‘what is literary studies?’ and ‘what does it mean to study literature? Amidst an almost overwhelming profusion of different perspectives on these questions, Spivak says there is an unhelpful tendency in academic circles to want to discipline the discipline of literary studies, so that there can be certainty, so that one can verify a text as ‘literature’ (or not) and so that the discipline of literary studies can be definitively located, pinned down and ‘verified’ where otherwise it remains elusive, problematic and ambiguous. She believes these tendencies of academics to pursue certainty and to pin down truths are leading ineluctably to the death of the discipline of literary studies. The fundamentals of her argument, while complex and multi-levelled, might be translocated into a framework for describing and understanding literature teaching and learning in Australian secondary schools. In my sketch of the bigger picture policy and research context for literature teaching in Australia, I have tried to show a rich diversity of views, ideologies and understandings of literature teaching. I have indicated that there has been a history of articulate voices speaking from and on behalf of Australian literature teachers and literature teaching groups. And I have provided some evidence of a rich culture of practitioner researchers in Australia, such as Prue and Bella. Their professional learning and professional writing enliven both their own practice and the practices of others who access and engage with this writing (in or through ‘live’ professional conversations). But still there remains, in recent Australian history, no shortage of significant public figures who see literature teaching and literature teachers in Australia as their business. They tend to speak as if the diverse literature teaching profession were a simple collective. It would seem that some in Australia ‘perform’ their interest in literature and literary high culture in the ‘café culture of upmarket bookshops’ and others do it by denigrating English teachers in public pronouncements in the popular press. Our former Prime Minister John Howard felt it was his business to discipline the English teaching profession for the ‘gobbledegook’ they talked, and he threatened to cut off education funding to any state that encouraged its teachers who had the audacity to use their own professional language in communicating about and reflecting on their professional practice. It’s fair to say that Howard was suspicious of all intellectual discourse, and yet he wanted to see greater prominence given to literature teaching in Australia (cf. Lewis & Saluszinsky, 2006), as he believed that it had the potential to help produce a more moral and patriotic national citizenry. He was not alone in this thinking, as has become evident in the last four years, with a change of federal government in Australia (from a right wing ‘Liberal’ neoliberal government to a supposedly left-wing Labor government that is still to all intents and purposes demonstrably neoliberal), the change in government producing no perceivable difference in beliefs about and policy for literature teaching. Literature teaching in secondary schools in Australia is entering an interesting period, as we move closer to a national curriculum. Although at the time of writing 82

LITERATURE TEACHING IN AUSTRALIA

we have only seen drafts of the English curriculum, already two matters seem very clear: (1) The conception of language, which supposedly underpins the whole national curriculum, all but rejects what Raymond Williams (1977/2001) calls the ‘sociality’ of language. The English language, we are told in the rationale for this curriculum, is ‘always dynamic and evolving’, and yet the language at the heart of this curriculum is glibly ‘recognised as the “common language” of Australians’ (ACARA, 2010). This is a rationale that gives meaning to George Orwell’s notion of double-speak. And so it is that the so-called ‘Language strand’ of the new Australian curriculum will be made up of dedicated (i.e., year level by year level), highly prescriptive and content-heavy lists of language rules, structures and conventions that students (irrespective of their sociocultural and linguistic backgrounds, irrespective of their interests and needs) ‘will be taught’; and (2) The ‘Literature strand’, we are told, will be constructed on the basis of an understanding that what counts as literary texts (and literary practices) is ‘dynamic and evolving’. And yet, the rationale for the curriculum explains, some (unidentified) group has ‘verified’ that some subset of texts and practices has been ‘recognised as having personal, social, cultural and aesthetic value and potential for enriching students’ lives and scope of experience’ (ACARA, 2010). And these are the ones that literature teachers will teach. Suffice it to say that, from what we have seen in this new Australian curriculum, there is much evidence of ‘hanging on’ to allusions of certainty (such as what constitutes a literary text or a literary practice) and ‘hanging on’ to beliefs in the ‘moral technology’ of this curriculum. There is evidence of the curriculum hanging on to some centrally governed control of curriculum and of students’ learning. Indeed, there seems to be a palpable fear running through the draft curriculum of letting go, of allowing approaches to literature teaching that respect the professional judgements of literature teachers such as Prue, and the literature teaching profession, more broadly. One wonders whether there will be room for Honneth’s rich antecedent acts of recognition in the ‘futures orientation’ (ACARA, 2010) that this curriculum trumpets in its preamble. Will there be space for teachers to read their classroom and their texts, to encourage imaginative students’ engagement and play with texts in the process of meaning making? Will the positive developments in literature teachers’ professional learning practices, of which Prue and Bella’s conversation is just one example, become more of a luxury than they are even now? I confess to harbouring serious concerns with respect to these questions. But perhaps I should listen to Gyatri Spivak and let go some of these concerns. Perhaps, I should look instead to the rich heritage of literature teachers in this country living multiple contradictions and, as I said earlier, quietly getting on with the business of exploring the complexities of texts within their classrooms. This is clearly a heritage worth hanging on to. In my more optimistic moments, I do look forward to a future where teachers, policy makers and students can talk about literature teaching, 83

PARR

curriculum and professional learning in Australia with the same dialogic spirit that characterizes Prue and Bella’s conversations and the conversations in Prue’s classroom. I’d like to look back in five years time and affirm this continuing spirit in the loose collective of Australian literature teachers that Prue identifies with. I’d like to be able to reflect on these five years and say, as Prue’s students say about her class: ‘I think that people were generally open minded and willing to accept and [challenge] other people’s ideas.’ This is surely the spirit, the collective of literature teaching in Australia that is worth holding on to. REFERENCES Australian Curriculum and Reporting Authority (ACARA). (2010). The Australian curriculum: English. Draft consultation version 1.0. Retrieved online January, 2011, from http://www.cen.edu.au/ resources/4%20Rationales%20Draft%20Consultation%20v1.0%20Aust%20Curr.pdf Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M.M. Bakhtin (M. Holquist, Ed., C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bellis, N. (2004). A beginning: Using writing and STELLA to construct a professional identity. English teaching: Practice and critique, 3(2). Bellis, N. (2006). Finding a voice by listening to others: A journey in the English classroom. In B. Doecke, M. Howie, & W. Sawyer (Eds.), ‘Only connect’: English teaching, schooling and community (pp. 294–303). Kent Town & Kensington Gardens, SA: AATE & Wakefield Press. Bellis, N., Parr, G., & Doecke, B. (2009). The making of literature: A continuing conversation. Changing English: Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 16(2), 165–179. Boomer, G., Lester, N., Onore, C., & Cook, J. (Eds.). (1992). Negotiating the curriculum: Educating for the 21st century. London: The Falmer Press. Britton, J. (1970/1993). Language and learning (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. Caldwell, B., & Hayward, D. (1998). The future of schools: Lessons from the reform of public education. London: Falmer Press. Connell, R. (2006). The new right triumphant: The privatisation agenda and public education in Australia. In G. Martell (Ed.), Education’s iron cage and its dismantling in the new global order (pp. 143–162). Toronto: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Culler, J. (1983). On deconstructionism: Theory and criticism after structuralism. London: Routledge. Darling-Hammond, L., Wei, R. C., Andree, A., Richardson, N., & Orphanos, S. (2009). Professional learning in the learning profession: A status report on teacher development in the United States and abroad. Technical Report. Dallas, TX: National Staff Development Council. Retrieved January, 2010, from http://www.srnleads.org/resources/publications/pdf/nsdc_profdev_short_report.pdf Department of Education & Training (DE&T) Leadership and Teacher Development Branch. (2005). Professional learning in effective schools: The seven principles of highly effective professional learning. Melbourne: State of Victoria. Retrieved January, 2010, from http://www.eduweb.vic.gov.au/ edulibrary/public/teachlearn/teacher/ProfLearningInEffectiveSchools.pdf Dixon, J. (1967). Growth through English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doecke, B., & Gill, M. (2000–2001). Setting standards: Confronting paradox. English in Australia, 129–130, & Literacy Learning: The Middle Years, 9(1), 5–15. Doecke, B., & McLenaghan, D. (2011). Confronting practice: Classroom investigations into language and learning. Putney, NSW: Phoenix. Doecke, B., Parr, G., & North, S. (2008, November 19). National mapping of teacher professional learning project. Final report. Canberra: DEEWR. Retrieved January, 2010, from http://catalogue. nla.gov.au/Search/Home?lookfor=National+Mapping+of+Teacher+Professional+Learning+Project &type=all&limits=&submit=Find Doecke, B. (2006). Beyond externalising and finalising definitions: Standards for the teaching of English language and literacy in Australia (STELLA). English in Education, 40(1), 36–50. 84

LITERATURE TEACHING IN AUSTRALIA Doecke, B., Gill, P., Illesca, B., & van de Ven, P.-H. (2009). The literature classroom: Spaces for dialogue. L1 – Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 9(1), 5–33. Retrieved online May, 2009, from http://l1.publication-archive.com/public?fn=enter&repository=1&article=293 Doecke, B., Green, B., Kostogriz, A., Reid, J.-A., & Sawyer, W. (2007, December). Knowing practice in English teaching? Research challenges in representing the professional practice of English teachers. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 6(3). Retrieved online January, 2010, from http:// education.waikato.ac.nz/research/journal/ Doecke, B., Howie, M., & Sawyer, W. (Eds.). (2006). ‘Only Connect’: English teaching, schooling and community. Kent Town & Kensington Gardens, SA: AATE & Wakefield Press. Eagleton, T. (1985–6). The subject of literature. Cultural Critique, 2, 95–104. Fish, S. (1980). Is there a text in this class? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fish, S. (1995). Why literary criticism is like a virtue. In Professional correctness: Literary studies and political change. New York: Clarendon Press. Freebody, P. (2007). Literacy education in school: Research perspectives from the past, for the future. Camberwell, VIC: ACER. Frow, J. (2001). Text, culture, rhetoric: Some futures for English. Critical quarterly, 43(1), 5–18. Frow, J. (2005). Genre. London & New York: Routledge. Gill, P. (2005). Talking to write: On-line conversations in the literature classroom. In B. Doecke & G. Parr (Eds.), Writing=Learning (pp. 149–165). Kent Town & Kensington Gardens: Wakefield Press & AATE. Gill, P. (2008). Learning’s bower. English in Australia, 43(3), 52–56. Goddard, R. (2009). Towards engagement with the ideas of Ian Hunter: An argument for an overdue encounter. Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education, 16(2), 181–191. Green, B. (1998). Born again teaching?: Governmentality, ‘grammar’ and public schooling. In T. Popkewitz & M. Brennan (Eds.), Foucault’s challenge: Discourse, knowledge and power in education (pp. 173–204). New York: Teachers’ College Press. Haug, F., et al. (1987). Female sexualization: A work of collective memory. London: Verso. Haug, F. (1992). Beyond female masochism: Memory-work and politics. London & New York: Verso. Hayes, T. (2007). Whither/wither STELLA? A sea change or a bureaucratic chore? A Victorian perspective. English in Australia, 42(3), 9–12. Honneth, A. (2005, March 14–16). Reification: A recognition-theoretical view. The Tanner lectures on human values (pp. 91–135). California: University of Berkley. Retrieved online at: http://www. tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/Honneth_2006.pdf Howie, M. (2006). (Un)Common sense: A case for critical literacy. In B. Doecke, M. Howie, & W. Sawyer (Eds.), ‘Only connect …’: English teaching, schooling and community (pp. 224–235). Kent Town & Kensington Gardens, SA: AATE & Wakefield Press. Howie, M. (2008). Embracing the other within: Dialogical ethics, resistance and professional advocacy in English teaching. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 7(1), 103–118. Retrieved January, 2010, from http://education.waikato.ac.nz/research/files/etpc/2008v7n1nar1.pdf Hunter, I. (1988). Culture and government: The emergence of literary education. London: Macmillan. Hunter, I. (1997). After English: Toward a less critical literacy. In S. Muspratt, A. Luke, & P. Freebody (Eds.), Constructing critical literacies: Teaching and learning textual practice (pp. 315–334). St Leonards: Allen & Unwin. Illesca, B. (2003). Speaking as other. In B. Doecke, D. Homer, & J. Nixon (Eds.), English teachers at work: Narratives, counter narratives and arguments (pp. 7–13). Kent Town & Kensington Gardens, SA: AATE & Wakefield Press. Illesca, B. (2005). Temporary validation; The challenges of remedial ‘literacy’ programs. In B. Doecke & G. Parr (Eds.), Writing = Learning (2nd ed., pp. 166–181). Kent Town & Kensington Gardens: AATE & Wakefield Press. Illesca, B. (2007). Telling stories. My work as a literacy intervention teacher. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 6(3), 148–161. Retrieved online May, 2010, from http://education.waikato.ac.nz/ research/files/etpc/2007v6n3nar1.pdf Kemp, D. (1996, October 22). Alarming new literacy results. Press release. 85

PARR Kracauer, S. (1929/1998). The salaried masses: Duty and distraction in Weimar Germany (Q. Hoare, Trans.). London & New York: Verso. Lewis, S., & Salusinszky, I. (2006, April 21). PM canes ‘rubbish’ postmodern literature. The Australian. MacLachlan, G., & Reid, I. (1994). Framing and interpretation. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. McLean Davies, L. (2008). Competing capital and cultural cringe: Teaching Australian literature in the (global) secondary English classroom. In Australian literature in a global world. Conference of The Association for the Study of Australian Literature Unpublished paper. McClenaghan, D. (2006). Imaginative recreation and popular music. In B. Doecke, M. Howie, & W. Sawyer (Eds.), ‘Only connect …’: English teaching, schooling and community (pp. 156–165). Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press/AATE. McLenaghan, D., & Doecke, B. (2010). Multiliteracies in the English curriculum. In D. Cole & D. Pullan (Eds.), Multiliteracies in motion (pp. 224–238). New York: Routledge. Mellor, B., Patterson, A., & O’Neill, M. (1991). Reading fictions. Scarborough, WA: Chalkface Press. Misson, R., & Morgan, W. (2006). Critical literacy and the aesthetic: Transforming the English classroom. Urbana, IL: NCTE. Mitchell, L., & Parry, S. (2005, October). Pop goes the Bard. The Age: Education, pp. 6–7. Monash Professional Learning Research Group (MPLRG). (Eds.). (2008). Leading professional learning: Cases of professional dilemmas. Melbourne: DEECD, Monash Professional Learning Research Group. Monash Professional Learning Research Group (MPLRG). (Eds.). (2009). Willing to lead: A case book of practice. Melbourne: DEECD, Monash Professional Learning Research Group. Monash Professional Learning Research Group (MPLRG). (Eds.). (2010). Leading professional learning: A case book of practice. Melbourne: DEECD, Monash Professional Learning Research Group. Morson, G., & Emerson, C. (1990). Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a prosaics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Morson, G. (2004). The process of ideological becoming. In A. Ball & S. Warshauer-Freedman (Eds.), Bakhtinian perspectives on language, literacy and learning (pp. 317–333). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (NITL). (2005, December). Teaching reading: Report and recommendations. National inquiry into the teaching of literacy. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. Retrieved May, 2010, from http://www.dest.gov.au/nitl/documents/report_recommendations. pdf Parr, G. (2003). Teacher professional learning and transgression: Inquiry on the boundary. English in Australia, 138(Spring), 63–79. Parr, G. (2004, September). Professional learning, professional knowledge and professional identity: A bleak view, but oh the possibilities … English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 3(2), 21–47. Parr, G. (2007, December). Writing and practitioner inquiry: Thinking relationally. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 6(3), 22–47. Parr, G. (2010). Inquiry-based professional learning: Speaking back to standards-based reforms. Teneriffe: Post-Pressed. Parr, G., & Doecke, B. (forthcoming). Writing, identity and professional learning: A dialogic interaction. In M. Kooy & K. van Veen (Eds.), Teacher learning that matters: An international conversation. London: Routledge. Reid, I. (1984). The making of literature: Texts, contexts and classroom practices. Norwood: Australian Association for the Teaching of English. Reid, I. (1991). Remaking literature through narrative. In J. Thomson (Ed.), Reconstructing literature teaching: New essays on the teaching of literature (pp. 174–183). Norwood, SA: AATE. Reid, A. (2005). Rethinking the democratic purposes of public schooling in a globalizing world. In M. Apple, J. Kenway, & M. Singh (Eds.), Globalizing education: Policies, pedagogies, and politics (pp. 281–296). New York: Peter Lang. Reid, A. (2010, May 7–8). My school? Whose school?: My school? Whose school? What’s on the table for public education in Australia? Keynote address at Policy Forum, Deakin University. Retrieved online May, 2010, from http://communities.deakin.edu.au/ppf2010/node/39 86

LITERATURE TEACHING IN AUSTRALIA Rudd, K., & Gillard, J. (2008). Quality education: The case for an education revolution. Canberra, ACT: Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR), The Commonwealth of Australia. Scholes, R. (1999). The rise and fall of English. New Haven, CT, London: Yale University Press. Smith, D. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Spivak, G. (2003). Death of a discipline. New York: Columbia University Press. Sumara, D. (1996). Private readings in public: Schooling the literary imagination. New York: Peter Lang. Teese, R. (2000). Academic success and social power: Examinations and inequality. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press. Teese, R. (2003). Undemocratic schooling: Equity and quality in mass secondary education in Australia. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press. Thomson, J. (Ed.). (1992). Reconstructing literature teaching: New essays on the teaching of literature. Norwood, SA: AATE. Williams, R. (1977/2001). Language as sociality. In J. Higgins (Ed.), The Raymond Williams reader (pp. 188–207). Malden, MA: Blackwell. Yandell, J. (2007). Investigating literacy practices within the secondary English classroom, or ‘Where is the text in this class?’ Cambridge Journal of Education, 37(2), 249–262.

Graham Parr Faculty of Education Monash University

87

THEO WITTE

6. BETWEEN DREAM AND DEED Constructive and Destructive Frictions in an Ill-Structured Domain

INTRODUCTION

What are teachers trying to accomplish when reading literary texts with adolescents in the classroom, and what is the result? Teachers often unwittingly achieve very different objectives than what they intend. Janssen (1998) found that almost 90% of teachers of Dutch regard awakening an interest in literature and reading pleasure as the most important goals of literature teaching. However, that study also revealed that over half of fifteen-year-old students (grade 10) have problems reading and understanding literary texts. This lack of success has a devastating impact on student motivation and reading pleasure. And of course it is also disappointing for teachers. Research into teacher competences highlights the fact that many teachers have difficulty matching their objectives and choices of text with the interests and reading level of their students (Witte, 2008; Kyriakides, Creemers & Antoniou, 2009). This is not a uniquely Dutch problem. Appleyard (1994), who teaches English at Boston College in the United States, expresses the friction between himself and his students as follows: I wanted them to think about how books and poems were structured and how they worked, what values they implied, how they reflected or criticized the culture in which they were produced. The students seemed to want to discover messages about the meaning of their lives, to find interesting characters they could identify with in their fantasies, or to use the ideas of the author to bolster their own beliefs and prejudices. This discrepancy began to puzzle me more and more. (Appleyard, 1994, p. 1) Students in upper secondary classes (grades 10–12) not only have to read what they experienced as very different books, but they have also to do so in a way that perhaps differs from what they can and would like to do (Witte, 2008). In other words, there is friction between the ‘perceived curriculum’, or what teachers want, and the ‘operational curriculum’, or what actually happens in the classroom. Moreover, the curriculum can lead to unintended learning outcomes – the ‘experiential curriculum’ (Goodlad, 1979). These frictions mean that teachers often cannot do full justice to the texts that they would like to tackle in class and consequently find it increasingly

P-H. van de Ven and B. Doecke (eds.), Literary Praxis: A Conversational inquiry into the Teaching of Literature, 89–105. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

WITTE

difficult to realise their ideals. In the Netherlands, the following verse is often cited to express this tension between ideal and reality: Want tussen droom en daad / staan wetten in de weg en praktische bezwaren / en ook weemoedigheid, die niemand kan verklaren, / en die des avonds komt, wanneer men slapen gaat. (For between dream and deed / laws and practicalities remain / and melancholy, which none can explain, / which comes in the evening, when one goes to sleep.) (Willem Elsschot, 1882–1960) Many teachers blame these problems on the fact that their students are not very well-read or on an overfull programme (the ‘laws and practicalities’). They are consequently disappointed at the difficulty of realising their ideals (and might be said to slip into ‘melancholy’). But a closer look will reveal that many problems arise out of the inability of teachers to reach students with a text and to distance themselves from their own attitude, biography and literary baggage. The case studies of Ramon and Mies, two teachers of Dutch literature, reflect this problem. Before I comment on them, I will first examine the literary development of adolescents in the context of literature teaching in the Netherlands. DUTCH CONTEXT

The government’s agenda swings from liberation and decentralization to centralized and detailed regulatory requirements. Since the introduction of the Dutch Constitution in 1815 freedom of expression and religion has been one of the main democratic pillars of the Dutch state. This humanist principle also underpins the Dutch educational system in which individuals are free to found their own schools, with the government having primarily a facilitating role. Schools and teachers are to a degree autonomous. To a degree, because there are of course rules attached to setting up a school and exams are increasingly regulated by the government. Dutch Delta There is no national exam for the teaching of literature. The National Curriculum (Rijksleerplan) of 1970 sets out the exam requirement in very general terms: The final examination tests the knowledge and understanding of literature. (…) the theory and history of literature need only be included in the examination inasmuch as the elements addressed relate to the work read by the candidate. (National Curriculum, 1970). Teachers themselves could decide which objectives they wished to pursue, how many and which texts they wished to use, and how much time they wished to devote to literature. This freedom has to this day prompted discussions about the aims and content of literature teaching. Research into teacher attitudes and classroom practice shows that literature teaching has assumed many forms since the 1970s. Studies conducted before 1997 highlighted the fact that the teaching of literature had many possible objectives, 90

BETWEEN DREAM AND DEED

reflecting the many different views on the purpose and function of reading literature (Braaksma & Bonset, 2009). The teaching of literature is therefore one of the ‘illstructured domains’ (Spiro, Feltovich, Jacobson & Coulson, 1991). Well-structured domains are subjects whose objectives and structure most researchers are in agreement about, whereas ill-structured domains are characterized by an unsystematic structure and a multiplicity of visions. As a result, students may be ill-equipped to consistently apply and develop the knowledge they have acquired. Moreover, students can be taken by surprise if a change of teacher results in a completely different programme. In the Netherlands, there are in a manner of speaking just as many curricula for the teaching of literature as there are teachers. Janssen (1998) was the first to document the ‘delta’ of Dutch literature teaching. She describes four prototypical approaches or currents: (1) cultural education, (2) literary-aesthetic education, (3) social education and (4) individual development. She also notes that these approaches are sometimes difficult to distinguish in practice because many teachers adopt an eclectic approach. At the time of the National Curriculum, literature teaching was dominated by the cultural approach, and the 1970s and 80s saw a greater focus on the student as teachers sought new pathways. This search raised questions about text choice, objectives and testing, and the cultural approach came under pressure from the literary-aesthetic, social and reader-centred view of literature. The literary-aesthetic, text-based approach became especially popular because it gave teachers the ‘tools’ to operationalize the difficult-to-grasp interpretation process. Verboord (2005) embroidered on Janssen’s study. He distilled the four approaches to two underlying dimensions: the culture-centred (combining types 1 and 2) and student-centred approaches (combining types 3 and 4). Like Janssen, he concluded that in practice these differences were gradual rather than categorical. Moreover, his empirical data revealed a trend towards a more studentcentred approach between 1975 and 2000. This trend was probably linked to educational innovations in 1997 that advocated a more student-centred curriculum. Nevertheless, the discussion about the aims and content of literature teaching continues. Alongside the debate about a culture-centred or student-centred approach, the composition of the reading list has come up for discussion. Students in the Netherlands compile their own book lists and read the books at home rather than at school. In the examination year, teachers test whether the students have satisfied the requirements. This examination usually takes the form of an interview. Depending on the type of school, the exam formally requires students to read an average of four works of ‘recognized literary quality’ each year for a period of two or three years. Some schools, however, feel that four books are not enough and prescribe five or six books a year. Another point for discussion relates to what ‘recognized literary quality’ actually means. Many teachers are unfamiliar with popular genres and question the literary quality of, say, adolescent novels and literary thrillers. They insist that students place works from the literary canon on their list. Recently there has been a discussion about which stages students pass through in their literary development at school. Witte (2008) investigated pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1986) among teachers of literature with regard to the relationship between the student as reader, text complexity and task complexity at 91

WITTE

different levels of literary competence for students aged 15 to 18 years. Teachers identify six levels that correspond to different kinds of reading: (1) experiential reading, (2) identifying reading, (3) reflective reading, (4) interpretive reading, (5) literate reading and (6) intellectual reading (level 6). The kind of reading is determined above all by the reader’s attitude to literature and his or her reasons for reading. Students with little reading experience and a negative attitude have a nihilistic, pragmatic view of literature: they have to study it because it is part of the curriculum. In subsequent stages, students discover that reading literature has different functions and satisfies different needs. You can, for instance, (1) read for pleasure, (2) recognize your own experience and thereby find self-affirmation, (3) expand your horizons, (4) discover deeper meanings and aesthetic enjoyment, (5) immerse yourself in literature, culture and history, and (6) nourish your intellect. The levels correspond to levels in models of developmental psychology.1 This means that the instrument is supported by both theory of classroom practice and development theory. Developing literary competence is a cumulative process, with each level laying the foundation for the next. The levels can be seen as repertoires of operations, or types of reading, which a student can employ flexibly. Flexibility is thus a feature of a higher level of literary competence. Students at level 1 can use only one type of reading, while students at a higher level can employ different ways of reading. Dutch Canal The government has intervened on several occasions to more effectively channel these ‘currents’ in the Dutch delta. The learning-to-learn paradigm became the focus of curriculum design in Dutch education in the 1990s. The year 1997 saw the introduction of the major educational innovation known as the ‘study house’. The study house is a metaphor for a pedagogical approach that focuses on student activity and independence. This innovation has entailed some changes in classroom management, curriculum planning and cooperation among school departments. In the classroom, the teacher’s role changed from that of mere instructor to a combination of instructor and coach (Bonset & Rijlaarsdam, 2004). Meanwhile, detailed learning outcomes (eindtermen) and exam programmes have been implemented to regulate the process. The new quality agenda for secondary education was launched in July 2008. In it, the government and the education sector set out their policy priorities for the years to come, together with the actions necessary to achieve them. One priority has implications for the mother-tongue curriculum, namely the ‘Delta plan for mathematics and language: to achieve a marked improvement in children’s language and numeracy skills.’ (The ‘Delta plan’ refers to a governmental plan in the 1960s to protect the Rhine-Meuse-Scheldt delta in the southwest of the Netherlands from the sea.) For mathematics and mother-tongue this priority resulted in a more detailed and regulated curriculum, the continuous, longitudinal learning path (doorlopende leerlijn), inspired by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages. 92

BETWEEN DREAM AND DEED

This learning path defines four standards or levels of language skills (including literature) and mathematics (grades 6 to 12). The four levels for the literary domain are an adaptation of Witte’s study of different reading stages. They have a cumulative structure, and take into account the cognitive, social and emotional development of adolescents. (See Appendix A.) LITERARY DEVELOPMENT

Literary development is a socialization process that is stimulated firstly by the family and later also by primary education, the public library, peers and secondary education. Literary competence does not develop spontaneously. Instead, students are initiated into literature within the institutional environment of education. In an educational context, the dividing line between development and learning is a problematic one that touches on one of the oldest disputes in the social sciences, namely the controversy between nature and nurture. In Germany, Graf (1995), Schön (1995) and others have used reading biographies to conduct retrospective research into the literary socialization of children aged 2 to 18 years. Garbe (2002) summarized some of the findings of this research. Within the literary socialization process, she distinguishes between intrinsic and extrinsic development factors and two critical development stages – primary and secondary literary initiation. Primary literary initiation occurs within the family, and secondary literary initiation during the second stage of secondary education. Intrinsic development factors are highly dependent on age and aptitude (nature), while extrinsic factors depend on the environment (nurture). Adolescent literary development cannot be viewed separately from intrinsic factors such as the cognitive and social-emotional development that adolescents undergo between the ages of 12 and 18 (Witte, 2008). In order to understand literary texts, readers must at times be able to independently construct entire representations and lines of reasoning, as in the case of unanswered questions or when establishing links between different storylines, perspectives or action sequences. In order to understand the experiences and values of a novel’s characters, especially those who are far removed from their own experience, readers must be able to dissociate themselves and to bring together the perspectives of different characters (Andringa, 1996). We know from theories of development psychology that students in this age group can vary immensely in this respect (Kohlberg, 1969; Loevinger, 1976; Selman, 1980). Reading is an interactive process in which characteristics of the reader, the text and the context influence one another. As well as internal socialization factors, there are external factors that play a major role in the literary development process. Students at school acquire literary experiences in a particular way: they often read texts that they have not chosen themselves and they communicate about their reading experiences and interpretations with their teacher and classmates in accordance with certain rules and conventions. In other words, there is an ‘interpretive community’ (Fish, 1980). In a different context, students would read very different texts and would reflect on their reading experiences in a very different way. Many adolescents would probably not read any books at all, let alone a literary novel or a book of poetry, if 93

WITTE

they didn’t have to do so for school. Students are initiated into literature for adults at school by subject specialists who grant them access to the broad spectrum of literature and who teach them to read differently, in particular with greater distance. The teaching of literature influences the way in which readers engage with literature once they have left school. As such, it can be seen as the most institutionalized intervention in the process of literary socialization. Teachers have a key part to play in this community. Beach and Marshall (1990) conceive of the interaction between teacher, students and text as a triangle that shows the dual relationships between these three constituents (Figure 1):

context

x

Figure 1. Teacher-text-student interaction in an educational context.

The teacher interacts with both students and the text. The teacher knows the text and approaches it from his or her own experience as a reader and teacher. The teacher also knows the students. He or she will take both the text and students into account when dealing with the text and may try to bridge any gaps that exist between them. Students also have their own reading of the text. In addition, they interact with the teacher and the teacher’s interpretation of the text. The text also has a dual relationship in that both the students and the teacher have their own reading of the text. Ultimately, it is the sociocultural context of literature teaching – the Dutch context in the case of Ramon and Mies – that helps shape the interaction between these three actors. CONSTRUCTIVE AND DESTRUCTIVE FRICTIONS

I will discuss the cases of Ramon and Mies in which they reflect on their views of literary education and their control of the learning process. Since the learning-tolearn paradigm was introduced in the Dutch curriculum, teachers are looking for a new balance between student and teacher controlled regulation activities. Bonset 94

BETWEEN DREAM AND DEED

Table 1. Interplays between three levels of teacher regulation and three levels of student regulation of learning processes (Vermunt & Verloop, 1999: 270) Degree of student regulation of learning High Intermediate Low

Degree of teacher regulation of learning Strong Destructive friction Destructive friction Congruence

Shared Destructive friction Congruence Constructive friction

Loose Congruence Constructive friction Destructive friction

and Rijlaarsdam (2004) defined three degrees of student/teacher regulation. (1) In independent working the teacher determines the activities and the manner in which this must be carried out. The learning is teacher-controlled. (2) In independent learning the teacher encourages students to make the learning decisions. Generally, these decisions fall into two categories: the what and the how of learning. When students can make choices in both respects themselves, we can establish there is shared control. (3) Self-regulated learning gives the teacher only general control over the final objective. It is left to the students to decide what this objective requires and how to achieve it: the learning is student-controlled. Vermunt and Verloop (1999) studied different ways in which student regulation and teacher regulation of learning influence one another. Table 1 presents possible interplays between student regulation and teacher regulation of learning processes. Teaching and learning strategies are congruent on one diagonal. For example, if students are not very good at regulating their own learning (low degree) and the teacher does it for them (strong degree), teaching and learning strategies are balanced for that moment. The majority of cells (six out of nine) represent friction between teaching and learning. Some of these are destructive in nature, for example when students who are capable of self-regulated learning (high degree) have a teacher who prescribes in detail how they should learn (strong degree). This combination frustrates student regulation and can lead to demotivation. Others are constructive, in the sense that they challenge students to try new ways of learning and thinking. For example a student with a low degree of regulation needs the helping hand and control of the teacher (shared degree). These constructive cells reflect Vygotsky’s ‘zone of proximal development’ in which teachers mediate the literary socialization of their students. Thus teachers play a key role in interaction. In my discussion, I will therefore be guided primarily by the interaction models developed by Vermunt and Verloop (1999) and by Beach and Marshall (1990). I will also refer to my own research into the literary development of adolescents in upper secondary classes. Before commenting on Ramon and Mies’s lessons, I will summarize their views on literature teaching, their classroom practice and their results. Ramon: Between Theory and Practice Ramon is guided in his lesson plan by his own biography as a student and as a student of literary theory. Because he himself learned so much from literature as a student, more than anything else he would like to expand his students’ world view. 95

WITTE

Table 2. ‘Ramon’ case study: summary of teacher and student activities Teacher instructs and forms five ‘expert groups’ supervises group work instructs and forms new groups bringing together the five expertises leads whole-class discussion, asks questions summarizes lesson objective

Students read the story individually and answer questions discuss their answers in their ‘expert group’ and jointly come up with conclusions each student reports on the findings of his or her ‘expert group’ to four other experts answer questions ?

But he opts for a literary-academic objective: during his studies of literary theory, he learned that a ‘multiform approach’ to the text yields the best results. He therefore wants to equip students with ‘tools’ to help them approach texts in different ways. The lesson was intended for a 4 VWO class (pre-university education, 15–16 years, grade 10). An important criterion in the choice of text was that it should allow a ‘multiform approach’. It was clear that Ramon himself had to like the story. Although he regarded the existential theme as too difficult for this target group, he believed that Thomas van Aalten’s story would tie in with the milieu of his students because the language is not difficult and the main character tells a lot about his youth through flashbacks. Ramon designed several group tasks so that students could explore a structural and analytical, sociological, reader-centred or author-centred text approach. Once students discussed the task in their ‘expert group’, the four areas of expertise were combined to form new groups in which students could exchange answers and try to reach conclusions about the results of the different approaches. The teacher rounded off the lesson through a structured discussion in which he summarized the essence of the subject matter. The main teacher and student activities are summarized in Table 2. The evaluation shows that Ramon was dissatisfied with how the lesson went and with the disappointing results. He attributed this among other things to having overestimated the students’ reading level, to the complexity of the text and to too much teacher direction, which gave students insufficient opportunity to construct knowledge themselves. I will try to expand on his analysis and to explain his interaction with the class from the perspective of the models referred to above. Comments Ramon’s disappointment shows that there is tension between the perceived and operational curricula. The differences between the teacher’s academic objectives and student initial levels on the one hand, and text complexity and student reading levels on the other, led to destructive frictions. In just a short space of time, inexperienced readers of literature with little knowledge of the world were expected to arrive independently at the same discoveries, on the basis of a fairly complex story, some open questions and unstructured discussions, that their teacher, a well-educated and 96

BETWEEN DREAM AND DEED

adult student, had taken an entire course of study to achieve. The students were also given tools for approaching texts in a structural-analytical, sociological, readercentred and author-centred way. What these tools were, what they equip students with and how they should be used was not made explicit in this lesson. Moreover, the transcript shows that the teacher did not approach the text in a pluriform way but primarily from a structural analytical framework. The way the lesson was organized reinforced destructive frictions. The teacher opted for a low level of teacher regulation while student self-regulation was very low for this complex task. Students probably did not know what was expected of them. Fragments 1 and 2 reveal many hesitant, uncertain utterances from both the students and the teacher, which suggests that the ‘interpretive community’ of this lesson was not made clear enough for the participants. Over and above that, there was no opportunity to discuss comprehension and interpretation problems, as a result of which the reading of the participants varied enormously. In other words, interaction in the teacher-text-student triangle was not optimal. The choice of text and the lesson objectives lay far beyond the zone of proximal development of grade 10 students, which led to destructive frictions. Fragment 1 shows that the students were focused on the protagonist’s behaviour rather than the text approach. For many 15–year-olds, a precondition for reading a text is that they can identify with the characters and situations depicted: to borrow the terms of developmental psychology, they are not yet able to enter into the world of adults, who are far removed from the experience of young adolescents in social and psychological respects (Loevinger, 1976). The literary competence of these students corresponds to level 2 (see Appendix). This means that they had little experience of literature and didn’t know how to handle literary processes such as ‘filling the blanks’ (Iser, 1978, p 167) and open endings. They find it difficult to see through the unreliable perspective of a first-person narrator. They are not yet able to distance themselves and to identify implicit messages. They are not far enough advanced in their intellectual development to penetrate independently to the psychological and philosophical layers of a text. In short, readers with a low literary competence find it extremely difficult to understand and interpret Thomas van Aalten’s fairly complex story, let alone be concerned with ‘aesthetic awareness’ and a ‘multiform approach’ to the text. Such objectives require a metaposition that is asking far too much of students in grade 10. We know from studies of student literary development that this level is achieved by only 5% of the pre-university students in grade 12 (Witte, 2008). The teacher’s attempt to summarize his intentions once again at the end of the lesson was probably just a drop in the ocean. Although the students made no explicit evaluative utterances and we can therefore only speculate on the experiential curriculum, the cited lesson fragments together with the teacher’s own evaluation show that the learning gains were low. An unintended result of this lesson may have been that students discovered that they derived little satisfaction from reading a literary text judged ‘good’ by the teacher, that they themselves were unable to identify with the main character and that they hadn’t properly understood what the teacher meant by different reading objectives and appropriate ways of reading. I can imagine that this disappointing experience 97

WITTE

would make Ramon ‘melancholy’, causing him to look back with nostalgia on his own experiences as a school and university student. Mies: Lessons with a Message Like Ramon, Mies was inspired by her own biography. Her lessons were imbued with a certain political message. As she herself said, lessons should above all be ‘engaging lessons’ that spur students to critically reflect on the world and their own position in it. In her lesson series, she wanted to investigate whether the students could make the transition, by means of activating teaching methods and a politically-themed book, from experiental reading to a more identifying and reflective kind of reading. The lessons were intended for a 2 VWO class (pre-university education, 13–14 years, grade 8). Mies preferred to choose books for young people that were permeated with political and social problems in such a way that students could understand the message. Whether or not students liked the book was of lesser importance. What mattered most to Mies was that students could identify with someone else, could put themselves in someone else’s shoes and learn to empathize with the problems of young people their own age who lived in wretched conditions and could realize how well off they are in the Netherlands. The teacher did her utmost to ensure that all students had a mental picture of the text. She read the entire text aloud, supported the text with a PowerPoint presentation and handout, and discussed certain themes as she read. She also made a video recording of the lessons so that absent students could catch up. The students kept a reading response log (RRL). Once the text had been read, they were given questions about the character development of the characters, which they exchanged in groups. This approach led to a context-rich learning environment in which students learned to discuss in a natural way, as well as to undertake action themselves and write an argumentative letter to aid agencies. Table 3 presents a summary of the teacher and student activities. Table 3. ‘Mies’ case study: summary of teacher and student activities Teacher reads the story out loud and supports this with PowerPoint presentation and handout explains and provides additional information discusses certain themes and assigns reflection tasks (‘Mama, if you could see me now’) makes video recording and places it on DVD assigns various identification tasks and instructs groups guides and coaches groups leads exchanges relates the text to the here and now and activates students 98

Students listen ask questions, discuss do reflection tasks in their reading logs watch the DVD (in the case of absent students) (individually) carry out tasks (in groups) exchange answers and together draw conclusions (placemat method) (whole class) exchange placemats (group trip) write letter to organization

BETWEEN DREAM AND DEED

Mies looked back on a successful series of lessons and was surprised at its effect on her class. She attributed this success to reading aloud a story with a political theme and to the many types of interaction with and between students. The emotional stimuli guaranteed student involvement, motivating them to write an argumentative letter to an aid agency. Her main point of criticism was that she was unsuccessful when it came to teaching students to place events and the behaviour of characters into a social context, in this case Philippine society and culture. I will now try to explain Mies’s experiences on the basis of my own interpretive framework. Comments The series of lessons went largely according to plan. I believe that there was a high level of congruence between teacher and students, as well as constructive friction in the development of an identifying and reflective way of reading. Student involvement and the willingness to take action on the part of some students even exceeded the teacher’s expectations. Student independence in the group tasks was also greater than expected. But there were some slight disappointments too. Although boys felt engaged with the subject of child prostitution, their reaction was less emotional than that of the girls. This ‘friction’ between boys and girls did have a constructive spin-off, however. The boys were interested in how the girls felt and were better listeners during group discussions than what Mies was accustomed to. This is a good example of successful peer mediation. Also disappointing was the fact that students failed to reflect seriously on the cultural-social context. Students were very involved in the experiences of the main character and were not able to abstract from them and to place the events into the sociocultural context of the Philippines. Nor were they able to enter into the world of the father who, against his will, sold his daughter to a pimp. But this is not a case of destructive friction because the students did not experience frustration. There is a danger of destructive friction, however, in Mies’s self-commentary (about curbing her ‘enthusiasm’) and in Piet-Hein’s observation that Mies used ‘persuasive techniques’ – suggesting that constant proselytising can irritate students if they don’t understand or share the teacher’s message. Mies’s teacher regulation was so strong that it was almost impossible for her students to escape the objectives. In the interactional triangle ‘teacher-text-student’, the teacher controlled both the reading and interpretation processes. She chose a gripping book for young people and read it right through. She explained certain passages, illustrated the text using PowerPoint and discussed certain themes and events on several occasions. She used video recordings and handouts so that students who had been absent from lessons could catch up. She also stimulated the emotional perception and identification of students through illustrations (PowerPoint), penetrating processing tasks (‘Mama, if you could see me now’) and discussions. This fitted in with her pedagogical care for a safe classroom environment in which students could freely express and develop their personal opinion. In addition, students made personal notes about their experiences in RRL and reflected in groups on the protagonist’s character development (agnitio) using a structured task (placemat method). These shared, tightly orchestrated activities facilitate (a) the development of a mental picture of the text, (b) the standardization of the ‘interpretive community’ 99

WITTE

and (c) the personal involvement of the students in the lesson objectives, with an appeal made to their compassion and human responsibility. This series of lessons thereby offered a context-rich environment for conducting discussions and writing an argument. This pedagogical experiment shows that interesting results are produced by a text that appeals to students, in combination with a variety of teaching techniques and a highly directive teacher. Most of Mies’s students were probably at the conformist, egocentric stage of development (Kohlberg 1969; Loevinger 1976). A characteristic of this stage is that students have difficulties abstracting from their own milieu and they reject any behaviour that deviates from that of their own group. We therefore see from their utterances that they interpret and judge the dramatic events from the perspective of their own experience, as if the main character is a friend. With regard to identification possibilities, the teacher’s choice of story was an excellent one, especially for girls. As the above activities show, student development towards an emotional, identifying kind of reading (see Appendix, level 2) was carefully mediated by the teacher. However, the reflective type of reading that the teacher intended (Appendix, level 3) appears to lie outside the zone of proximal development of many 13 and 14–year-olds. Despite the teacher’s strong mediation, the students were not yet open to the father’s world and to a society that tolerates behaviour regarded as reprehensible by Western standards. The fact that Western tourists help to preserve this system will have escaped many students. CONCLUSION

What happened in these case studies is typical of the teaching of literature in the Netherlands. Two teachers working at a school have entirely different views on the aims and function of literature teaching. Ramon, who strives for aesthetic awareness, represents an literary-academic approach, while Mies, who strives for social awareness, is a proponent of the student-centred approach. Of interest in this context is the discussion that each of them had with Piet-Hein about the extent to which teachers ‘may’ persuade their students. This discussion is part and parcel of the humanist tradition of Dutch education in which not only the teacher has autonomy, but where student autonomy is also an objective. Since the learning-to-learn paradigm (‘study house’) was introduced in 1997, the discussion about student independence has stepped up once more. This perhaps explains Ramon’s decision to limit his directions to students to enable them to discover for themselves what the different approaches to a text can deliver. In the case of Mies, my impression is that she is apologizing for her decision to give strong direction to the learning process in an ‘unorthodox’ way. With Vermunt and Verloop’s interaction model (Table 1), I have sought to show that the success of varying degrees of direction depends in part on the level of student independence and literary competence. These case studies also show that teacher mediation is essential in the zone of proximal development. The influence of intrinsic development factors on the reception and processing of literary texts is often underestimated in the teaching of literature. Nor does the cognitive and social-emotional development of students play a significant role in 100

BETWEEN DREAM AND DEED

Mies, Ramon and Piet-Hein’s discussions. Both case studies showed that if the lesson objectives lie beyond the zone of proximal development, destructive frictions arise because too much is demanded of students, which prevents self-regulation from taking place. Both case studies also showed the importance of taking account of student interests and reading levels when choosing texts and learning activities. It struck me in the case studies that both teachers were focused on the one lesson or series of lessons, paying little attention to the development process that students must pass through in the longer term. We know from development studies that it is critical for student motivation and progression for them to understand the development expected of them over a particular period (Meece, 1997; Schunk, 2000). Lack of continuity is disastrous for student literary development (Witte, 2008). Developing literary competence is a cumulative process, with each level laying the foundation for the next (Witte, 2008). We can interpret these levels as repertoires of actions, ways of reading that a student can deploy flexibly. Flexibility is thus a feature of a higher level of literary competence. If we link different aspects of literary awareness to Witte’s development levels (2008), we see the following sequence: personal awareness (levels 1 and 2), social awareness (level 3), aesthetic awareness (level 4), cultural awareness (level 5) and academic awareness (level 6). Ideally, both teachers should be able to teach all these aspects of literary awareness. The recently introduced continuous learning path with its four reference levels (see Appendix) offers Dutch literature teachers a framework for identifying different development stages in their students and for structuring the literary development process in the longer term. But it is uncertain to what extent the introduction of these levels in the Netherlands will produce a well-structured curriculum. It will require teachers to put their personal views into perspective and to adopt a ‘pluriform’ approach to texts in their teaching (personal, social, aesthetic, cultural and academic) so that secondary students can extend their repertoires step by step. Innovation studies by Van de Ven (1996) and Van den Berg and Ros (1999) show, however, that teachers find it very difficult to alter their teaching and to adopt a pluriform approach. As we have observed with Ramon and Mies, they often cling to their own academic training and their experiences as a student. Between dream and deed. NOTES 1

It is primarily in research literature from the Anglophone world that we encounter theories on the stages of literary development. Kreft (1977), Applebee (1978), Thomson (1987) and Appleyard (1994) investigated the literary development of various groups of subjects. All these development theories converge into five to six almost identical development stages. There are also strong parallels with the stages in psychological (Kohlberg, 1969; Loevinger, 1976) and aesthetic development models (Housen, 1983; Parsons, 1987; Gardner, 1990).

REFERENCES Applebee, A. N. (1978). The child’s concept of story. Ages two to seventeen. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Appleyard, J. A. (1994). Becoming a reader. The experience of fiction from childhood to adulthood. New York: Cambridge University Press. 101

WITTE Andringa, E. (1996). Effects of ‘Narrative Distance’ on readers’ emotional involvement and response. Poetics, 23, 431–452. Beach, R., & Marshall, J. (1990). Teaching literature in the secondary school. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers. Bonset, H., & Rijlaarsdam, G. (2004). Mother-tongue education (L1) in the learning-to-learn paradigm: Creative redevelopment of learning materials. L1–Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 4, 35–62. Braaksma, M., & Bonset, H. (2009). Het schoolvak Nederlands opnieuw onderzocht. Een inventarisatie van onderzoek van 1997 tot en met 2007. Enschede: SLO. Fish, S. (1980). Is there a text in this class? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Garbe, C. (2002). De literaire socialisatie van jongeren in de mediamaatschappij. Onderzoeksperspectieven uit Duitsland. In A. Raukema, D. Schram, & C. Stalpers (Eds.), Lezen en leesgedrag van adolescenten en jongvolwassenen. Stichting Lezen reeks (Vol. 5, pp. 263–283). Delft: Eburon. Gardner, H. (1990). Art education and human development. Santa Monica, CA: The Paul Getty Trust. Goodlad, J. (1979). Curriculum inquiry. The study of curriculum practice. New York: McGraw-Hill. Graf, W. (1995). Fiktionales lesen und lebensgeschichte. Lektürebiographien der fernsehgeneration. In C. Rosebrock (Ed.), Lesen im medienzeitalter. Biographische und historische aspekte literarischer sozialisation (pp. 97–125). Weinheim: Juventa. Housen, A. (1983). The eye of the beholder: Measuring aesthetic development. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University Graduate School of Education, Cambridge, MA. Iser, W. (1976). Der Akt des Lesens. Theorie ästhetischer Wirkung. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Janssen, T. (1998). Literatuuronderwijs bij benadering. Een empirisch onderzoek naar de vormgeving en opbrengsten van het literatuuronderwijs Nederlands in de bovenbouw van het havo en vwo. Amsterdam: Thesis Publishers. Kyriakides, L., Creemers, B. P. M., & Antoniou, P. (2009). Teacher behaviour and student outcomes: Suggestions for research on teacher training and professional development. Teaching and Teacher Education, 25, 12–23. Kohlberg, L. (1969). Stage and sequence: The cognitive-developmental approach to socialization. In D. A. Goslin (Ed.), Handbook of socialization theory and research (pp. 347–480). New York: Rand McNally. Kreft, J. (1987). Moralstufen in Texten – interpretiert im entwicklungspsychologischdidactische Aspekt. In H. Willenberg (Ed.), Zur Psychologie des Literaturunterrichts (pp. 112–130). Frankfurt am Main: Diesterweg. Loevinger, J. (1976). Ego development. Conceptions and theories. San Francisco/London: Jossey Bass Publishers. Meece, J. (1997). Child and adolescent development for educators. New York: McGraw-Hill. Parsons, M. J. (1987). How we understand art: A cognitive developmental account of aesthetic experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schön, E. (1995). Veränderung der literarischen rezeptionskompetenz jugendlicher im aktuellen medienverbund. In G. Lange & W. Steffens (Ed.), Moderne formen des erzählens in der kinder- und jugendliteratur der gegenwart unter literarischen und didaktische Aspekten (pp. 99–127). Würzburg: Koningshausen und Neumann. Schunk, D. (2000). Learning theories. An educational perspective. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Shulman, L. (1986). Paradigms and research programs in the study of teaching: A contemporary perspective. In M. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of research on teaching (pp. 3–36). New York, London: MacMillan. Selman, R. L. (1980). The growth of interpersonal understanding. Developmental and clinical analyses. New York: Academic Press. Spiro, R., Feltovich, P., Jacobson, M., & Coulson, R. (1991). Cognitive flexibility, constructivism and hypertext: Random access instruction for advanced acquisition in ill-structured domains. Educational Technology, 33(5), 24–33.

102

BETWEEN DREAM AND DEED Thomson, J. (1987). Understanding teenagers’ reading. Reading processes and the teaching of literature. Norwood: Australian Association for the Teaching of English Inc. Van de Ven, P. (1996). Moedertaalonderwijs. Interpretaties in retoriek en praktijk, heden en verleden, binnen- en buitenland. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff. Van den Berg, R., & Ros, A. (1999). The permanent importance of of the subjective reality of teachers during educational innovation. A concerns-based approach. American Educational Research Journal, 36(4), 879–906. Verboord, M. (2005). Long-term effects of literary education on book-reading frequency: An analyses of Dutch student cohorts 1975–1998. Poetics, 33(5–6), 320–342. Vermunt, J., & Verloop, N. (1999). Congruence and friction between learning and teaching. Learning and Instruction, 9, 257–280. Witte, T. (2008). Het oog van de meester. Een onderzoek naar de literaire ontwikkeling van havo- en vwo-leerlingen in de tweede fase van het voortgezet onderwijs. Stichting Lezen Reeks 12. Delft: Eburon.

Theo Witte University Centre for Learning & Teaching University of Groningen, the Netherlands

103

104

Level 1 (age 11–12) Experiential reading

Competences Understand – able to identify basic structure elements (e.g. changes in time, place, person) summarize key fragments Interpret – able to relate the story to their own world recognize different feelings of characters give re-creative response (e.g. drawing) Evaluate – able to give personal (subjective) response express their own anti- or sympathy for characters and their experiences use emotive criteria (e.g. exciting, sad, stupid)

Aims Understand – able to identify genre (e.g. war, romantic, thriller, fantasy) summarize story (chronological order) recognize metaphorical language describe situations, intrigues, and feelings and thoughts of characters describe development of main character Interpret – able to identify with characters and events typify characters, inner and outer determine the main topic of the story Evaluate – able to give personal (subjective) response use also realistic criteria support ones findings with references to the text exchange reading experience with peers motivate his/her interests

Level 2 (age 14–15) Identifying reading Understand – able to identify narrative techniques (e.g. tense, characterizing, atmosphere) notice different storylines recognize important figures of speech establish causal links (incidents, behaviour) notice explicit motifs and goals of characters Interpret – able to dominate implicit motifs and goals of characters give meaning to symbols give an outline of the ‘message’ or central idea of the text explain effects of the use of basic narrative techniques Evaluate – able to use emotive, realistic, moral and cognitive criteria explain new insights (about the world, live, literature) discuss with peers: their interpretation of the text ‘quality’ or value of the text

Level 3 (age 16–17) Critical and reflective reading

APPENDIX A | FORMAL CURRICULUM THE NETHERLANDS Level 4 (age 17–18) Interpretive and esthetical reading Understand – able to recognize irony distinguish different layers of meaning (e.g. historical, sociological, philosophical, inter textual) notice stylistic and structural details Interpret – able to identify oneself emphatically with different characters formulate overall theme relate text to historical cultural context Evaluate – able to use (emotive, realistic, moral, cognitive) structural and esthetical criteria compare different texts (content, structure, style) evaluate the critics of peers and expert readers motivate their interest in some authors

WITTE

Criteria for text selection

social, psychological and moral issues in the text motivate their interest in particular issues and themes describe their literary development and motivate their literary taste relatively simple children’s relatively simple young adult relatively complex young adult literature: simple structure, exciting literature or simple adult literature or not complex adult or dramatic story, high tempo literature: clear (explicit) literature: structure can be structure, dramatic storyline, complex; literary procedures like sometimes tension can be shifts in time or changes of interrupted by descriptions and perspective tend to be clear; thoughts (inner monologues). deeper layer of meaning Poetry and songs have a narrative alongside the concrete one. Text structure and are expressive deals with personal or social (emotional) or humoristic. issues.

Appendix A (Continued)

relatively complex adult literature: ‘literary’ style, complex techniques (e.g. unreliable perspective, implicit shifts of time and changes of perspective), metaphorical style, non contemporary language 3 old canonical texts (published before 1880).

BETWEEN DREAM AND DEED

105

PART 3: READING AND REREADING

TERRY LOCKE

7. IF IN DOUBT, REACH FOR A STORY

I am aware that many of my contemporaries maintain that nations are never their own masters here below, and that they necessarily obey some insurmountable and unintelligent power, arising from anterior events, from their race, or from the soil and climate of their country. Such principles are false and cowardly; such principles can never produce aught but feeble men and pusillanimous nations. Providence has not created mankind entirely independent or entirely free. It is true, that around every man a fatal circle is traced, beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free; as it is with men, so with communities. The nations of our time cannot prevent the condition of man from becoming equal; but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness. (de Tocqueville, 1956, p. 317). The aristocratic Frenchman, Alexis De Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America in 1835 out of a sense that the writing was on the wall – that democratic ideology with its ‘principle of equality’ was an inexorable historical force. His book, however, was not a celebration of democracy as he experienced and analysed it in his travels in the United States, but rather the expression of profound dismay that the ‘principle of equality’ can lead to the tyranny of a majority that is at odds with individual freedom, equality and social justice. In our own time, we can see the global marketplace enshrined as an ‘insurmountable and unintelligent power’ whose workings must be accepted, regardless of their capacity to destroy communities, environments and livelihoods. What would de Tocqueville have thought of the bail-out of the American banking system? I am privileged to be invited to join in this conversation. I am a teacher-educator and researcher who also spent 12 years as a secondary classroom teacher and in a more remote life as a university lecturer in an English department plying the trade of literary critic. Recently, I led a two-year project on teaching literature in the multicultural classroom and in the course of the project was able to spend time observing four wonderful secondary teachers at work in diverse classrooms (Locke, Cawkwell, Sila’ila’i, Cleary, de Beer, Harris, Lumby, Riley, Sturgess and Thumath, 2008). The relative ‘privilege’ of the students taught by Prue, Ramon and Mies remind me of a 20–minute car trip I undertook from Sandy Harris’s classroom in Mangere College (a decile 1 school in Auckland)1 to Janet Sturgess’s classroom in Botany Downs Secondary College (a decile 10 school, also in Auckland). At the start of Sandy’s lesson with her Year 11 class,2 she gave out pencils and paper and used P-H. van de Ven and B. Doecke (eds.), Literary Praxis: A Conversational inquiry into the Teaching of Literature, 109–121. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

LOCKE

one of the pencils as a reward to be given to a well-performing student at the end of the lesson. In Janet’s Year 9 class, the students were well equipped with bulging pencil-cases, filled to the brim with writing/calculating paraphernalia. In New Zealand, a country that once prided itself on its egalitarianism, ‘the income gap between families of unqualified and qualified parents has more than doubled over 25 years’ (Anon., 2008, p. 2; see also Cotterell et al., 2008). For many of its citizens, de Tocqueville’s ‘fatal circle’ is being drawn very tightly indeed. Altruism is a hallmark of the professional teacher; it is as true for Prue, Bella, Ramon and Mies as it is for teachers in the New Zealand project. Prue recognizes the ‘fragility’ of democracy but still wants to ‘help students develop a consciousness of the values, the responsibilities, the behaviours underpinning a democratic process’. Ramon rejects an empty aestheticism which disconnects the literary text from the world and grapples with how to develop an aesthetic with an ethical face. Mies’ agenda is somewhat more straightforward: to use literary study to sensitise her students to the plight of others and to the extent of their own privilege. One of the New Zealand’s project’s teachers, David Riley, wrote the following in his reflective profile: The media represents South Auckland and Otara in particular ways and I want students to be able to be aware of that and question it and reject it if necessary. Representations can be very powerful, they can influence how we see the world, they can promote ideas. I want students to be able to look at advertisements for a ‘White Sunday Loan’ and be able to question it. It may help their families in some way. Behind this sentiment is a recognition of the ways in which ‘loan sharks’ target poor Pacific Island families in South Auckland by manipulating a perceived tendency to spend extravagantly for White Sunday, a special day focused on children.3 How might literary study in the context of L1 subjects further an altruistic agenda that seeks to foster democratic ideals and address issues of social injustice? And is this an appropriate aim? To begin addressing this question I turn to the nature of dialogic inquiry and conversation. TALKING THE TALK

The long shadow of Bakhtin stretches across the writings of these Australian and Dutch teachers. It is Bella who refers specifically to Bakhtin in her commentary on Prue’s teaching, referring approvingly to Prue’s view of her students ‘as complex and contradictory individuals whose words are split in productive dialogue between themselves and others, between the individual and the social’. She then quotes Bakhtin: ‘I live in a world of others’ words’ (Bakhtin 1986, p. 143). Piet-Hein quotes Bakhtin in discussing the way he and Ramon and Mies are ‘each constructing an understanding of literature and literary education’: ‘After all, our thought itself – philosophical, scientific, and artistic – is born and shaped in the process of interaction and struggle with others’ thought, and this cannot but be reflected in the forms that verbally express our thought as well’ (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 92). 110

IF IN DOUBT, REACH FOR A STORY

Before moving to some considerations of the realm of classroom talk (or discourse), let me discuss the pertinence of Bakhtin to an English teacher desirous of fostering democratic ideals and to the dilemma of the one and the many that de Tocqueville refers to (i.e. can e pluribus unum be achieved without the one being tyrannical, oppressive, stultifying and conformist?). I add two more quotations to the mix. Moreover, any speaker is himself a respondent to a greater or lesser degree. He is not, after all, the first speaker, the one who disturbs the eternal silence of the universe. And he presupposes not only the existence of the language system he is using, but also the existence of preceding utterances – his own and others’ – with which his given utterance enters into one kind of relation or another (builds on them, polemicizes with them, or simply presumes that they are already known to the listener). Any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 69). The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language … but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own … (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 294). Literary study influenced by such thinking: – Views the literary text as a special kind of text or utterance, whose maker is entering into (intertextual) dialogue with a complex history of preceding utterances as well as with anticipated texts/utterances in response (what Bakhtin calls ‘addressivity’); – Views the production of and response to literary texts as replete with the presence of the ‘other’ and as rhetorically situated; – Views literary texts and indeed all utterances as replete with the traces of the intentionalities of others. ‘We learn our language by assimilating the voices of others, and we speak back to our community of peers through re-externalized modes of discourse’ (Honeycutt, 1994, pp. 6–7). The sense of texts as reflecting myriad voices (as multivocal), Bakhtin termed ‘heteroglossia’. – Invites students into dialogue with the voices in texts (author and characters), voices or discursive positions implicit in texts (via what Fairclough terms ‘manifest’ or ‘constitutive’ intertextuality [1992, p. 85]), and voices responding to texts (academic critics, reviewers, teachers and fellow students). – Views literary production, literary criticism and literary study as praxial. Based in a neo-Aristotelian, tri-partite philosophy of knowledge, Regelski (1998) writes that: ‘Praxis is governed by the kind of “doing” called phronesis – an ethical [and situated] knowledge of and for achieving “right results” judged in terms of actual benefits for one’s self or for others’ (p. 28). In a rhetorical view of language production, the focus is on the social effects of our discursive acts, and has its philosophical counterpart in pragmatism. 111

LOCKE

While Bakhtin always emphasised individual agency, he also viewed the individual language-user and the other as mutually implicated. Like Whitman’s self, the Bakhtinian individual contains multitudes, not as a tyrannous majority but as a reminder of the responsibilities Prue refers to in her enunciation of democratic teaching. Talk of various kinds is the crucial determinant of what is learnt in classrooms. I tell my pre-service teachers that their primary responsibility as an English teacher is to manage a conversation around a text and that textual meaning (what students make of a text) depends on the character and quality of that conversation. Talk looms large in these Dutch and Australian classrooms. Prue tells us that her focus is ‘on talk’ and that ‘talk, writing, and talking about writing’ are ‘a way of helping us to construct our futures - both public and private’. By fostering talk, each pupil might be helped to find their ‘voice’ (a concept that poststructuralist approaches to literary study call into question but which won’t lie down and die). This whole project, of course, is about conversation, and I’m aware that my own chapter is a response to two chapters and informed by a number of writers whose words keep infiltrating my thinking processes – Bakhtin himself and Brian Boyd, whom I’ll bring in later. Group learning processes based on structured talk around a task are a staple of teacher education in New Zealand, which, of course, is no guarantee that they are happening successfully in the classroom. Group work figured largely in the classrooms of the secondary English teacher-researchers in the ‘Literature in the multicultural classroom project’ in New Zealand. For two of these teachers, working with predominantly Maori and Pasifika students, group processes were emphasised on the basis of their suiting the cultural learning styles of students (high on orality and low on individualism). One of the findings of the study was that social interaction was certainly a motivating factor for these supposedly disadvantaged students, especially when coupled with the novelty of sharing their responses with others through the kind of electronic shared space Prue used with her privileged students (Locke, 2009, p. 17, cf. Williams, Hedrick & Tuschinski, 2008). For one of the teachers (Sandy), a main focus of one of her interventions was the encouragement of wide, personal reading. Consequently, the interactive brief for her students was to share their personal responses to a range of texts with their peers. She and I have discussed our view that there is too much emphasis on a particular kind of ‘close reading’ in New Zealand English classrooms, often synonymous with the drilled preparation of examination answers for this or that achievement standard in ‘reading’ (see Locke, 2008). Sandy’s aim for her students was enjoyment. In a recent book, Terry Eagleton laments that ‘quite a few teachers of literature nowadays do not practise literary criticism, since they … were never taught to do so’ (2007, p. 1). What is striking about the group processes enacted, certainly by Ramon and Prue, is the extent to which they are shaped by literary criticism, which I define simply as the theory and practice of how to read and evaluate literature. As Piet-Hein tells us, Ramon emphasizes the importance of his university education, which involved sustained engagement with literary texts within a literary-theoretical framework. Ramon himself suggests the influence of a range of reading 112

IF IN DOUBT, REACH FOR A STORY

approaches, and sets out to have these reflected in the tasks he sets for the five initial groups, each governed by a different critical orientation. His overall aim, however, is what I have referred to as ‘critical eclecticism’, the awareness that different approaches to reading and writing produce different results, that classroom teachers are seldom pure in the application of a particular approach or theory, and that adopting an approach knowingly and critically for a particular purpose is part of a teacher’s improvisatory repertoire (Locke, 2005). (In Bakhtinian terms, we can also foster dialogue among different theories or discourses of literary reading in our classrooms.) His use of ‘expert’ groups, in a way, can be seen as designed to bring a range of literary critical approaches into a dialogic space via a student voice, with a view to producing greater insight. His own evaluation is that his strategy has not been particularly successful, and on the basis of a borrowed taxonomy of literary reading comes to the conclusion that his chosen text has been too difficult for his students. I have to confess to a prejudice against these kinds of taxonomy, since I have seen many instances where they (i.e. ‘progressions of learning’) operate as normative frames leading to the dumbing down or labelling of students. I think that Ramon is too hard on himself. As I read his account, he has been at pains to provide scaffolding to his students in their initial groups. What I did wonder at was the timeframe that this learning took place in (too short?) and whether there could have been more deliberate teacher modelling of the kind of dialogue students were expected to engage in. I was also left wondering if Ramon was reluctant to engage in modelling for fear of displaying even more what he terms a ‘dominant teacher text’. At this point in this section on talk, I am aware that a number of topics have entered the arena: activity design, the scaffolding of learning (and therefore talk) and now teacher ‘voice’ and its role in classroom discourse. Let’s turn to Prue. When we first meet her she is setting a close reading task for her students, which focuses on what I would call literary texture, even though they are invited to relate a selected passage to the story as a whole. In part, the voice she is wanting them to develop is one that will operate effectively in the rhetorical space of a high-stakes examination that demands of students the ability to articulate a position and defend it with reasoning and evidence. As I read the task, with its focus on ‘language and stylistic features’, it is quite in keeping with a New Critical approach, even though this is not stated. There appears to be less scaffolding in the task design that Ramon uses, which in one sense gives the students place to roam – a kind of ‘grounded theory’ approach to literary reading where a particular kind of patterning is not predetermined. The key thing here, however, is the role Prue adopts once the groups begin reporting back. She is a particular kind of questioner, drawing students out, demanding clarification and evidence, and contributing to the patternmaking process. The teacher is an improviser in all of this, but it is not random (Cazden, 2001). Rather she is governed by a view of what close literary reading entails, as per the following statement which could easily be recast as a set of unit objectives: I want even closer attention. I want them to use their own language with more particularity, to look for ease or eloquence, patterning or rhythm, sarcasm or 113

LOCKE

grace, resonance, ambiguity, image, or figurative language. Their evidence lies in how they read, and I am asking them to make the interpretive nature of their reading visible. Where Ramon builds scaffolding into his written instructions, Prue tends to display it via her own questioning and modelling behaviour. However, she does employ written scaffolding also, as in her ‘review of a review task’ with her excellent set of ‘strategies for reading an academic article’. In the New Zealand context, beginning teachers are often presented with the binary of sage-on-the-stage versus guide-at-the-side and told that their aim is the latter. The dilemma for the teacher, then, is the status of their own voice and their expertise based on their professional content knowledge. Mies has few misgivings about adding her own voice to the fray. We see it in the way she literally uses her own voice to orient her young, adolescent students to Blue is Bitter, by offering them a DVD of her own reading of the book accompanied by a PowerPoint of poor and exploited young people. You would have to say that she establishes a very strong presence by so doing. Yet it is also clear that her design of dialogic spaces (the placemat which retains spaces for individual voices while featuring the collective viewpoint of the group; the group expedition) encourages students to learn from one another. Finally, in this section on talk, we come to the most obvious topic of all, the importance of the language in which the talk is couched. In lamenting the supposed disappearance of literary criticism, Eagleton (2007) was in part lamenting the disappearance of a particular kind of metalanguage. This sense of Eagleton’s was actually borne out by what we observed in our New Zealand project on ‘Literature in the multicultural classroom’. Teachers in our project (especially primary teachers) were surprisingly insecure in their metalinguistic terminological grasp (see Locke, 2010a). This is not evident among these Dutch and Australian teachers, regardless of the differing approaches they bring to literary study. All implicitly assume a connection between metalanguage and metacognition. Prue is the teacher who most overtly encourages her (albeit older) students to think about their own thinking (via Ritchhart’s theories), and she models a metalanguage for analysing Farmer’s texts in her own talk. BRINGING THE AUTHOR BACK TO LIFE

Much of Theory, since Roland Barthes’s 1968 announcement of the ‘death of the author’, has sought – or professed – to downplay the individual using the rhetorical strategy of referring not to authors but to texts, as if they were selfcreated or the product only of ‘systems of cultural production’ (Boyd, 2009, p. 348). Early in Prue and Bella’s chapter, we find the following passage: One of the features of the year 12 Literature study, as it is mandated by the state, is the underlying premise that meaning is derived from a relationship between the text itself and the reader – in other words, there is an 114

IF IN DOUBT, REACH FOR A STORY

acknowledgement that the ‘truth’ of the text is inevitably negotiated rather than ‘given’. This passage would appear to bear out Roland Barthes’ (in)famous assertion that ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author’ (1977, p. 148). The use of the word ‘text’, commonplace enough in curriculum parlance, separates work from authorship. Yet what is striking about these three teachers is the extent to which the author is made present as a participant in the dialogue of meaningmaking that occurs in and beyond these classrooms. Operating out of a New Critical discourse, Brooks and Warren have the following to say about meaning-making. While they are referring to the reading of poetry, their argument can be extended to literary prose fiction: The meaning is the special import of the dramatisation of a situation. In sum, a poem, being a kind of drama that embodies a human situation, implies an attitude toward that situation … In short, poems do not so much ‘state’ themes as ‘test’ ideas and attitudes by putting those ideas and attitudes into dramatic situations, by dramatising human concerns and interests (1976, p. 267) [Their italics]. However, the New Critics had their own version of the death of the author, embedded in the doctrine of the ‘intentional fallacy’, which argued that the meaning of a work should be based on internal evidence and that preoccupation with the author or his/her intention was a distraction (Wimsatt & Beardsley, 1946). When Prue is questioning her students on their response to ‘Pumpkin’, she asks: ‘What might Farmer think about this attitude?’ (i.e. the character Andoni’s view that ‘it’s what people think that matters’). The modality (‘might’) is interesting here. The question suggests to me that from Prue’s perspective: authors’ voices are important and their attitudes to their characters matter; while we can’t be sure what authors’ attitudes are, we can interpret these on the basis of internal evidence. (An example of this is where Prue accepts a student’s view that ‘Farmer uses language to unsettle’ but asks her for internal evidence to support her interpretation of the author’s intention.) Later, we see the students building on these interpretations to begin fleshing out speculative ‘biographies’ of Farmer (which Prue doesn’t agree with). These speculations are not the only prompt for Prue to bring the flesh-andblood Beverley Farmer into the dialogic precinct. It is clear that there are such things as ‘underlying values implicit in the writing’ which are Farmer’s but which ‘might [my italics] reflect the context within which Farmer is writing’. Prue uses the expression ‘view of the world’ rather than ‘discourse’, indicating to me that there is little evidence of a critical literacy discourse at work here. Indeed, the word ‘might’ suggests that while writers have a relationship to their context, Farmer and her stories are more than mere products of ‘systems of cultural production’ (Boyd, 2009, p. 348). Engaging with Farmer herself has far-reaching consequences for these students’ reading of her work: ‘some comment that they need to rethink their hasty conclusions, that they might read her work differently now’. One of Ramon’s initial groups is also asked to focus on the author of Fam (Thomas van Aalten). The possibility of a connection between the story and the 115

LOCKE

author’s life is raised, as is the desirability of attempting to ascertain authorial intention (‘why Van Aalten decided to write this story’). In the class discussion that ensues, an overt connection is made between the author’s living situation and the setting of the story. Later Ramon puts the author at the centre of his view of literature: I see a text as a product of an author who has a certain message that he wrote down in a certain way in a certain time. I think it is impossible to fully extract that message, so what I try to do with my students, is to distil the author’s possible message. Mies is similarly author-focused. She tells us she has taught students ‘about Vondel’ before she names his work. She does not hesitate to speculate about authorial intention (‘which is what I think Vondel wants to achieve with his biblical tragedy’). Where Prue brings Farmer into the space of classroom, Mies enters into the space created by Bracke’s website (author of Blue is Bitter). Mies’ major aim as a teacher of literature, however, is the fostering of empathy. It is to this subject I now turn, via a diversion into evocriticism. EVOCRITICISM AND THE ESSENCE OF EMPATHY

In a number of publications, I have identified various paradigms of L1 textual study (e.g., Locke, 2007a): Cultural Heritage, Personal Growth (or ‘Progressive’ English), Rhetorical or Textual Competence and Critical Literacy. The first of these tends to be associated with the New Criticism and, as I have indicated, while hallowing genius eschews a focus on authorial intention. The Personal Growth model finds a critical fellow in reader response criticism (e.g. Rosenblatt, 1989; Iser, 1978). According to Rosenblatt ‘The finding of meanings involves both the author’s text and what the reader brings to it’ (1978, p. 11), but the focus is very much on literary response as a reader-text transaction. Proponents of Critical Literacy have tended to associate its development with Poststructural literary critical theories (a case in point is Morgan, 1992). Such theories, however, dispute the legitimacy of terms such as ‘authorship’, ‘individuality’ and ‘creative genius’. Potentially, the Rhetorical/Textual Competence model might focus on the literary author as implementing a range of textual strategies in relation to content, purpose and audience pitch. However, this model tends to be reflected in L1 classrooms as either a narrow focus on skills or a focus on genre as defined (and, I would argue, skewed) by the Australian Genre School. In either case, the emphasis is often student writing rather than reading and often on non-literary rather than literary texts. In the light of all this, the compelling question I am left with is why three exemplary L1 teachers of literature focus on the author in the way that they have, despite the strictures of widely circulated ‘schools’ of literary criticism. One answer to this question can, I argue, be found in a recent approach to literary criticism which, influenced by recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, has mounted a frontal assault on the tenets of postmodernism and poststructuralism (Carroll, 1995; Boyd, 2001, 2009). In what follows, 116

IF IN DOUBT, REACH FOR A STORY

I draw on Brian Boyd’s compelling book On the Origin of Stories (2009). The book is in two sections, the first of which provides an evolutionary account of story-telling, art and creativity, while the second applies ‘evocritical’ literary theory in a close analysis of Homer’s Odyssey and Dr Seuss’s Horton Finds a Who. Viewing art as a behaviour, Boyd suggests that: ‘we can view art as a kind of cognitive play, the set of activities designed to engage human attention through their appeal to our preference for inferentially rich and therefore patterned information’ (2009, p. 85). Boyd proposes four functions of art as Darwinian adaptation: 1. to refine and retune our minds in modes central to human cognition – sight, sound, and sociality – which it can do piecemeal through its capacity to motivate us to participate again and again in these high-intensity workouts; 2. to raise the status of gifted artists; 3. to improve the coordination and cooperation of communities, in our very social species; and 4. to foster creativity on an individual and social level (2009, p. 381). ‘Storytelling,’ according to Boyd, ‘appeals to our social intelligence. It arises out of our intense interest in monitoring one another and out of our evolved capacity to understand one another through theory of mind’ (p. 382), a unique human capability ‘to read one another, and therefore social events, in a far finergrained way than any other species’ (p. 141). By way of emphasizing the current disjunct between academic literary study and science, Boyd makes the point that thousands of papers have been published on theory of mind since 1978, all of which have been virtually ignored ‘in literary studies, despite the fact that trying to understand why others do what they do matters so much in both human life and literature’ (p. 141). Boyd offers and illustrates an approach to literary study that employs four levels of explanation: 1. the universal or specieswide, the features of human nature represented or appealed to in literature; 2. the local, in time, place, or culture, which may modify human behavior and interests in more or less substantial ways; 3. the individual powers, interests, and experience of storytellers or their audiences; 4. And the particular features of this or that story or audience situation (2009, p. 383). In respect of particular stories, a ‘problem-solving model’ is used which allows readers to analyse choices inferred behind a work of art aimed at solving particular problems, the first of which is to ‘capture attention’. We … interpret the actions of others in terms of their intentions. Telling a story is itself a complex action. So long as a storyteller holds our interest, we will infer significance both from the story world – from characters and events – and from the storyteller’s intentions in recounting these events in just this way (2009, p. 383). 117

LOCKE

Boyd has effectively turned the intentional fallacy on its head, drawing on theory of mind to justify and analyse a whole range of inferences, including authorial intention. What strikes me is that Boyd’s approach (which I’ve offered very sketchily here) is that it offers a better account of the practices that our Dutch and Australian teachers are engaging in with their students than we find in the kinds of literary criticism L1 teachers of literature are customarily exposed to. I have already drawn attention to their author focus. Another focus relates to the issue of attention. The topic itself has been getting its share of attention in the last decade in relation to literacies research. For example, Lankshear and Knobel (2001), draw on Goldhaber’s (1997) theory of an attention economy, noting that ‘being able to participate in the attention economy involves knowing how to pay and receive attention’ (‘Conceptions and theory of an emerging attention economy’, p. 8). It may be that attention economy proponents are actually repackaging something essential about human sociality, but which is taking a particular form in the digital age and its range of mediated practices. As mentioned above, Boyd argues that in relation to his fourth level of explanation (features of stories and audience situation), the first problem of a story-teller is ‘to capture attention’: They may choose from among many different kinds of audience, but whichever audiences they seek, they will attempt to appeal through both common human predispositions and the fine-tunings of local culture (2009, p. 383). As I tell my pre-service teachers (usually in relation to classroom management issues), the attention economy operates in classrooms in all sorts of ways. These Dutch and Australian teachers use a number of strategies, for example, to distribute attention (for example, group-based learning and turn-taking during whole-class discussion). When we see Ramon struggling with his (self-perceived) propensity to engage in ‘dominant teacher text’, it could be seen as a struggle with his own entitlement for attention. With Prue and Mies, the struggle is less evident, largely because they are more assured in their own attention entitlement or strategies for distributing attention. In terms of story-telling, it appears that Mies comes closest (on the basis of these accounts) to being a classroom story-teller in her own right. She not only enacts Bracke’s book on DVD; she complements it with a visual story in the form of a powerpoint presentation and then moves immediately (once her ‘circle of trust’ is achieved) to ‘talk about the miserable life’ of the protagonist Lina. In general, all of these teachers can be seen as serving their authors’ need to capture attention. As all of us know, an author’s attention-seeking devices are not always self-evident to student readers, especially without the metalanguage that helps direct attention to this or that linguistic or rhetorical strategy. When Prue comments: ‘I want even closer attention’, she is referring to precisely this kind of attention: But for each of us as we talk together now, we have the knowledge of hindsight, and it colours the way we attend to tone and atmosphere [my italics].

118

IF IN DOUBT, REACH FOR A STORY

Each of these teachers has a unique repertoire of foci, that is, aspects of a literary text that they choose to draw their students’ attention to in their meaning-making acts. As noted before, Prue focuses (in the lesson we have a glimpse into) on texture. Mies focuses on the key structural concept of turning point. Stories, though, are made up of events, structured in particular ways (narrative), located in particular settings and peopled with characters, each with their own predicaments, struggles, choices, rewards and failures. I want to conclude this essay with a discussion of empathy, in part because of the particular take on empathy that evocriticism provides and because it is key focus for Prue, Mies and Ramon. Citing Hobson, 2004 (p. 54), Boyd (2009) notes that, ‘Being affected by others is a design feature of human beings’. He continues: ‘Through mirror neurons and other systems we are wired for emotional contagion. We half imitate what we see others doing, although an inhibiting mechanism stops us from actually moving while we simulate. We automatically have empathy for others. We know how they feel because we literally feel what they are feeling’ (p. 163). In his extended discussion of The Odyssey, Boyd discusses at length the way the swineherd Eumaios receives Odysseus in the latter’s guise of an aged beggar. He notes that Eumaios’ reception goes beyond the duty of hospitality to strangers (xenia) but ‘arises from a compassion so imbued as to have become utterly spontaneous – founded on innate human empathy …’ (p. 298). In terms of evolution, ‘We not only learn to infer others’ intentions, but in social species that benefit from cooperation we also evolve to empathize with or emotionally react against others’ purposes. And without this capacity, stories would be impossible’ (p. 403). Mies begins her chapter section by quoting approvingly van den Vondel’s assertion that the goal of art is ‘to induce compassion and fear by listening and reading’. Her central goal is to have her early adolescent students ‘identify with’ the protagonists of selected novels. Her students display empathy in their responses, from Miriam’s poem to René’s touching comment that ‘I will never know what it is like to be pregnant. Anyway, it seems horrible to have to murder your own child when you don’t want to. It burdens you with guilt.’ Ruefully, Ramon confesses that in this regard, he doesn’t quite foot it with Mies, and wonders if he should put ‘more emphasis on emotion and empathy’. For all her concentration on building ‘analytical and interpretive skills’, and despite the fact that her catalogue of intellectual dispositions omits compassion/empathy, Prue avowedly wants her students ‘to step into the shoes of the other. Texts become reference points for students to think critically about their own world, how they might change it, the life they might lead.’ ‘Providence,’ de Tocqueville said, ‘has not created mankind entirely independent or entirely free. It is true, that around every man a fatal circle is traced, beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free’ (1956, p. 317). All of the teachers and students on show here are socially circumscribed in all sorts of ways. Though René is male, he connects with the emotions and situation of a fictional character half a world away. Though Marieke is initially outraged, even disgusted by the subject matter of Blue is Bitter, she 119

LOCKE

reviews her position, examines her conscience, and acts to bring about change. Yet through a complex process of identification undertaken as responders to stories, and as a result of wonderfully orchestrated dialogic processes, the ‘fatal circle’ for each has been enlarged. NOTES 1

2 3

1. In New Zealand the decile system is a way of indicating the socio-economic status (SES) of a school’s community. For Decile 1 read ‘poor’. Equivalent to Australian Year 10, i.e. 15 to 16-year-olds. As this teacher explained further in an email, ‘Many families buy new outfits for their children for the day. A finance company was advertising what it called ‘White Sunday loans’ in our local newspaper, the Manukau Courier i.e. they will give a family money to purchase new clothes, food, etc, to celebrate White Sunday, but of course with the usual high interest in fine print. I feel those finance companies are unethical in their advertising, and talked about it with the students, how they will use Pacific symbols like hibiscus flowers, pictures of Polynesian families looking happy, etc and play on pressure parents may have to spend more than they should. Comparing to others is a big thing for many Samoan families, not wanting to look less than someone else, or seen to be contributing less than others puts a lot of pressure on families’ (D. Riley, personal communication, October 31, 2008).

REFERENCES Anon. (2008, September 28). New Zealand’s income gap doubles. The Press. Retrieved March 25, 2010, from http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/649243 Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination (M. Holquist, Ed., C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. (1986). The problem with speech genres (V. McGee, Trans.). In C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Eds.), Speech genres and other late essays: M.M. Bakhtin (pp. 60–101). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Barthes, R. (1977). Image–music–text. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins. Boyd, B. (2001). The origin of stories: Horton hears a who. Philosophy and Literature, 25(2), 197–214. Boyd, B. (2009). On the origin of stories: Evolution, cognition, and fiction. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Brooks, C., & Warren, R. P. (1976). Understanding poetry (4th ed.). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Carroll, J. (1995). Evolution and literary theory. Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press. Cazden, C. (2001). Classroom discourse: The language of teaching and learning (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.. Cotterell, G., von Randow, M., & Wheldon, M. (2008). An examination of the links between parental educational qualifications, family structure and family wellbeing, 1981–2006. Wellington: Ministry of Education. Retrieved March 25, 2010, from http://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/publications/ assessment/32057/5 de Tocqueville, A. (1956). Democracy in America (R. Heffner, Ed.). New York: Mentor. Eagleton, T. (2007). How to read a poem. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Cambridge, England: Polity Press. Goldhaber, M. (1997). The attention economy and the net. First Monday, 2(4–7). Retrieved April 11, 2010, from http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/519/440 Honeycutt, L. (1994). Chapter 1: Introduction from What hath Bakhtin wrought? Toward a unified theory of literature and composition. A thesis submitted to the faculty of The University of North Carolina at Charlotte in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the 120

IF IN DOUBT, REACH FOR A STORY Department of English. Retrieved April 10, 2010, from http://www.public.iastate.edu/~honeyl/bakhtin/ thesis.html Iser, W. (1978). The act of reading: A theory of aesthetic response. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. James, W. (1981). Pragmatism (B. Kulick, Ed.). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Lankshear, C., & Knobel, M. (2001, January 26–27). Do we have your attention? New literacies, digital technologies and the education of adolescents. Paper presented at the State of the Art conference, University of Georgia, Athens, GA. Retrieved April 12, 2010, from http://everydayliteracies.net/ attention.html Locke, T. (2005). Writing positions and rhetorical spaces. In B. Doecke & G. Parr (Eds.), Writing=Learning (pp. 75–95). Kent Town, SA: AATE/Wakefield Press. Locke, T. (2007). Resisting qualifications reforms in New Zealand: The English study design as constructive dissent. Rotterdam/Taipei: Sense Publishers. Locke, T. (2008). English in a surveillance regime: Tightening the noose in New Zealand. Changing English: Studies in Culture & Education, 15(3), 293–310. Locke, T. (2009). The disappearance of enjoyment: How literature went wandering in the literacy woods and got lost. In J. Manuel, P. Brock, D. Carter, & W. Sawyer (Eds.), Imagination, innovation, creativity: Re-visioning English in education (pp. 123–138). Putney, NSW: Phoenix Education. Locke, T. (2010). Discovering a metalanguage for all seasons: Bringing literary language in from the cold. In T. Locke (Ed.), Beyond the grammar wars: A resource for teachers and students on developing language knowledge in the English/literacy classroom. New York: Routledge. Locke, T., Cawkwell, G., Sila’ila’i, E., Cleary, A., de Beer, W., Harris, S., et al. (2008). Teaching literature in the multicultural classroom. Report commissioned by New Zealand Council for Educational Research. Wellington: TLRI/NZCER. Locke, T., Harris, S., & Riley, D. (2009). Teaching literature in the multicultural classroom: What motivates students to engage? Paper presented at NZARE Conference, Rotorua. Morgan, W. (1992). A post-structuralist English classroom: The example of Ned Kelly. Melbourne: Victorian Association for the Teaching of English. Regelski, T. (1998). The Aristotelian bases of praxis for music and music education as praxis. Philosophy of Music Education Review, 1, 22–59. Rosenblatt, L. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem: The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Sleeter, C., & Grant, C. (2003). Making choices for multicultural education: Five approaches to race, class, and gender (4th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley. Williams, L., Hedrick, W., & Tuschinski, L. (2008). Motivation: Going beyond testing to a lifetime of reading. Childhood Education, 84(3), 135–141. Wimsatt, W. K., & Beardsley, M. (1946). The intentional fallacy. Sewanee Review, 54, 468–488.

Terry Locke Faculty of Education University of Waikato

121

LAILA AASE

8. REFLECTION ON LITERATURE TEACHING A Norwegian Perspective

INTRODUCTION

I want to get students to make their own thinking process visible not only to the rest of us in the class, but to themselves. I am asking them ‘what do you think is happening here?’ ‘what makes you think that?’ ‘where in the text can you locate this idea of yours ?’I want them to be able to work out how it is that they are drawing conclusions, and to be prepared to test those conclusions. Prue’s explanation of her method of conversational inquiry in her literature class seems to me to encompass a number of important goals for literature reading in school. She grants the students the right to have personal interpretations, yet she wants them to be able to justify their assumptions and interpretations by locating them within the text itself. Finally, she wants them to understand their own choices and their own thinking. Making meaning of texts thus becomes a cognitive and meta-cognitive activity, beneficial not only for investigating one particular literary text, but for developing a capacity to understand oneself, as well as others. To me this is one of the core justifications for the importance of literature in school, although not the only one. This essay represents an attempt to investigate literature teaching in school by interacting with reports from three teachers in two different countries and reactions to these reports. My reflection is thus a third round of reflection. In the process of writing this essay I have wondered if I really have new points to add or new perspectives to offer. Piet-Hein van de Ven and Bella Illesca certainly have contributed with wise comments on what they have seen in these three classrooms and I have been inspired by their thinking. Having taught didactics of literature and language in teacher education at the university for more than 30 years I have spent a lot of time thinking about literature teaching and learning, and a lot of time observing literature teaching in classrooms, mainly in secondary and upper secondary school in Norway. Reading the reports from Prue, Ramon and Mies I can relate to all their approaches and dilemmas. I cannot, however, completely avoid being affected by my personal ideas and biases and also by my Norwegian context and I may surely misinterpret what I read. I think the most obvious fallacy is to take for granted that we agree upon all aspects of the issue. Still one of my basic assumptions before even starting this essay has been that in spite of national differences of curricula and traditions, literature teachers share a belief in the value P-H. van de Ven and B. Doecke (eds.), Literary Praxis: A Conversational inquiry into the Teaching of Literature, 123–135. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

AASE

of literary texts. This means that we claim literary texts to be especially valuable for young people in their growth into mature human beings in society. I really do think that this is a common rationale that underpins our argumentation for literature in school. LEGITIMIZING LITERATURE IN SCHOOL

Before getting involved in the reports of Prue, Ramon and Mies I would like to reflect on the different ways of understanding the value of literature as part of school knowledge and activities. Surely there are many paradigms for legitimizing literature, and we see this clearly in comparing curricula historically and nationally. Traditionally in my country literature has been considered a very important part of the subject of Norwegian on all levels of school, and it still is, but the justifications have changed over time. Historically there has been a strong tradition for reading national literature for the purpose of creating a common cultural national identity. This must be understood as a result of nation building in a small country getting its independence first from Denmark in 1814, and later from Sweden in 1905. The national legitimating of literature, however, has become unfashionable and is rarely argued for these days, although it may still underpin argumentation for a national literary canon. Literature has also been considered the means of enhancing a more general Bildung: the potential for acting according to cultural values, and understanding and taking responsibility for the choices one makes when interacting with other people. Today we find a number of different ways of legitimizing literature, also amongst teachers. There is definitely a new emphasis on literacy, especially after tests like PISA in 2000. We are concerned about boys’ reading habits and competencies, and we are disappointed that Norwegian students do not score higher in the tests after 2000. In fact they score lower. The result is that reading projects are flourishing all over the country, especially in primary and lower secondary school. Often, however, the aims seem to be more focused on quantities of books and fluency of reading than on literary competencies. When asked why the students should read literature, teachers tend to either focus on the importance of literacy in general or to express a desire for their students to become fond of reading. The literacy purpose often is expressed in instrumental and utilitarian terms, the aesthetic value of the text not really taken into account. In my work I have found that the variety in the ways teachers express the purpose and aims of literature is striking. Often teachers just want their students to have a nice reading experience or to develop a love for literature. Because teachers often love literature themselves, they would like others to experience books as an important dimension in their lives. So they often put a lot of effort into finding texts their students might like or in choosing texts where the students might recognize something from their own lives. This way they want to make the students realise how literature may have a personal relevance for them by giving them something they can recognise. The purpose seems to be having a nice experience in the literature class, an experience that hopefully could lead to further reading. The way 124

REFLECTION ON LITERATURE TEACHING

they express their goals of experience, however, sometimes seems to entail only a moment of entertainment not a more lasting impact on our lives. Teaching literature to students who do not read unless they have to may well make teachers minimize their goals in the hope of providing situations that their students at least enjoy. In compulsory levels reading just for enjoyment may well be argued for taking into account that reading without the aspect of subjective experience (Langer, 1995) cannot provide a full understanding of literature. Enjoying a text is thus seen as prerequisite for a more complex experience of text on an existential or intellectual level. In upper secondary school we find that literature is argued for in more varied ways, and here the argument of protecting cultural heritage is more common. The canon authors should be read because this is part of what an educated person knows. This corresponds to Klafki’s notion of material Bildung (Klafki, 2001). Still we may see examples of Klafki’s notion of formal Bildung expressed in general terms of the role of literature in enhancing identity building or general formation of character, and sometimes we even see examples of argumentation that correspond to Klafki’s notion of categorial Bildung where cultural representations are given an important role in enhancing thinking and understanding. When asked questions on how they see the purpose of the subject of Norwegian as a whole, teachers seem to have internalized the overall aims expressed in curriculum about equality and democracy and how mastering language is a prerequisite for participating in society. Reading literature, especially the classic texts from our national heritage, does not always fit into this purpose. WHAT KIND OF KNOWLEDGE IS LITERARY COMPETENCES?

There is a dilemma in literature reading in school because students should have the opportunity to be involved in the experience of literature and at the same time they must learn to experience literature. Providing just one of these two goals means deceiving students. Being able to provide both, however, is not always easy. We cannot predict personal experiences, and if we just teach literary terms and analytic strategies the justifications of literature in school are undermined. In dealing with this we at least need to know what we are aiming at. What are the knowledge and skills we want our students to develop? As a whole the various school subjects create a mosaic of knowledge forms that separately as well as taken as a whole are considered valuable in education. The knowledge forms may be named (after Aristotle) epistemic knowledge and technical knowledge and phronetic knowledge. Council of Europe has formulated this as knowledge of, knowledge how and existential knowledge (CFR, 2001). Each school subject encompasses all these knowledge forms, but the emphasis will often be on one of them. In literature teaching and learning there are elements of all these three knowledge forms. The epistemic knowledge includes knowledge about texts, how they are constructed, how tropes and figures create certain effects, how metaphors may open up for new ways of understanding, etc. History of literature may open up for deeper understanding of the connection between text and context. This kind of knowledge surely is a prerequisite for reading literary texts on an advanced level, 125

AASE

in other words a prerequisite for the second knowledge form: the technical knowledge, knowledge how. Not just reading literature, but learning to read literature is certainly one of the aims in literature classrooms. We want the learners to experience literature, but at the same time we want them to develop their repertoire for making meaning of texts. In reading the report from Ramon’s literature class I got the impression that this was one of his main concerns: he wants his students to be able to approach literature with a broad register of reading strategies. This is because he thinks a choice of strategies will help them to read with more insight and to analyse literary texts better. Ramon is probably right in his assumption on a general basis: a broad range of tools for approaching texts in various ways may help them approaching a text. He loves literature himself and has some assumptions on how his students might benefit from being introduced to his strategies. Ramon is disappointed in what he has accomplished in this particular project. And he no doubt has astutely identified the causes for this failure to realise his aims, just as all reflective teachers think about the differences between their intentions and what they actually manage to accomplish. I shall come back to this later on. The third knowledge form mentioned above is the phronetic knowledge which we have learnt from Aristotle has to do with the ability to make judgement and to understand a situation not completely identical with another situation. It is often named practical wisdom. Unlike practical knowledge or skills (techne) the purpose is not creating a product of any kind, but still it plays a role in creating things. Wise judgement requires abilities to see things from a perspective different from one’s own, exercising a flexibility of thought that is quite different from applying rules to any situation. This in fact is also what Bildung is about: to be able to see an issue from the point of ‘the other’ and to act according to values not just beneficial for oneself. Wise judgement is uncertain knowledge that we probably only acquire through experience and by interacting with others. It is important to emphasise that, although other knowledge forms support phronesis, it cannot be taught and learnt in the same ways as other knowledge forms, certainly not from rules and directions. Ability to interpret and judge people and situations is crucial in reading literature, as it is in life. A literature teacher would have to consider how to develop this kind of knowledge in the classroom. Many of us assume that investigating literature through dialogue in the class is a good approach. Being teachers of literature, we may well overestimate what literature does or the potential it has for contributing to personal development. We have in fact few possibilities of measuring the effects of reading literature on an individual learner. Still we firmly believe that reading and interpreting literature provide specific opportunities for enhancing an understanding of the world and human conditions. So how do we argue for this? One argument is connected to the action of interpretation itself. We interpret the world constantly in all our experiences every day. The assumption is that interpreting literature provides a general model for interpretation. So exploring a literary text gives the opportunity to think about various reasons for actions, for how people act and think and react to others. The clue is that we may do this independently of our personal experiences. It concerns somebody else: fictive persons in a fictive world. Still it may tell us something about ourselves: 126

REFLECTION ON LITERATURE TEACHING

‘Soi-même comme un autre’ (Ricoeur, 1990). If reading literature is crucial for the Bildung-process it has to do with what we may call cultural encounters. Reading is experiencing other people, thoughts and milieus. Hopefully these encounters make us more open and flexible in our ways of perceiving the world. So the question is: are we able enhance this in a literature class? And what are the optimal conditions for exploring ‘the other’ without succumbing to personal prejudice? In my opinion the teacher plays the most important role in this process. Being well aware of all the pitfalls concerning dominant teachers who direct students into their own interpretation or official ways of reading texts, I still claim that the teacher is an indispensable person in the literature classroom, not only as a facilitator for reading literary works, but as a listener, communicator and a person who challenges and explores student’s interpretations. I also firmly believe in literary dialogue in a class where plural voices are heard and responded to by others. Expanding a repertoire for thinking and emotions is perhaps our most powerful argument for reading literature in school, and we link it closely to the notion of Bildung, which entails a broad repertoire of knowledge, values and self-insight. But we have other arguments, as well, one of them linked to the value of art in general. I shall not try to explain why we value art in general, and especially literature, so highly in our culture. It is a fact that we do, and this is also a reason why we teach it. By exploring a literary text, we explore at the same time what language can do, and maybe we also explore the limits of language. We realise the ambiguity of language and the fact that language has potential for plural interpretations. Poetic language often provides examples of how the poet explores the limits of what language can do. In exploring the text students will also be part of this act of exploration. To me the uncertainty of this activity has a value in itself. In other subjects students are supposed to produce work where the outcome is more predictable as right/wrong, weak/strong, based upon standards of achievement for a certain age group. I may be wrong in this generalisation, my point is merely to emphasise a trait in literary interpretation: the value of not always being able to fully understand a text and to be able to accept that not everything can be explained in everyday language. To be able to enhance literature classes that are characterised by exploration and inquiry, we need students to be willing to get involved in the reading, emotionally and intellectually. We do not always see that happening, so teachers often put a lot of effort into the process of helping students to be involved, either by contextualising the text or raising questions concerning characters or plot. Mies seems to me to be a teacher who believes in emotional involvement as a prerequisite for literature reading. I am greatly intrigued by her objective of making her students identify with the protagonist in the story. She seems to be an experienced as well as a successful teacher of literature and I wonder if this is her clue. Mies herself links her approach to the age group she is teaching and I can see that this is her way of enhancing a personal involvement with the text. I wonder if the emphasis on identification is especially important for this age group or if it can work for all texts and all students? I see in the reflective accounts that Ramon and Mies have given of their teaching dilemmas that many teachers of literature face. 127

AASE

THE DILEMMAS OF RAMON AND MIES

To me it has been very interesting to read the reports from Ramon and Mies because they exemplify two different ways of dealing with dilemmas of teaching literature. These are dilemmas which I certainly recognise from my own experiences. They have to do with how and when to lead learners in their reading process and when to give them room for their own judgements and approaches. I suppose none of us have clear answers to these questions, at least not on a general basis, but examples like this help us reflect on options and possibilities, and I am indebted to Ramon and Mies for providing me with an opportunity to engage in reflection of this kind. In fact I admire how they are putting themselves in such a vulnerable position by letting us into their classrooms. Ramon and Mies seem to me to be very able literature teachers with enthusiasm and knowledge. They are both more than able to articulate goals for their lessons. They are reflecting upon their function as teachers in a way I could wish was generally common in my setting. Ramon has an underlying assumption that a broad range of reading strategies will help his students to understand a text more broadly and more deeply. He sees these approaches as tools for interpretation. In order to make the learners see the different choices of approaching a text, he gives the groups different tasks that are examples of a specific approach. Each group discuss their tasks first, then they split up into new groups, consisting of one representative from the original groups, and in the end there is a classroom discussion. In this way Ramon hopes to enable his students to explore the complexities of literary interpretation, and the fact that we might read the same text differently, depending on the standpoint we bring to it. Ramon has put a lot of thought into these lessons, but in the end he feels rather disappointed with the result. The students do not quite get his points and he thinks their discussions about the content are superficial. In fact they do not seem to understand the character of the protagonist in the short story. They do not really see the points in the various approaches either. In his afterthought analysis Ramon identifies two issues, one concerning the task and the other concerning the choice of text: he has expected too much and he has given his students too little time, and he thinks perhaps the adult narrator is too far removed from the students’ life and experiences even if he looks back on his high school years. I shall not claim that Ramon is wrong. Having not read this Dutch short story and not knowing his 15 year old students there is certainly a need for me to approach his report with a good portion of humility. My outsider reflections might, however, still be of interest, which by the way is the whole idea behind this essay. I think even if Ramon on a general basis may be right in his assumptions about giving his students analytical tools for interpretation, his two observations on what he thinks went wrong perhaps suggest that there may have been a possibility of approaching this in a different order. He expresses his personal reasons for choosing this particular text in a very convincing way: I for one think it is beautiful, and I feel that the register which is used could appeal to the young people in my classroom. Although the existential questions 128

REFLECTION ON LITERATURE TEACHING

in the story may be too challenging for them, the fact that the protagonist’s youth is a central theme in the story could incite their interest. The protagonist looks back on his high school years and his family, and those are things that students in form 4 of secondary education (15–16 years old) can connect. Let us first have a closer look at the students’ discussion about the protagonist. In Fragment 1 one student presents his perception of the protagonist as being negative or discontented, and the rest of the group just follow his line of thinking and support his point of view. There are just no more ideas about this question in the student group, and thus they make no progress in their investigation of the protagonist. For this to happen, it seems to me that they possibly needed more ideas or more help. In Fragment 2 in the class discussion Ramon asks the question ‘who could tell me how he sees the world?’ And again the students come up with the same judgement: ‘he is completely negative.’ As far as I can see Ramon does not challenge this, he just accepts what the student says. There may have been an opportunity here to investigate this further with the whole class. This would have involved going back to the text, in order to look at specific passages to see if this is the whole truth, to wonder about why they perceive the protagonist in the way that they do, etc. Ramon thinks this short story is beautiful. I do not know if he conveys this to his students or not, but he might have also considered this option as a basis for an analysis of the text that might have moved everyone beyond the students’ negative reaction to the protagonist. I wonder perhaps whether he might consider offering them something of his own emotional involvement, not because they should feel or think in the same way, but to show them another possible way of reading the text. Still, his dilemma is a common one for teachers of literature. We choose a text that we think has special merit or potential for discussion, and then we find that students react to it negatively, and it is not always easy to unsettle their initial judgments. It can also take great presence of mind not to feel slightly affronted by students’ lack of enthusiasm for a text that we hold dear. To me it seems that what this group of students first and foremost need is to develop their register of interpretation. The example from Fragment 1, where the students just jump upon one idea and thus quickly decide upon an answer, tells us that the students are inexperienced readers who need to develop their interpretation strategies as such, not only their strategies for analysing a literary text. So what I mean by suggesting that Ramon perhaps should reconsider the progression and order of his work on literary competences is that the work on interpretation should probably come first. To be able to make meaning of a literary text, students need to learn how to investigate something that is not settled as the truth. They need to develop a sense of afterthought by questioning their own ideas, to ask questions like: Is this the only way of understanding the protagonist? Is there anything in the text that points at other ways of understanding his personality? Why do we judge him in the way we do? These interpretative strategies imply that they constantly go back to the text and see if there is subtle information they have ignored or if they need to read between the lines. In my opinion we often take these competences for granted and forget that this must be taught and can be learnt. In my experience we may teach a literary tool by showing students that they have already used it. 129

AASE

That way it becomes more a practical tool than an abstract concept. I do not know if this could work in Ramon’s case though. The repertoire of strategies he is offering are advanced literary strategies reflecting different traditions in literary studies. I think I understand what Ramon is trying to achieve here, but I am not surprised that the young and fairly inexperienced readers in his class found this task daunting Ramon provides us with only two small glimpses of student dialogue, and so I am hesitant to speculate about how these students are really thinking. My own preference is to set up interaction with the whole class, as this gives teachers a golden chance to challenge their students and to help them to develop more investigative approaches to the text. I am fully aware of the pitfalls in this approach. We all know how literature teachers tend to impose their interpretations on their students and thus give the impression that there exists a correct interpretation. The strategies that Ramon adopts show that he is very conscious of this problem, even to the point of allowing his students to persist with their negativity, rather than challenging it. I still want to advocate for strong teacher involvement in literary dialogue because I think this is one of the best opportunities for teachers to enhance literary competences. The very fact that the classroom provides possibilities for many voices to be heard is one argument for this. Students listen to peer interpretations, and the teacher, by learning how the students read the text, will learn something about what they need to work on and how he or she may introduce new ideas or hypothesis in a fruitful way. The teacher may there and then make the students go back to selected passages in the text and make them reread it for possible new information or open spaces of interpretation (Iser, 1978). At this moment there may also be an opportunity to introduce alternative ways of interpreting passages in the text. This last option of course represents one of the pitfalls for a literature teacher; the danger of taking over interpretation is certainly there. On the other hand being a teacher also requires awareness of emerging possibilities for enhancing students’ capacities to engage in literary texts. I believe that, as difficult as this challenge can be, teachers can do this without repudiating students’ assumptions and interpretations. Ramon thinks perhaps his choice of text was an obstacle for the students. The protagonist being so much older than the students may have hindered them in being able to relate to him and his life. There surely are texts that 15 year olds would find difficult to relate to, and Ramon points to a very common problem for literature teachers: Should we offer students literature they can identify with, or should we try to provide encounters with the unknown. Thomas Ziehe advocates for the latter. He claims that school must offer students ‘good enough strangeness’ (Ziehe, 1995, 2004) and he is convinced that we should not support the students in their demands for school content that they like and find personally relevant, This, of course, does not mean that any text can be presented to any student group. The teacher constantly reflects on what to read in class bearing in mind that the text somehow must be possible to read and engage a particular age group, as well as providing some challenges for them. Sometimes we succeed in our choices and sometimes we do not. Despite Ramon’s disappointment about the course of the lesson, he is aware of this dilemma, and this suggests that eventually he will find ways to enhance his 130

REFLECTION ON LITERATURE TEACHING

students’ appreciation of literature. 15 year olds may well read literature about grown ups – in fact, I believe that for many reasons they should. Being able to understand the mind of people who are not exactly their sort is part of the Bildung project that we think literature provides. Ramon realises that maybe he does not emphasise emotions and involvement enough in his class. He thinks Mies’ approach may tell him something he needs to know. He might be right. The strategies he wants his students to master seem to be somehow detached from the content and aesthetics of the story. Yet although Mies manages to get her students involved in the characters in the novel they are reading, I still feel compelled to record some reservations about this alternative approach. Why do I feel an urge to question her accomplishments? Mies is obviously an experienced and successful literature teacher. Her aim is to make her students identify with the protagonist, Lina, a young Philippino girl forced into prostitution, betrayed first by her father and later by other people she trusts. Mies obtains what she aims for: most of her students express strong feelings for Lina, and at least the girls show that they can identify with the horrors of her fate. Mies’ students feel a strong urge to take action because they realise that the novel describes a reality in the world. Lina is not just a fictional character, she represents an example of the fate of many young girls in the third world, and the students react by wanting to support the organisation Terre des Hommes, an organisation that works for children who are caught in prostitution. So why do I still want to question some aspects of this approach to teaching literature? Mies’s literature teaching leads to empathy and practical actions. Is this not something we want from reading literature? Mies expresses very clearly her objectives for reading literature: I cannot help but emphasise the social context in books and stories, because it is exactly my goal to engage into a discussion of social topics by means of youth novels. I think my question marks are twofold: on the one hand it is connected to the impact of identification with the protagonist, on the other to the literary text as an art form. Why do we want the 14 year old students to identify with a young prostitute in the Philippines’? Is it really true that they can do that? What they can do is become upset and horrified by Lina’s fate, but they can only do this from their secure positions in a middle class setting in the Netherlands. My feeling is that they are not really confronted with new thoughts and new insights in human conditions. There is a sense in which they merely feel affirmed in values and thoughts they already have. Am I wrong in thinking that identifying with Lina is just not possible for these youngsters? Mies’ aim of identification helps her in the process of getting her students involved in the text, which we sometimes see is a missing dimension in literature classrooms, but I am not sure whether it really helps them to scrutinize their own judgements and broaden the possibilities of understanding. Mies herself expresses her doubts about whether the students are capable of understanding the actions of a father who sacrifices his daughter for his own needs: ‘The students’ remarks above show that I have not been entirely successful 131

AASE

in unlocking the full context for them’. To address this, she gives her students background information about Manila. But I think it would have been extraordinary if she could have managed to make them understand the values and habits in a society so remote from their lives. Her students try to imagine unwanted pregnancy and forced abortion in an unfamiliar culture, and they feel that they have learnt something about a foreign society. My remark may seem unfair, taking into account that her students are so young and also because Mies obtains something in her literature class that we all are aiming at: engagement and involvement with the text. Still I am left wondering about the nature of identification. Piet-Hein’s references to Langer (1995) differentiating between ‘objective experience’ and ‘subjective experience’ might be a fruitful way of approaching this problem. The subjective experience in this case comes through identification and is closely connected to the text, but the objective experience is not connected to the text but to a reality in the world. My second question mark concerns the literary text as such, as I am not really sure why this awareness of Lina’s situation should have to go via a literary text. In fact I shall claim that not taking the aesthetic value of a text seriously in literature classes undermines our argumentation for the importance of literature in school. Could the same kind of engagement be obtained by reading a report about young prostitutes in the Philippines? This bring us back to a big question, namely why literary texts should be given a privileged place in a school curriculum. Should social awareness be the ultimate goal, or is this narrowing the purpose of reading literature? Is there anything particular that makes reading literature different from reading any other text? For Mies, identification with the protagonist in a narrative appears to be a crucial way of enhancing social awareness and empathy, and this is a view that, in my experience, many teachers of literature share. They feel that narrative provides an opportunity for involvement that is not so easily obtained by reading other prose, such as newspaper articles or journalistic reports. But I am still left weighing up the value of identification against the need for detachment and judgment. There is no doubt that appreciating a literary text is dependent on a reader being willing to be captured by the content and the language of the text. This does not preclude judgment of a different kind. Judith Langer’s two concepts of literary experiences are undoubtedly indebted to Louise Rosenblatt. Rosenblatt points out how the reader moves between aesthetic and efferent stances in the reading process (Rosenblatt, 1938, 1978). She describes the aesthetic stance as an involvement of a sensual kind, being absorbed in the language of the text and the feelings it creates. The efferent stance is pointing away from the text to the reader’s experiences and knowledge of the world. Rosenblatt describes this as an ever changing movement from efferent to aesthetic and vice versa. Thus the reader is able to get emotionally involved in the text and still mobilise knowledge and experience from his or her own life. This movement to and fro, however, both concerns understanding the text. Rosenblatt claims that the most important part of reading literature is the emotional involvement. If this is true, we may well discuss how this can be staged in a classroom. Mies shows us her answer to this question. 132

REFLECTION ON LITERATURE TEACHING

CONTEXTS OF TEACHING LITERATURE

Bella Illesca’s comments on the privileged setting of Prue’s school and Prue’s students are something I also have reflected on. The contrast between her class and many of the classes I visit is striking. Prue’s small group of students in a private school where all students have chosen literature provides a very different context from the obligatory literature lessons with about 28 students I normally see. It also contrasts markedly with the classrooms in which Ramon and Mies teach. In my school context the conditions for teaching literature vary more than one should think by just looking at the curriculum. Sylvi Penne’s research on literature reading in two lower secondary schools in Oslo, one typically middle class in Oslo’s central west end area and the other in a working class environment in a suburb shows that the students have two different approaches to literature (Penne, 2006). The middle class students approach literature as part of a general strategy for academic success, the suburban students lack this strategy of looking ahead and planning for the future. They encounter each text without any notion of this being important in the sense that it is part of a cultural heritage in which everyone shares. The motivation for getting involved in the text is thus not something the teacher can rely on a priori, so to speak. Yet although Prue may be in a privileged situation with respect to the values and expectations that her students bring to class, this still does not explain the quality of the literary dialogue that she is able to facilitate, and I wish to affirm this aspect of her work. Her students are in their last year of upper secondary school, but they are not necessarily experienced readers: ‘it is a bit mysterious, they’re not sure what they’re meant to be doing’. I think one of her secrets might be that she little by little demonstrates in collaboration with her students what it means to reflect on passages in the text, which of course is theorising. The crucial point in her teaching is negotiation and dialogue opening up for variety of interpretations, a multitude of voices that has a value in itself, but she still wants more. She is aiming towards making her students know more about language, what language can do and what the limits of language might be. She has a constant project going on, namely to try to make her students move ‘from the particular to the general’. I am sure Prue sometimes fails in her intentions like we all do at times, but I think her sense of process is something we could learn from. In her report she constantly reflects on process. She realise that there are challenges that her students need to encounter, but as she frequently remarks, this is for later, not yet. I think of how my student teachers might conceivably benefit from Prue when they are teaching their literature classes. They would be teaching very different student groups: heterogeneous classes in lower secondary school, classes in upper secondary school aiming mostly at university or classes of students who are engaged in vocational training. In vocational education literature has not traditionally had a very prominent place. Earlier the subject of Norwegian consisted to a great degree of purely functional tasks, such as filling in forms, writing applications and reports. This changed, however, from 1994 with a new curriculum aimed at more equal general education for all students claiming equal Bildung aims in all strands of upper secondary education. This means that students in vocational training have the 133

AASE

same curriculum for the subject of Norwegian over two years that students who aspire to further studies experience in their first year of upper secondary school (age group 16). This again means reading literature and interpreting. The idea is that all students should have possibilities to build on a general education and perhaps combine practical and academic education later on in life. Possibilities are available for students in vocational training to do additional courses for entering colleges or university, and some students choose this path. The ideology of equal opportunities for all students, however, is not unproblematic. Since 1994 the percentage of students, especially boys, falling out of school has gone up to a degree that is worrying educators, as well as politicians. The blame is often put on the new ideology of education and the emphasis on more ‘theoretical’ work. In this picture the subject of Norwegian becomes an example of a theoretical subject. Vocational training has traditionally had a utilitarian character and the students there would expect, even more than other students, that what they learn in school should be of use later on. One of my student teachers quoted a student claiming that a short story was something he never would need in life: ‘If I ever find the need for short stories, I would know my life has gone to hell’. He even asked his parents if this was true, and they confirmed his assumption that short stories were something that he would never need. Earlier this year the leader of the conservative party claimed that the vocational students ‘should not be burdened with analysing 18th century poetry’. She probably did not mean this literally, and had she known the curriculum she would have known that they hardly read 18th century poetry during their two years of vocational training. What she probably meant was to advocate for a more utilitarian content in the subject of Norwegian, possibly to make the subject more like the subject as it was taught before 1994. The idea of poetry being a burden and not an asset is interesting though. To me it shows that it is not generally acknowledged what role literature should play in school. This politician might think reading and analysing poetry represent a domain for a special group, such as typically middle class students. Prue’s reflections on what we want students to achieve through reading points to a much wider understanding of the significance of literature: … we want them to develop their conceptions of the relationship between language and ideas, to confidently express their ways of seeing, to think in increasingly abstract ways, to be open to challenge, to understand the value of evidence and argument. We want them to marvel at the way people use language to help us see anew and to experience unknown worlds in intimate ways. We want them to step into the shoes of others. Surely this is something we want for all young people, not just for selected groups, because they are all going to be grown ups participating in all areas of life. Recently one of my students, discussing vocational training, pointed out that her students would not just live their lives at work, but in all kinds of social and cultural settings as fathers and mothers, friends, neighbours, politicians etc. Their need for Bildung and competencies would not be very different from any other student. We may of course sometimes wonder if reading literature is the only or the best way to 134

REFLECTION ON LITERATURE TEACHING

enhance Bildung. Even a literature teacher may admit that there are other ways. Still most of us believe there is a potential for self insight and cultural understanding in the literary text providing more than just information or even reflection. We think that good literature might have the power to provide experiences, emotionally as well as intellectually. And even more important: The combination of reading good literature and interaction in the classroom provides unique situations for understanding oneself and others in a number of different social situations. School is not just an arena for learning for the future or the world outside school. It is a scene for real social interaction and fruitful conflicts. Reading literature in school thus represents unique reading situations different from reading outside school exactly because it is done in a community of interpretation and interaction. Teaching literature in school surely is dependent on a number of factors: students’ age and background, social settings, organisation of classes and schools and underlying educational ideology. One or two hours a week surely represent a completely different context for enhancing literary competencies than 5 or 6 lessons a week. The examples we have seen here from the Netherlands and Australia clearly illustrate these differences. REFERENCES CFR. (2001). Common European framework of reference for languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. Council of Europe/Cambridge University Press. Iser, W. (1975). Die Appellstruktur der Texte- Unbestimmtheit als Wikungsbedienung literarischer Prosa. In I. R Warning (Ed.), Rezeptionsäshetik. München. Iser, W. (1978). The act of reading. London and Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Langer, J. (1995). Envisioning literature. Literary understanding and literature instruction. New York Teacher’s College, Columbia University. Klafki, W. (2001). Dannelsesteori og didaktikk – nye studier. Århus, Forlaget Klim. Penne, S. (2006). Profesjonsfaget norsk I en endringstid. Å konstruere mening, selvforståelse og identitet gjennom språk og tekster. Oslo, Det Utdanningesvitenskapelige fakultet, Universitetet i Oslo. Ricoeur, P. (1990). Soi-meme comme un autre. Paris: Seuil. Rosenblatt, L. (1938). Literature as exploration. New York: Appleton-Century. Rosenblatt, L. (1978). The reader, the text, the poem. The transactional theory of the literary work. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Ziehe, T. (1995). Good enough strangeness in education. In Aittola, T. u.a. (Eds.), Confronting strangeness. Towards a reflexive modernization of the School. Jyväskylä, Finland. Ziehe, T. (2004). Øer af intensitet I et hav af rutine. København: Politisk revy.

Laila Aase University of Bergen Norway

135

ANTHONY PETROSKY

9. TEXTS, TASKS, AND TALK

SITUATING THESE READINGS & THIS WRITING

The subject of this chapter is, of course, the teaching vignettes as they’re represented in the descriptions and class dialogues provided by the teachers and their critical friends, but, somewhat paradoxically, it’s also about the ways in which it’s possible to ‘read’ these representations in writing without the writer disappearing. The methodology of asserting my presence in writing about these representations of teaching and learning is a situated action, yet it is easy to lose sight of that, to slip into discourse (for both me the writer and for you the reader) that would like to appear truthful or iron-clad, even though in addition to my writing always being situated, it also is inevitable that what I write, like what the teachers wrote, will become what others make of it, what they say I said. At these intersections with multiple writers and readers, we always have difference. The tension for me is to create a commentary on these vignettes that moves back-and-forth among my frameworks for understanding them and the vignettes represented through the descriptions, class discourse, and critical commentary. To locate this writing, my thoughts turn immediately to the ways in which my observations of teaching and teachers occur. There is that in my looking in on these vignettes, so I begin there momentarily, but there is more, of course, since my comments on the vignettes are framed by my experiences with classroom talk, texts, and tasks in urban school districts in the US marked heavily by poverty, class, race, and the external manipulations of accountability systems. I feel, too, that my readings of these vignettes are constrained by the practices and discourses of commentary and coaching that I’ve grown accustomed to over the years, no matter what I write to acknowledge those constraints, and by the constraints inherent in such a cross-cultural study. To begin, then, I should say that when I observe, I always read the texts that will be used in the class. If possible, I like to read the texts the class studied prior to my visit and review lesson plans and student writing from those studies. Most of my work with both beginning teachers and seasoned master teachers has to do with inquiry learning with texts. For the past ten years, my practice in schools has focused on the design and implementation of curricula that engages students in interpretive or inquiry studies through discussions and writings. This type of learning almost always moves students through sequences of tasks that make use of student talk in groups of two to three, writing, and interpretive discussions prompted by either student or teacher questions for which there are multiple possible responses that can be argued from the text. In these lessons, students learn to use the text to substantiate P-H. van de Ven and B. Doecke (eds.), Literary Praxis: A Conversational inquiry into the Teaching of Literature, 137–150. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

PETROSKY

their responses, they learn to up-take from and build on others’ comments in discussions, and they learn that the text is a linguistic artifact whose construction by an author is a legitimate subject for inquiry. For students to engage in these kinds of inquiry study, the texts have to offer opportunities for them, for instance, to argue multiple different interpretations that can be warranted with references to the text or to a particular lens or perspective they bring to it. I mention this because not having read the texts in these vignettes, it’s difficult for me to know whether they offer opportunities for this kind of inquiry teaching and learning, except when the teachers tell me they do or as I see such opportunities presented to students in the tasks from which they study, so I feel a bit at sea, if only because my vision, so to speak, has been tuned to consider texts from these perspectives and to look for these types of inquiry discussions in the classes I observe. After reading the chapters by Prue and Bella and Ramon and Mies and Piet-Hein, I have this odd sense of being caught in reflecting surfaces, missing my usual tethers to my own readings of the texts under discussion and my usual fine-grained sense of the arcs of teaching and learning in which the vignettes sit. When I observe teaching, it has become critical for me to meet with teachers before observations and again after lessons to debrief. In these meetings, we talk about where the lesson or lessons sit in an arc of lessons or a unit. This conversation always touches on the teacher’s goals or intended learning for the students and how those also are nested in overarching goals for the unit or arc of lessons. Generally, single visit observations are not as informative as observing three or four times in a row with the same class. If student work and learning is sequenced and scaffolded, then it takes that sequence of observations to see the work and learning unfold. Most lessons that focus students on cognitively challenging work with texts involves multiple lessons, especially if it invites them to do so with a novel or a set of texts, so observing, say, week long arcs of lessons makes teaching and learning much more visible than observing single lessons, even if those single lessons are contextualized in pre- and post-lesson conversations with the teacher. In fact, I prefer to view tapes of three or four sequenced lessons than to actually visit only once, if that’s the choice. Even though these vignettes present class dialogue and summaries of lessons that are in fact arcs of lessons, I’m not certain that I could accurately represent the arcs here in these vignettes, since I am accustomed to seeing teaching and learning through different lenses. Perhaps it’s a matter of gain size. My observations and comments on them grow out of a fine-grained picture of teaching and learning that I establish in the ways I’ve been discussing. When, for example, my teacher preparation students produce transcripts of talk in their classrooms for discussions in our seminar, I ask for at least 20 minutes of transcribed sequential talk. For my commentaries here though, the grain size is larger than that to which I am accustomed, so I feel less certain about the larger pictures of teaching and learning from which I’m writing. As you’ll see, I feel more comfortable speaking to the representation of general teaching approaches than I do about the types of comments made by the teachers and students about the texts, although I overreach when the momentum of the readings engages me. It’s at those moments that I’m most vulnerable to disappearing as the writer of the reading. 138

TEXTS, TASKS, AND TALK

Finally, I should mention that my obsessions with inquiry teaching and learning; with texts that offer opportunities for multiple inquiries; with sequences of tasks that build on each other and reach across multiple texts, and with fine-grained understandings of teachers’ and students’ attempts to establish dialogic discussions are very much connected to a research literature (Applebee, 1996; Nystrand & Gamoran, 1991, 1997) that compels me to believe that students and teachers benefit from these kinds of engagements. Yet, on the other hand, the students and teachers in the large urban districts in which I’ve worked over the past 10 years have little if any experience with these engagements. Education in the US has for the last decade been driven by a system of rewards and punishments that privilege the types of recognition, identification, and memorization skills that appear on high-stakes multiple choice achievement tests. In public education, many teachers teach to the tests, administrators even demand it, and generally, the public, like the politicians who put this system into place, believes that these tests are indicators of student learning even though there is ample evidence that they narrowly constrain teaching and learning to low-level skills more likely to produce boredom and disengagement than learning and engagement. When, for instance, I think of the freedom that all of the teachers in these vignettes have to choose texts and approaches to their teaching, seemingly unconstrained by rigid curricula requirements, standardized tests, and scripted lessons, I am both heartened that it is possible for them and disheartened at what has happened in our urban public education in the US, especially to the poor and under privileged who don’t do well on these standardized tests or who have given up and leave our urban schools at the rate of 30–40 percent a year. As I comment on these vignettes, these issues are inescapably at the back of my mind and continually surfacing. THE PRUE & BELLA VIGNETTE

My readings of the chapter from Prue and Bella came on the heels of my reading in the May 2010 English Journal. It’s a themed issue focused on ‘Collaboration and Social Interaction’. An article by Mary Kendrick, a teacher at Davidson IB Middle School in Davidson, North Carolina, entitled ‘Using Student Collaboration to Foster Progressive Discourse’ caught my attention, so there was a point in my readings of these vignettes where I moved back-and-forth between the Prue and Bella vignette and the Kendrick piece. Prue opens her introduction to her class by telling us that her tack is to ask the students to use short passages from a story to discuss the whole story. This kind of significant passage analysis is a strategy they’ll need to demonstrate in the end of the year exam. She predicts this will be difficult for them, and she’s going to be particularly attentive to ‘whether they draw on language and stylistic features of the writing in their discussion, as well as ideas’. She imagines that her ‘role will be to ask questions that help them to move from passage, to story, to work as a whole’. After giving us this glimpse into the task she sets, she goes on to say that her real focus is on talk. I’ll let Prue speak for herself. 139

PETROSKY

What I don’t tell Bella yet, though it will clearly emerge as she spends time with us in the classroom, is that my teaching focus at this time is on talk. Students might spend a whole class talking, with almost no formal note taking or ‘quiet’ work happening at all. Thinking about it now, I can see that I want to develop the same sense of conversational inquiry in the classroom, that Bella and I will be using ourselves. I want to get students to make their own thinking process visible not only to the rest of us in the class, but to themselves. I am asking them ‘what do you think is happening here?’ ‘what makes you think that?’ ‘where in the text can you locate this idea of yours?’ I want them to be able to work out how it is that they are drawing conclusions, and to be prepared to test those conclusions. Mary Kendrick begins her essay in the English Journal by summarizing two scenes of student collaboration, although they do not include transcribed student talk, in her classes that are ten years apart. The first scene from 1998 involves her ninthgrade students working in small groups to study To Kill A Mockingbird, the most taught novel in the US, through the lens of different themes – friendship, family, growing up, injustice, prejudice – to produce posters that they share with the class, then watch the movie then take the test. In the second scene from 2008, her tenthgrade students are again working in small groups to study Siddhartha in ‘a semester-long unit that explores the relationships between culture and identity’. She asks her students to use double-side journal entries to begin their conversations (noting passages that catch their attention and their responses to them), take notes as they talk, and then ‘identify three ideas that emerged from your discussion and write them on the sticky notes’. The notes are posted on a butcher paper for the whole class to see, and she then sends them off to work in their groups to prepare the notes. Each note ‘needs (1) a quote, question, or connection that could lead to a literary analysis; (2) a thought or question about the culture portrayed in the book; and (3) a real-life connection that could be explored through research’ (Kendrick, 2010, p. 86). (I would like to pause for a moment to mention how I am writing. Think of my chapter as a slow train moving from one spur track to another then another. As I read these chapters and the Kendrick article, I took notes in my journal that represent my exploration of these works more as a montage rather than a linear argument. That said, I will argue and draw conclusions, as I am about to, but my writing will be like a montage, so you might expect some dissonance, especially as I compare what I read here to what I know from my experiences – as I mentioned earlier – in urban schools in the states.) As I reread my notes, it seems important for me to say that Prue and Bella and Kendricks are defining for me what could be meant by ‘authentic conversations’, a term I generally dislike and distrust but not here. Prue would like her students to have conversations about the Farmer story to make their thinking visible that are similar to her conversations with Bella to make their thinking visible. She has goals, to be sure, and they are caught in the tensions between exam preparation and making students’ thinking visible, but she knows that. Kendrick characterizes the differences in her two vignettes as having to do with her goals and the kinds of talk 140

TEXTS, TASKS, AND TALK

in which the students engage. In 1998, her goal was to prepare her students to write a thematic analysis for the exam, and she structured their talk with her questions, although, according to her, they did have conversations in a give-and-take, citing text, and building interpretations. In 2008, her goal was to ‘stimulate further thinking, further inquiry’, and given her focus on students’ talk with each other in their small and in the large group, she’s structured the tasks and the pedagogy to allow her students to make their thinking visible by talking among themselves and by building on each other’s comments. As a part of this, like Prue, she describes her students moving back-and-forth among their ideas and the text, speculating, testing, inquiring, interpreting. Prue’s comment leads me to think that her students make the same sorts of moves, and Prue writes about them in similar terms. After one of their discussion turns, Prue says: Later, their thinking will become more complex. Later I will push them further: ‘what is the implication of your interpretation?’ … ‘have you a theory about what Farmer is doing in this story?’ … ‘what conclusions are you beginning to draw about Farmer’s writing?’ I want them to be talking about language and meaning. Kendrick and Prue say that they structure their tasks and their teaching approaches so that their students talk with each other, referencing the text, working towards understandings of various sorts, but also working towards seeing their own thinking in action, so to speak. I identify with these moves, and especially with Prue’s comments. Like Prue, I set up my small groups with only two to three students. This makes them inescapably accountable to each other and the task. Like Prue, and like Kendrick, I value tasks that invite students to move back-and-forth among ideas, multiple sources, and their own thinking that up-takes and builds on voiced comments as they track them in notes and on charts. This is to say that Prue’s (and Bella’s) comments on their goals and approaches to classroom talk resonate with me and my goals and approaches with my students. I was struck to read Prue’s focus on asking students to identify and explain significant moments in the text because this is an approach I often take, and generally I make it specific to the big concepts we’re studying. I might, for instance, ask students to identify the significant moments in the text that they think reveal the way the female characters are positioned in relation to male characters when we study the big concept of gender construction and the ways authors create gender in texts. THE RAMON VIGNETTE

Three of Ramon Groenendijk’s students, working in a small group, studying Fam by Thomas van Aalten, have what seems to me to be a quite interesting turn in which they talk about the author’s perspective and take up and build on each other’s points in an evolving give-and-take focused on the main character. It reminds me of the kinds of talk I hear from my students at the beginning of their discussions of a text when they’re sorting out and grappling with characters and events to get them straight, so to speak, to reach a common understanding about them before turning to literary analysis or interpretive tasks. Here is that turn. 141

PETROSKY

Renske: Danique: Aike:

Danique: Aike: Anne Wil: Danique: Anne Wil: Renske: Danique:

Everything comes back to that, yes, the bad view he has on the world. Of his past, especially. Because in his past, he was used to being less important and stuff. That’s why he is now … well, sad. Yes, he thinks the world is bad and that everything goes wrong. Like with that friend of his or something, what’s his name … The time they biked home and he would say: nothing wrong? So that kind of shows that he thinks everybody is that way, in a way. Everybody’s boring and … come on, what’s that word? A little like self-pity. (‘zelfmedelijden’) Yes, there is no fun really. Or when he describes that party. He’s kind of saying that the party was no fun at all either. Mariah Carey being played all the time … And that holiday on Cyprus. Yeah, outside there’s like this war going on. (laughing): Yeah, pieces of soldiers flying around! Yes, I mean if you talk about it like that, I don’t think you really care that much. He was living in a mist or something. Yes, he really thought the entire world was a bad place.

Since you have read this chapter, you know that Ramon’s student groups are working from carefully focused, well-structured interpretive tasks he sets for them as a part of his goal to have them learn different approaches or perspectives. He believes ‘you gain more insight into the story when you put these perspectives together’. Each group has a different task. Because he wants them to make connections among the different tasks, he steps into this group’s conversation and towards the end, he leads them to think about the main character in terms of the author’s background. It’s worth reading this turn because it’s a demonstration of how a teacher can fairly easily take over and redirect talk by valuing one response and using it as an occasion to promote a point of view. Teacher:

Aike: Teacher: Aike: Teacher: Deniece: Teacher: Danique: Teacher: 142

Alright, I am going to ask you a few questions. To see how we can enhance the connections between the different approaches to the story even more. We have noticed that the main character has a certain outlook on life. Who could tell me how he sees the world? Bad. Bad, explain. He’s completely negative. Nothing’s fun really. The holidays, that party, it was all equally boring. Everything is stupid and it doesn’t amount to anything? (…) If we look at time and space. Where is this story situated? In the city. In the city. Which city? I think a big city or at the outskirts of a big city. Because he is near an airport. And an industrial area. Very good. There is even mention of a prison tower nearby.

TEXTS, TASKS, AND TALK

Paul: (Laughter) Teacher:

Danique: Teacher:

The Bijlmer ! Well, that’s an excellent remark, Paul! Airplanes, prison towers, lots of apartment buildings, it might just be the Bijlmer. That gives us a chance to make a connection with the author, Thomas van Aalten, he also lives in Amsterdam. So we have this big city, airplanes, apartment buildings, but the author also talks about this small room in the attic … He had bad memories about that. It is dusty, everything is crooked, it is a very desolate place. All very discomforting. You could say that this room in the attic represents his youth, more or less. (…) So what am I trying to say? When you read a book at some point, you will notice that your goal in reading requires a certain reading strategy. And being the smart people you are, you will have to gradually develop in order to be able to apply these different ways of reading, different ways of approaching literature. Basically you already do a lot of these things automatically: when reading books for school, you pay attention to certain things. And realizing that can give you a lot of advantages. And actually, that is what wanted to share with you today.

By the end of this turn, Ramon is talking more than any of the students and he’s doing so to help them see a connection that he thinks is important for them to make. Of the first turn, the one in which the students are focused on the main character, Ramon writes: … the students are especially preoccupied with understanding the protagonist. In their original groups, all have paid attention to specific elements, as the reading instructions required. Now, they are sharing their findings, as ‘experts’ in approaching a text in a specific way. In an exploratory manner, they try to form an image of the protagonist. However, I feel they get stuck at this point. Apparently, they are still at the level Witte (2008) calls the level of recognition or identification. They do not understand the protagonist and cannot get past that point. While it seems to me that Ramon has a point, the students did stay close to a discussion focused solely on the main character, and one could argue that this is how they understand their task: to ‘pay attention to the way in which the author wrote the story … what perspective the story was written and what effect it has on you, as a reader … who describes the events and how does that influence your way of reading the story ….’ I would suggest, as well, that they aren’t stuck on a level of recognition or identification. They are doing what most leaderless groups do when they first begin such a task. They are sorting out their understandings of the main character who has caught their attention because of his attitude, and they do create an image of him that seems to me to be an interpretation. My reading of Ramon’s goals for his students puts him in a different instructional space from Prue and Bella and Kendrick. He says that ‘I want to show the students 143

PETROSKY

how to think freely about literature when they are exploring a text … However, since I am operating at an intellectual level they have not yet reached, I find that I become frustrated: they are not yet ready to read a story in the way that I read it,’ and later on he says, ‘The most important thing is that I give the students the tools with which they can distil this beauty from a book … and that is what I consider the core of my method for teaching literature: providing the students with tools.’ Ramon’s narrative, like his goals for his students, is largely about whether his students got the perspectives he wanted them to and whether they see the differences in them. He structures tasks for students to focus their discussions on analyses of the text from different perspectives. He is, as he says, text and task oriented. It seems somewhat ironic to me (and to Ramon, I think) that he would like them to think freely as long as they follow his lead. My journal responses to Ramon’s narrative are testy. Perhaps, and unfortunately, my reading of his chapter comes on the heels of reading Kendrick and Prue and Bella, but he sounds to me very much like students in courses I have taught at the university who imagine that teaching literature is about getting students to love literature as they do, and to appreciate its beauty as they do, although his tasks represent him as a teacher who would like his students to learn to use analytic and linguistic tools to understand texts. I am taken with the careful focus of his tasks that direct students to read from different perspectives. I think I could use them with some changes to the overall structure of the lessons that would allow me to deal in comprehension and significance discussions for the students before they take on these tasks. And I would ask each student in the group to compose a quick write in response to the task before the group begins its discussion of it. Like Ramon, my assignments for those types of courses are well-structured, often asking students to read through different lenses (e.g., feminist, Marxist, New Critical, and so on) to analyse literature to see how it works from these perspectives, to see the methods the author uses to develop characters, scenes, and evocations. I think of these studies on perspectives as situated work with a critical cognitive strategy. I always begin my students with comprehension discussions of the texts we’re reading, so that students together in groups of two to three can write and talk to sort out and understand the characters, events, and unfolding plots or themes of the selections before going on to work on moments that strike them as significant or on literary analysis and interpretive tasks such as those that Ramon has created. I write out the comprehension tasks, much like Ramon writes out his tasks for his students, and ask them to write before they talk among themselves and to write to track their conversations, so that they can later chart them to share with the whole group. Conversation is the engine – it is the means by which they make their thinking visible, but it is also the means by which they socialize their intelligence. A SITUATING INTERLUDE

Before going on to discuss my response to Mies, and since I’ve already begun to do this, I’d like to take a few pages to situate my thoughts. I’ll frame them with a quotation from Michael Oakeshott, an English philosopher, from his essay, ‘The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind’. 144

TEXTS, TASKS, AND TALK

As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. Of course there is argument and inquiry and information, but wherever these are profitable they are to be recognized as passages in this conversation … Conversation is not an enterprise designed to yield an extrinsic profit, a contest where a winner gets a prize, nor is it an activity of exegesis; it is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure … Education, properly speaking, is an initiation into the skill and partnership of this conversation in which we learn to recognize the voices, to distinguish the proper occasions for utterance, and in which we acquire intellectual and moral habits appropriate to conversation. And it is this conversation which, in the end, gives place and character to every human activity and utterance. (Oakeshott, 1991, p. 490–491) To me, Oakshott is saying that conversations are at the heart of our humanity, of our intellects and emotions, and that they evolve, veer off, and teach us in unrehearsed ways. Unlike most learning in school, they don’t result in prizes or scores on accountability measures, nor are they simply for explications. In schooling, such conversations over texts can occur, as they do for Prue’s and Ramon’s students, by inviting students to jump right in, to talk among themselves about the questions and issues that surface from their readings or that are presented them by the teacher. Discussions can occur almost spontaneously, as they seem to do for Prue’s students, if we can make a certain set of assumptions about the students participating in them. We have to assume, I think, that the students understand the text they’re discussing, that they share a common sense of characters and events and plots, that they are comfortable voicing their misunderstandings and disagreements, that they know the social-linguistic routines for speaking and arguing from texts, and that they are in, in effect, familiar and comfortable with self monitoring. I believe that this is the case for Prue’s (and Ramon’s) students. They are in a privileged place – socially and intellectually – as Bella points out. They appear to behave in their discussions as though they know and trust that the text will make sense and that they’ll make sense in their talk. Here’s an except in which Prue’s students demonstrate their familiarity and comfort with tone, Farmer’s use of brackets in the text, and issues having to do with Farmer’s stance towards male and female characters. Fiona:

Cara: Prue: Kim:

Farmer paints a picture in colours. Very striking and disturbing; ‘red velvet’ and ‘quilt’, ‘ink’ all foreshadow blood. Children’s essays and poem tell us she’s a teacher … but he hasn’t made a connection. She’s just a woman with black hair. The tone is very detached. It’s unsettling. How do you locate ‘unsettling’? Through detachment. [He is] not emotionally engaged with this at all. 145

PETROSKY

There appears to be a section of the conversation that’s excluded. Prue tells us that the students continue. Claire: Fiona: Cara: Natasha: Bree: Bec:

Weird … she uses brackets like that. What’s the purpose? Unnecessary information. Like a side note … in the first person. Makes it more intimate don’t you think? Do words in brackets give a different view into his psyche? Maybe it’s the narrator? I think it’s like a monologue. I think it’s like a play. Like stage directions … to set the mood.

‘There is an exploratory aspect to this talk,’ Prue tells us. She goes on to say that ‘four questions are asked, but these questions are directed to each other, not to me. Cara, Natasha and Bree are testing out an idea in their questions – openly hypothesising. Fiona and Bec are asserting, but not as though they have the only answer to the questions being asked, simply as though they are confident in offering an interpretation. ‘I comment now that it is clear that the rapist has been watching the woman, and someone takes this point further: Fiona:

Liz: Fiona:

[The writing] shows he knows oddities about her … her back door is described as solid, open. Could be a metaphor for herself? Vulnerable? She seems like an independent woman, but the man comes in and she breaks down … she becomes a detail in the house as inanimate and lifeless as the doors and the lightshades. Nameless. This is just why he only does it once.’ He doesn’t need to connect with her He stands, ‘cocky’, not hiding – unseen. The brazenness of his behaviour!’

Prue tells us that: Students are also beginning to draw some conclusions about the perspective Farmer brings to her work. I don’t agree with these conclusions, but I’ll wait for them to test them out for themselves. They say: ‘Farmer is anti-men’ ‘The only time men are OK is when they take on a woman’s role’ life’ ‘She’s annoying, so bleak … just because she came from a traditional background’. It’s important to understand that these conversations began with students reading excerpts from the text that caught their attention. Unlike Ramon, Prue doesn’t give them carefully structured tasks to respond to. They take-up ideas from each other and they build on them. Prue’s presence in the conversation doesn’t seem to override their ideas (as Ramon’s does in that one turn I quoted); they don’t, that is, take 146

TEXTS, TASKS, AND TALK

her word as the final one and don’t appear to be in the least looking to her for the right response. As I read these students’ comments and Prue’s and Bella’s, I thought about the students in the large urban districts in the US where, as I continue to mention, my work has been situated for the past ten years. I thought about the ways in which it is possible for students to comprehend the characters and plot and events as they pursue their own interpretive interests. I thought about how Prue’s (and Ramon’s) students’ experiences are unlike those of all but select classes of college bound students in districts where I have been working. It’s difficult to explain here in the contexts of these privileged situations what happens when students aren’t familiar with and practiced at the social and linguistic conventions that allow them to make sense of the text and to have conversations among themselves, especially when they have years of experience from which they’ve learned that the teacher has the right answers or that because they couldn’t remember or recognize details valued by test-makers, their ‘comprehension’, figured more like an on-off switch than the results of engagement with a text and others, is poor. It doesn’t make sense for me to go on with this line of thinking, to site the statistics, or locate the students with which I’m familiar, but it should be clear that I think Prue’s and Ramon’s students can have these conversations, whether they’re student-generated, as Prue’s appear to be, or tasks generated, as Ramon’s appear to be, in situations that to an outsider such as I am seem quite privileged – in the sense that the set of assumptions I mentioned earlier are in play. The teachers with whom I work are accustomed to giving students much more support, or scaffolding (McConachie & Petrosky, 2010), than Prue does hers, and their tasks look more like Ramon’s than Prue’s open-ended request for a discussion, and they initially, necessarily proceed from tasks – often conducted by groups of 2 or 3 students in conversations – that we refer to as comprehension building. We would all like our students to be able to have meaningful conversations among themselves in which they take up and build on each others’ ideas, in which they acquire, as Oakshott describes it, intellectual and moral habits, but for students unfamiliar with and unpractised in the social, literary, and linguistics conventions that underpin such conversations, they benefit from carefully sequenced and scaffolded learning that leads to challenging tasks (like those Ramon created) until they can break free of those scaffolds once they have internalized the routines. Yet I can’t relinquish the belief that privilege matters, that schooling that has been dominated by test preparation, recitations and drills in the service of memory and recognition and identification rather than in the service of analyses and interpretations conducted through talk and writing, like the ones we see here in these examples, always already situates students in a dramatically different space with learning from and about texts no matter whether they have opportunities to move away from those drills. THE MIES VIGNETTE

Although Ramon imagines that he might benefit from Mies’ reader response approach to teaching literature, I don’t think he would; I think it would take him away from 147

PETROSKY

his valuable work with teaching students to understand texts from multiple perspectives into a space where texts receive less attention as texts, as linguistic artifacts. The reader response approach that Mies takes, inflected by her desires to have students identify with a young sold-into-prostitution protagonist offers students a series of lessons that teach them that literature and reading is about connecting ‘the text they read to elements of their own lives in order to gain new insights’. ‘In my classes,’ she says, ‘I cannot help but emphasize the social context in books and stories, because it is exactly my goal to engage into a discussion of social topics by means of youth novels. I recognize that I am not so much interested in whether the students like the book, but rather that they identify with the main character.’ The dichotomy Mies uses here – students liking the book versus their identification with the main character to become involved with social topics – seems to miss the possibilities of literature studies that Ramon and Prue create for their students. It doesn’t include, for example, the kinds of teaching and learning through multiple perspectives that Ramon values and develops for his students, nor does it include the dialogic habits of working with texts, moving among interpretations and their substantiation in texts, that Prue wishes her students to learn. Nor does it include inviting students to read critically or to deconstruct texts, for instance, for the ways in which authors create gendered characters or race that I prefer. All of these alternatives benefit students in different ways, since they position them to engage in cognitive and literary strategies that ask for close readings of texts. My experiences with reader response approaches, when I see them used in urban districts, is that they minimize study of the text in favor of the study of the issues the text raises or in favor of individual readers’ personal reactions to particular moments or characters. When I participate with teachers in studies of students’ written work samples produced in classes where this approach is predominant, we notice that the students struggle to reference the text and to explain how textual references might or might not warrant statements about the text. These practices grow from close readings, and it is these types of close readings that we require from students in their university composition and literature classes, so much is made of students’ preparation for these in high school in the name of college and career readiness in the US (Conley, 2007). Although Mies values reader response, and it does appear to be her predominant approach to literature instruction, she has other tools in her repertoire that provide students with opportunities to dig into the text after their initial reader response experiences. She refers to ‘the placemat method’ as one such ‘didactic tool’ and uses it in conjunction with what she refers to as ‘a group expedition’ to give students opportunities to ‘chat with other groups’ about the ‘turning point (agnitio)’ they find in the text. Although she only gives one example of student talk in a group expedition that references textual moments, it appears that the students did find ‘different turning points’, so I can imagine that these were lively text-centred discussions that could have produced beneficial differences in their understandings. As I reread my notes on the Mies’ vignette, I’m struck by my hostility towards reader response approaches to literature instruction. Some of that hostility has to do 148

TEXTS, TASKS, AND TALK

with the way in which such approaches position students to discuss or write about the issues raised by texts or their own individual connections to moments or characters rather than to discuss or write about the text as a cultural linguistic artifact in what we understand as close readings. In the US, we promote close readings as part-and-parcel of academic projects with texts of all sorts, including media and actual observations, as the kinds of skills students need with literature to be college ready. The other issue that my notes raise on my reading of Mies’ chapter has to do with the possibilities or impossibilities of students identifying with characters and situations in texts. Perhaps my concern has to do with the differences in empathizing and sympathizing. While it appears to me to be possible to be sympathetic to characters and situations outside our experiences, I wonder about positioning students to empathize or identify with characters and situations removed from what they can know, and I wonder about the results of such requests of students. Why, I’ve asked for example in my notes, would a teacher want students to identify with a young prostitute? Is it possible for students to do that, to, in fact, empathize this way? What would they learn from doing that? That the situation is horrible, that it’s bondage, that it’s a ruined life? These possible ‘learnings’ seem to me to be stock responses, which I suggest are all that we can do when we confront such readings and situations so removed from anything we know. As stock responses, they lead to generalized explications. Mies, for example, admires the pieces of writing that were written to the prompt: ‘imagine you were the protagonist, what would you think or wish to tell your mother? Please finish this: ‘Mama, if you could see me now …’ For me, they represent a type of generalized theme writing that such impossible identifications and the prompt pre-structure for the student. In general, I think that’s it is quite difficult for anyone to say much about the protagonist’s situation that hasn’t already been said, so talk and writing, such as these examples, reproduces received language and ideas. I don’t take this generalized identification to be something from which students benefit in the ways they might benefit, say, from learning to study a text through multiple different perspectives by doing close readings. In the study through perspectives, they would work with analysis, application of concepts or frameworks, interpretations through those concepts or frameworks, and comparative syntheses – critical and portable cognitive strategies. The majority of my comments in my journal on Mies’ vignette repeat my questions about the intended learning goals in reader response approaches to literature instruction and how they help students dig deeply and carefully into the text. Rather than go on with them, I’d like to conclude because I think I’ve represented my position towards reader response approaches to literature well enough in these few paragraphs. I began as a heavily biased reader to that aspect of Mies’ vignette focused on her reader response approach, but I also want to acknowledge the way she gives students opportunities to build from this work with her use of the two other tools she puts into play that take students into the text. I have been seduced by the ‘college ready’ rhetoric (Conley, 2007; Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010) and the teaching practices of close readings of 149

PETROSKY

texts as cultural artifacts, and as a composition and literature instructor at the university, I’ve seen the struggles of students who have had steady diets of reader response to learn how to analyse, interpret, and critique texts rather than relate them to their lives or to social issues. FINALLY

I’d like to return to my opening comments and mention briefly that since I don’t know the texts or the contexts of these vignettes, my comments throughout this chapter appear to me to be about the particular approaches to teaching and learning rather than about the teachers or the students’ work samples – be they talk or writing. By writing what I’ve seen in these glimpses of teaching and learning, I’ve most certainly said more about the approaches to teaching and learning that I value than about the figures and scenes of these classrooms. That, of course, is inevitable, and as such, my comments are both an example of perspective taking at work and the values of one reader reading. REFERENCES Applebee, A. N. (1996). Curriculum as conversation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Conley, D. T. (2007). Toward a more comprehensive conception of college readiness. Eugene, OR: Educational Policy Improvement Center. Kendrick, M. (2010). Using student collaboration to foster progressive discourse. English Journal, 99(5), 85–90. McConachie, S., & Petrosky, A. (2010). Content matters: A disciplinary literacy approach to improving student learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices & Council of Chief State School Officers. (2010). The common core state standards initiative: A state-led effort to create shared high standards to make sure all American students are ready for college and work. Retrieved from http://www.core standards.org Nystrand, M., & Gamoran, A. (1991). Instructional discourse, student engagement, and literature achievement. Research in the Teaching of English, 25(3), 261–290. Nystrand, M., & Gamoran, A. (1997). The big picture: The language of learning in dozens of English lessons. In M. Nystrand (Ed.), Opening dialogue: Understanding the dynamics of language and learning in English classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press. Oakeshott, M. (1991). Rationalism and other essays: New and expanded edition. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, Inc.

Anthony Petrosky School of Education University of Pittsburgh

150

ANNE TURVEY AND JOHN YANDELL

10. DIFFERENCE IN THE CLASSROOM Whose Reading Counts?

The social multiaccentuality of the ideological sign is a very crucial aspect. By and large, it is thanks to this intersecting of accents that a sign maintains its vitality and dynamism and the capacity for further development. A sign that has been withdrawn from the pressures of the social struggle – which, so to speak, crosses beyond the pale of the class struggle – inevitably loses force, degenerating into allegory and becoming the object not of live social intelligibility but of philological comprehension. Volosinov, V.N. (1929/1986: 23). We welcome the commitment to dialogue that is embodied in the organisation of the case studies. This is, in our view, a hugely significant development, a way of negotiating the power relationships implicated in any real-world research, a way of addressing questions of representation in academic discourse. We see a connection between such methodological commitments to the ‘intersecting of accents’ within the domain of research and scholarship and broader understandings of meaningmaking, both in the world and in the literature classroom. In what follows, we trace something of the history of our engagement with literature teaching. We situate this history within particular institutional and policy contexts. We sketch out an argument for a literature-teaching praxis that is irreducibly, and sometimes uncomfortably, multiaccentual. Reading the case studies made us reflect, again, on our own national context and on the shaping influence of government policy on that context. For the past two decades in England, the content of English as a school subject has been specified by statute.1 Since 1989, we have seen four versions of a national curriculum, each with different emphases, each making somewhat different claims about the purposes and values of English. All four versions, though, have been closely articulated with high-status, high-stakes, centralised regimes of inspection and assessment. These regimes, tending to enforce data-driven models of accountability and performativity, have had a profound impact on notions of teacher identity: professional judgement, at least in a pessimistic account of this period, has been displaced by the lesser virtue of mere compliance. In such an account, the task of the English teacher has been reconceptualised as involving little more than the delivery of a pre-specified, pre-packaged curriculum. We both started our teaching careers in the era before the National Curriculum. We remember, with more than a little fondness, a time of more direct and immediate P-H. van de Ven and B. Doecke (eds.), Literary Praxis: A Conversational inquiry into the Teaching of Literature, 151–167. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

TURVEY AND YANDELL

accountability, the time when our students’ perennial question, ‘Why are we reading this?’ demanded a response that was both personal and professional: since texts, in those days, were chosen by departments and by individual teachers, we had to be ready with reasons more local – and perhaps more compelling – than the current catch-all defence of ‘it’s in the National Curriculum’. These choices were, without doubt, informed by the criterion of accessibility – an exercise of professional judgement that is always problematic because of the assumptions it entails, both about the text and about the readers. But the fact that these choices were themselves open to scrutiny – were part of the dialogue between teachers and their students – meant that our own interests as readers, and our thinking about our students’ interests, identities and needs, were often explored in the classroom. Our early years as teachers coincided with a period of fundamental change in the English curriculum, particularly in relation to the teaching of literature and particularly in London, where we both worked. Whereas the past two decades have been a time of centrally-imposed change from above, the preceding decades saw change from below, change that was responsive to social movements and to school students themselves: change that was motivated, primarily, by taking seriously questions of representation. In the classrooms such as those where we worked, classrooms that were constituted in diversity, both the senses of representation teased out by Spivak (1988), the cultural and the political, were centrally and inextricably implicated: this was both about acts of sign-making (re-presentation) and about speaking for. So we chose writers whose work represented something of workingclass experience (Barry Hines, Alan Sillitoe, Alan Bleasdale, Shelagh Delaney); we chose African and Caribbean (Chinua Achebe, Sam Selvon, V.S. Reid, Buchi Emecheta), and Black American (Angela Walker, Maya Angelou, Rosa Guy, Mildred Taylor) writers; we chose writers who were attempting to speak to the experiences of contemporary British urban youth (Farukh Dhondy, Jan Needle, Geraldine Kaye). What was at stake here was more than a rebalancing of the canon, to make it less male or more up-to-date, to give it a postcolonial or a proletarian flavour. The category of literature itself was problematised, in two important ways. First, our work as English teachers took seriously Raymond Williams’ insistence that ‘culture is ordinary’ (Williams, 1958). The 1970s and 1980s was a period in which community publishing flourished and its fruits, largely in the form of autobiography and poetry, figured prominently in English classrooms; allied to this was the tradition of publication of school students’ own work, from Chris Searle’s editions of Stepney Words (1971) to the steady stream of anthologies produced by the Inner London Education Authority’s English Centre, such as Our Lives (Ashton and Simons, eds, 1979), City Lines (Simons et al., eds, 1982) and Say What You Think (Moger and Richmond, eds, 1985). The presence of such collections and community publications in the classroom had the effect of blurring the boundaries of literature; it also acted as a powerful reminder of the cultural productivity of school students and the communities from which they came. Second, there was an overtly political dimension to some of the texts that we chose to read with our classes: the selection of Beverley Naidoo’s (1985) Journey to Jo’burg, for example, could not be seen as entirely separable from a shared set of commitments to the struggle against apartheid (see Yandell 2008b). 152

DIFFERENCE IN THE CLASSROOM

To some extent, these changes in what was read reflected teachers’ shifting conceptions of the processes and purposes of reading. There was a widespread recognition of the significance of students’ interests – of what they brought to the reading that happened in classrooms – and, perhaps, of the validity of diverse reading positions. There was, too, a shared understanding that literacy involved reading the world as well as the word (Freire and Macedo, 1987), and hence that encounters with literature were never simply a matter of induction into an academic discourse. At times, though, we wonder whether the arguments about which text to read left unexamined how these texts were read, or whose readings (really) counted. We think that this history matters, and we would want to honour it. This (necessarily abbreviated) sketch of a history that shaped us as well as being shaped, in some small measure, by us and teachers like us, is simultaneously the history of institutional forces and social movements. It might suggest that, to rephrase L. P. Hartley, another country is our past. Our reading of the Dutch and Australian case studies is, like all other readings, situated: we notice, and attend to, points of commonality and difference in relation to our own experience. So, for example, we notice the degree of teachers’ and students’ autonomy in the choice of text. We recognise the social/political purposes in Ramon’s and Mies’ account, and we read Prue’s choice of Beverley Farmer’s short stories as motivated, a product of Prue’s interests: we might even want to suggest a parallel between the choice of Farmer and the movement from the local to the general that Prue encourages her students to make in their reading of Farmer. What has happened in England in the past two decades is that the experience of literature in the classroom has been fundamentally reconfigured. In part, the effect of the imposition of a national curriculum has been the reassertion of canonicity, both of a prescribed list of canonical authors and of a predetermined notion of literary value. This process is most apparent in the fact that, since 1989, the proposition that all secondary students should study Shakespeare has been given statutory force. It is not simply about the return of dead white men, but also about the curricularisation, the institutionalisation, of the Other. Literature, in every version of the National Curriculum thus far, has been constructed as a double category. On the one hand, there is the ‘English literary heritage’, with its list of canonical authors from Chaucer to Tennyson (QCDA, 2009). The list, with its startling anomalies (in what sense are either Kate Chopin or Oscar Wilde representative of a specifically ‘English’ literary heritage?), has statutory force. On the other hand, there are ‘texts from different cultures and traditions’ (QCDA, 2009). These texts – and their authors – are thus defined by their difference, by their categorical separation from the ‘English’ canonical authors. In relation to the ‘English literary heritage’, the correct readerly attitude is one of reverence: pupils should be enabled to ‘understand the appeal and importance over time’ of these texts (ibid.). For the texts from ‘different cultures’, however, different criteria are in operation. There is a requirement that the authors ‘are so familiar with a particular culture or country that they represent it sensitively and with understanding’ (ibid): thus policy, at a stroke, insists on a one-forone correlation between culture and nation, and by extension nationality, and assumes a particular relationship between the writer and the culture that is represented. 153

TURVEY AND YANDELL

For the readers of such ‘different’ texts, on the other hand, much greater latitude is envisaged: they are to explore ‘how ideas, experiences and values are portrayed differently in texts from a range of cultures and traditions’ (ibid.). The marking out of literary territory in this way, the creation of lines of demarcation, enforces messages about texts (how they should be categorised and hence how they should be read) and also about readers and their cultural positioning. These divisions are marked most conspicuously in the exam board anthologies that almost all fifteenand sixteen-year-olds study. There are sections devoted to poetry labelled ‘English Literature’, and a separate section entitled ‘Poetry from Different Cultures’. These institutional messages are in tension with the anthologised poems themselves, many of which, like John Agard’s ‘Half Caste’, represent complex struggles of intercultural negotiation. In London classrooms, the assumption of a monocultural, hegemonic norm, the perspective from which cultural difference is to be approached, is nothing short of absurd. The second strand in the process of the repositioning of literature has been the renewed emphasis on a skills-based approach to the curriculum. Particularly in the past decade or so, with the advent of the National Literacy Strategy (DfEE 2001), texts have tended to become merely exemplary: drained of all particularity, all local significance, they are presented as vehicles for the teaching of generic devices. Our purpose, though, is not to elicit sympathy for lost autonomy; on the contrary, our argument, in the remainder of this piece, is that spaces for dialogue are always present in the literature classroom, no matter how prescriptive the curriculum. For all the contributors to this collection, these personal histories that help to ‘identify and articulate the philosophical frameworks in which we locate our professional practice’ (to borrow Piet-Hein and Brenton’s words in Chapter One) must be part of the book’s ‘conversation’. In Prue’s pedagogy, Bella Illesca sees the enactment of practices that support a form of ‘democracy’. The social space of Gill’s classroom encourages the development of shared understandings of texts: problems of understanding are jointly pursued and meanings are negotiated. But it is more than the ‘acculturation and reproduction of certain linguistic practices’ or even the joint construction of knowledge that we see so vividly presented in the accounts of Prue’s classrooms; Prue’s teaching comes out of and shapes her professional beliefs and values about the purpose of education: ‘… to help students develop a consciousness of the values, the responsibilities, the behaviours underpinning a democratic process’. In the Dutch case study, we think of Ramon and Mies’ intention that the study of literature should broaden their students’ world view, enable them to ‘look at the world from different perspectives’ as they are learning to read a text in different ways. The ‘social engagement’ that underpins their teaching is based on concepts of identification, recognition and empathy. These are at one level literary concepts that literature teachers want students to understand as they experiment with and gain confidence in using what Ramon calls ‘tools’ for textual analysis, and Piet-Hein refers to as ‘a broad repertoire for reading literature’. But these concepts are also part of a profoundly moral and ethical purpose seen most clearly in Mies’ belief that the study of particular novels can 154

DIFFERENCE IN THE CLASSROOM

induce ‘compassion and fear’, can lead to levels of social awareness about real world inequalities and exploitation. Mies reflects: In my classes, I cannot help but emphasize the social context in books and stories, because it is exactly my goal to engage in a discussion of social topics by means of youth novels. I recognize that I am not so much interested in whether the students like the book, but rather that they identify with the main character. We recognise aspects of our own histories and practices in these accounts but we would want to place centrally in our ‘story’ experiences of diversity in London classrooms and the impact of these experiences on our teaching of literature. In what follows, we focus on particular moments in our experiences as teachers and teacher educators, moments that speak to our interest in the diversity of readers and readings and in how such readings are produced. ANNE

In 1992 I wrote about an episode that had occurred early in my time as an English teacher in a London school, some thirty years ago now (Turvey, 1992). The episode has come to stand as something of a defining moment for me, in the way it led me to reconsider some of my ideas about how students engage with literature and about what it could mean to acknowledge the lives, histories and subjectivities of these students in a classroom discussion about meaning and literary value. I was teaching Wide Sargasso Sea: set in the Caribbean, this novel presents Jean Rhys’s alternative view of Rochester’s mad wife in the attic from Jane Eyre. Like Prue in her approach to Beverley Farmer’s stories, I was mindful of an examination at the end of the course where the girls would have to demonstrate a command of literary discourse to write about the novel. In those days, the demand that students ‘reflect on their interpretations and evaluate others’ interpretations’, something Prue has to consider, was a less significant part of this literary discourse as far as the examination was concerned. The girls I taught were also far less confident than Prue’s in using the conventions of a literary discussion but they could see that it somehow ‘mattered’, for the examination of course, but also in their developing relationship with their teacher, and they wanted to belong to this literary community. I know that I valued what I imagined to be the kinds of exploratory talk that characterise powerfully Prue’s classroom, although as the following account will show, there are problems with my intentions and my interpretation of a joint construction of knowledge through exploratory talk. Rhys, born in Dominica of a Welsh father and a third-generation Creole mother, was one of a selection of authors from the new ‘African and Caribbean Literature’ examination paper. You were not allowed to select texts from the new paper and do them alongside authors from other option papers such as ‘Twentieth Century Literature’ or ‘The Comedy of Manners’; if you decided to do this new paper, the ‘Special relief paper’, you were restricted to answering questions from it alone. I hadn’t read the examination board small print and thought Rhys would ‘go well 155

TURVEY AND YANDELL

with’ other things we were doing. I would want to defend my decision to try out a text from the African and Caribbean Literature paper with other texts from the more ‘traditional’ period papers on the grounds that it put these texts together as worth studying, as comparable in a number of important ways. It didn’t set this literature apart as ‘different’ or ‘other’. (A last minute realisation of what I’d done and a phone call to the examination board by my head of department asking that they make allowances for ‘teacher error’ did the trick and the students were none the wiser. I still think I was right to encourage my students to read Rhys alongside more securely canonical texts; these days, though, such ‘mistakes’ in applying the examination regulations would not be so easily rectified.) My focus in the lesson was the position of Antoinette Bertha Cosway, the Creole girl in the novel who is married off to Rochester. I directed the discussion to a consideration of Antoinette’s isolation and the way Rhys enlists our sympathy for her caught as she is in a patriarchal society. The particular essay question I had concocted was something about the ‘marooning of the Creole whites in a landscape where beauty hides cruelty’. At this point – I had just dictated the essay question – one student stopped me with a question about the word ‘marooned’. Nathalie, a black girl, was new to the group. She had been born in Jamaica and had lived there with her grandparents until she was 10, when she joined her parents in England. She was new to the school and so had not been with us for Jane Eyre the year before; nor had she been inducted into certain practices around a text that had guided my work with this class. I started to explain the word – ‘ “marooned” means “isolated” or “cut off” ‘ – but she interrupted me impatiently, angrily: ‘No, I mean “maroons” were slaves, weren’t they, back home. From Africa and they escaped into the mountains’. I remember conceding this angle on the word, but very much in a spirit of encouraging the girls to express personal opinions about literature in a dialogue orchestrated by me. I may have thought at the time that, like Prue and her class, we were ‘thinking about writing in a way that illuminates our own world’ where issues of ‘migration, place and displacement’ are increasingly complex and central to the experiences of the girls I taught. But actually, I was the teacher accepting the student’s contribution, validating her attempt to learn the rules of this literary game. Everything the word ‘marooned’ might actually mean to Nathalie and how she brought to her reading a history and a personal lived experience of being ‘marooned’ were not really admitted by me. I was not prepared for her sudden resistance – it seemed sudden at the time but now I see it differently – her resistance to the kind of discussion we were having, as well as to my interpretation of a particular word. ‘Why’, she said, ‘are we feeling so sorry for Antoinette? Why shouldn’t she be the outsider there? You just talk as though the place was to blame for her unhappiness, like it drove her mad or something. Anyway, what about all the others? What about Christophine and Tia? They live there. What do you mean “marooned”? I HATE this book’. In my work with this class on Rhys’s novel, I was interested in exploring themes and ideas similar to those that Prue identifies: ‘migration, place and displacement’. 156

DIFFERENCE IN THE CLASSROOM

But I see now that what shaped my approach had its roots in my own very literary education, one that led me to focus on the novel’s relationship with another literary text, Jane Eyre. It is clear to me now how this ‘intertextual’ approach so easily privileged some ‘voices’ and silenced others. Nathalie’s experiences of separation and exile, of migration from the West Indies to east London, did more than just inform her reading of the novel and her understanding of a particular word; she was attempting to make sense of her lived history in the light of a book which she felt marginalised that history, a book which I seemed to endorse. The result of this was her challenge. The book had a meaning for Nathalie which she tried to articulate against the grain of an academic discourse to do with texts and examinations and my desire to give these girls access to a particular kind of language work and a particular kind of literary experience. I responded to her contribution as to a disruption and she could see through my reluctance to shift my position. But things did change and the students, several of whom were black and shared some of Nathalie’s history, made this possible. This episode of classroom talk illuminates an aspect of Bakhtin’s work picked up by Bella in her comments on Prue’s classroom. Bakhtin insists on the ‘diversity of voices that present distinct and value-laden views on the world’ (Bakhtin, 1981). This view of language underpins both the Australian and Dutch case studies and influences the way the teachers there invite from their students alternative readings and a wide range of interpretations of the literary text. It’s a diversity which literature teachers would want to celebrate; but it is also the source of tension in the lesson I have described. In my appropriation of a word and in my reading of the novel, Nathalie meets what Bakhtin calls ‘an authoritative discourse’ (342) in which I am heavily implicated. Such a discourse ‘permits no play with the context framing it, no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions’. Nathalie is trying to make sense of it in the light of her own ‘internally persuasive discourse’ that has developed over time in countless interactions between her views and those of others. The learning I am writing about is at its core social. It had begun with a student’s question about a word – ‘marooned’. For Nathalie, this word had previously ‘existed in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions’ and in order for Nathalie to ‘make it her own’, she must ‘populate it with [her] own intention, [her] own accent’ (Bakhtin, 1981: 293). What developed was a complex negotiation, in part a struggle at many levels. Clearly there are considerable inequalities of power here as there are in any classroom. Race was also an issue which influenced different readings of the novel and what happened around those readings. Nathalie’s challenge resulted in a discussion about different races, isolation, leaving home, moving away, which then looped back to the word ‘marooned’. By this stage the word had assumed a significance for all of us, a meaning in fact that was steeped in a history of colonialism and slavery. Nathalie had in effect insisted that I attend to that history and to her knowledge of it. She did this in ways I could not have predicted or controlled. And what of the effect on me and my understanding of a word? What happened in the lesson was part of a process of developing an individual consciousness that Bakhtin refers to as ‘ideological becoming’ and this process is ongoing for pupil 157

TURVEY AND YANDELL

and teacher. It involves ‘struggling with another’s discourse’ (348) as Nathalie and I can be said to struggle. The role of the other is critical: once I acknowledged Nathalie’s separateness and had distinguished between my taken-for-granted view and her ‘internally persuasive discourse’, new possibilities opened up for all of us. Certain words are gathering a dense texture of meaning for Nathalie which are not the same for me or for other students in that literature lesson, but we share the process. Her challenge forced a recognition of difference which involved the individual subjectivities of all of us and we arrived at no easy consensus. But the literature lesson had opened up a space for a conversation, for learning about ‘migration, place and displacement’ and for learning about identity, in ways that would have been difficult or even impossible outside the classroom. In writing about discourse and education, Deborah Britzman describes the kind of learning that Nathalie’s intervention made possible. I like to think that my literature lessons were more a ‘site of departure’ as a result: Discourse that is internally persuasive provisions creativity, the play of meanings. It celebrates the ambiguity of words. For Bakhtin, internally persuasive discourse is the site of departure rather than a place of arrival. A tentative discourse, subject to negotiation and shifting contexts, and able to voice possibilities unforeseen, internally persuasive discourse is a discourse of becoming … In education, internally persuasive discourse provisions engagement with what we know and the struggle to extend, discard or keep it: it is characterised by those surprising questions – raised by the students and the teacher – that move from exhausted predestinations to the unanticipated. Internally persuasive discourse is opened during times of spontaneity, improvisation, interpretive risks, crises, and when one reflects upon taken-for-granted ways of knowing. In this way internally persuasive discourse is always in dialogue with authoritative discourse (Britzman, 2003: 42–43). Britzman’s reading of Bakhtin offers a way of theorising the episode with Nathalie and, more generally, a way of thinking about the affordances of the literature lesson. Britzman emphasises the provisionality of meaning-making and the sheer difficulty of negotiating divergent readings in contexts where, inevitably, questions of power are salient. Such negotiations involve shifts in thinking about the role and authority of the teacher and of her reading(s). Many years later I am visiting another London school in my role as a teacher educator. Catherine, a student teacher in my tutor group, is teaching Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men. It’s a younger class of 14–year-old boys so the terminal examination is less pressing. But even so the work on the novel is intended to lead to a literary essay on ‘the theme of loneliness in the novel’. The boys have just met Crooks, the black character in the novel who is set apart from the others in a society that is segregated at every level. Before the lesson begins, Catherine tells me about what occurred at the end of the previous lesson. The discussion had gone something like this: Allan: But what have the others on the ranch got to feel so superior about? Kemi: You’re missing the point. That’s the way they thought then. 158

DIFFERENCE IN THE CLASSROOM

Catherine was interested in and troubled by this exchange. At one level, the first boy’s question goes to the heart of the mad failure of logic that is racial discrimination. But, she wondered, how much did the class understand of the novel’s historical context and how segregation was strengthened by the very economic conditions that created and sustained the poverty and rootlessness of the book’s other characters? And the second boy’s response seemed to distance the novel from current concerns about race and ethnicity which Catherine knew these boys were actually very interested in. At the beginning of the lesson that I observe, Catherine begins with a question foregrounding the literary essay that is the stated ‘outcome’ of the work on the novel, or so it says in her lesson plan. She asks: ‘Is Crooks lonely? Should he be in this essay about loneliness?’ The boys respond in an open-forum discussion: – The others don’t want to mix with him – he says it’s because he’s black and like Kemi said last lesson, people thought like that then. – That’s true but it’s also … I think that Crooks wants to be on his own and he can sort of feel like he has something of his own in his room so maybe it’s better for him that way. It’s sort of power. – Yeah, he’s lonely but … not the same way the others are. Catherine: So he chooses it you mean? He chooses to be on his own? – – – –

In a way he does. That’s the same now, Miss. You mean racial prejudice? I do mean that but I mean choosing to … not mix – like Crooks does. That’s the same now … everywhere … in the school too. You can’t change that. People stick together. I’d do what Crooks does.

The atmosphere in the room grows tense and Catherine doesn’t know quite where to go with it. ‘I wasn’t really prepared for that direction,’ she said to me in our discussion after the lesson. ‘I wish I had let it go on but I wanted to do the photos exercise’. There were four photographs. In groups of four, the boys were asked to look at one of them and using a simple framework for analysing images, to consider three things: what’s in the photo; how does it make you feel; what questions do you have about it? I was at a table where the boys were looking at a black and white photo of Ku Klux Klan members, hooded and cloaked and standing around some kind platform/ altar next to which was an American flag. One boy knew something of the postCivil War origins of the Klan and the discussion turned to the significance of the robes, the hoods, the insignia, the significance of a ‘uniform’ in general and then to whether or not the KKK still exists. – Yeah it does – I saw a programme about them. – Can anyone join? 159

TURVEY AND YANDELL

– – – – – – – – –

Well Tende, we definitely couldn’t! And then – why do they have a flag? Americans have their flag all over the place. But why? Why don’t we? No, it’s like the BNP [the British National Party – a neofascist group that has become more prominent in recent years] and the way they use the flag to sort of … hide behind. It’s a disguise. We’ve got the BNP in my area. No, I don’t think they’re hiding … well, maybe they are, but it’s more like it shows they’re the real English people. But you can have a flag and not think those things? What things? About black people … about foreigners. The flag doesn’t make you think those things.

In considering talk in classrooms from a Bakhtinian perspective, Paul Thompson writes about the ways in which the internal heterogeneity of any text admits of a range of interactions between the text and its readers. Thompson describes an example of ‘hot seating’ as part of the study of a play for a class of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. The pupils’ own ‘social language’ interacts with the language of the play and as a result, ‘they are given the opportunity to create their own text within the dramatist’s’. Thompson writes: While all texts are in some way both univocal and dialogic, I have argued that it is important for teachers to ground classroom speech genres in the dialogic function of text, so that each voice can take other utterances as ‘thinking devices’ and so that, on this basis, other utterances can become the medium for the generation of richer meanings than would be the case when the function of texts is primarily univocal (Thompson, 2008: 253). For the boys in Catherine’s lesson, the novel serves just this dialogic function. They have been given freedom within those discursive frames derived from literary analysis and its focus on character and themes and the result of this freedom is that they create their own communicative contexts. They make connections between Crooks, a character in a novel, and the social and historical forces in ‘the real world’ of that time. Perhaps more remarkably, they make powerful and personally meaningful connections between the world of the novel and their own lives. In the small group – and also in the larger open-forum discussions – the boys have found what Thompson calls a ‘semiotic space where they can create their own heterogeneous texts within the texts that they are given’. There are ‘contending voices’ in their talk as they try to make sense of such complex issues as racial supremacy and its connections to notions of nationhood and the flag. When the teacher interjects with a question that directs them back to the novel – Does your picture change your view of Crooks? – there is a degree of uncertainty in their responses as they consider how to use these new ideas from their discussion in the context of a ‘literature essay’, a very important ‘textual voice’ for them and one that, as they are beginning to understand, determines what they can say about 160

DIFFERENCE IN THE CLASSROOM

‘character’. When they come to write the ‘loneliness’ essay, their comments about Crooks are clearly informed by this earlier discussion and they sit uneasily within the literary essay on which they will be graded. – If Crooks lived today, what would he say about his life? – Did John Steinbeck know about the Ku Klux Klan and what did he think about it? – Crooks’ loneliness is different from the other characters’ and I think his kind of loneliness still exists, whatever people say. Steinbeck’s work is re-made in this particular classroom in unexpected ways that make possible insights into the lived experiences of multicultural societies and identities. Catherine has created a space for the boys to consider both otherness and common ground and it is clear that there will be no easy consensus, no absolute convergence of views. The tensions that underpin this discussion of a literary work go to the heart of students’ lifeworlds, their lives and communities that inform their reading of the novel. JOHN

In what follows, I want to develop some of the strands of Anne’s contribution. In particular, I hope to problematise assumptions about the status of the textual object and the nature of agency and activity as a way of complicating the picture of the literature classroom. What does a literary text look like? What is its provenance? And what does reading look like? What do students do with texts? To address these questions, I want to focus attention on the teaching of Shakespeare Throughout the four different versions of the National Curriculum that have been imposed on us during the past two decades, Shakespeare has retained a singular prominence as the only compulsory author, on whose work English students have been relentlessly examined in national tests for 14-year-olds as well as in public examinations for 16-, 17- and 18-year-olds (GCSEs, AS and A2 syllabuses). Shakespeare represents one pole of attraction within the canon wars – Shakespeare as the repository of enduring cultural value, the centrepiece of what policy refers to as ‘the English literary heritage’ (‘texts that enable students to understand the nature, significance and influence over time of texts from the English literary heritage’, in the magnificently tautologous words of the current version of the English National Curriculum [QCDA, 2009]). The primary significance of Shakespeare in the school curriculum is thus as an index of transcendent value. In this conception of what encounters with Shakespeare might look like, it is clear that the role of the school student is that of an acolyte at the shrine of high culture, learning to value aright what has already been defined as valuable. Shakespeare is all about a common entitlement to cultural goods of enduring value. Such textual pursuits might appear to have nothing to do with students’ own subjectivities, nothing to do with particularities of history and culture, nothing to do with the world beyond the classroom. And yet, as I will go on to argue, doing Shakespeare, like doing Steinbeck, involves the (re-)making of texts, and hence, necessarily, the cultures and histories 161

TURVEY AND YANDELL

of the school students who are actively involved in these processes of textual production. What is involved here are the questions of whose reading counts and what counts as valid knowledge – the very questions that we suggested earlier might sometimes have been neglected in the debates over which texts to read. My argument, in essence, is that the very curricular node where, viewed from the lens of policy, agency might seem most limited can actually become a place of flourishing cultural productivity. To elucidate the argument, I will draw on research data derived from my collaboration with Monica Brady, an experienced teacher working in a secondary comprehensive school in the docklands area of east London. Further, the case of Shakespeare – Shakespeare as instantiated in contemporary London classrooms – might offer something of a challenge to the conceptions of the literary text that inform the case studies from Australia and the Netherlands. We might want to question assumptions about the stability of the text; and, if the textual object is itself (sometimes) unstable, polymorphous, it might become easier to see the difficulties, the tensions and contradictions, in the paradigm that equates second and subtler readings with better readings. (As Catherine’s pupils learn to produce their literary essays on Steinbeck, is there a danger that something important in their response to the novel and the images is lost? Are they learning to discard readings that lie outside the frame of the literary?) In every classroom, whenever any text is read, there is a sense in which every reader and every reading constructs a new and different text. But the case of Shakespeare might shed light on the need to attend to wildly divergent histories of textual production and reception (as well as to the generic differences between drama and prose fiction). The category of the literary is unstable not only because of its porous boundaries but also because, at what might be thought as its centre, we are actually dealing with different kinds of text, differently produced and reproduced. When Prue and her students are reading short stories by Beverley Farmer, the question of where the text is, and of what kind of text it is, seem fairly unproblematic. The text is there, on the printed page. Likewise, there would seem to be straightforward answers to questions about the author. Prue’s students know who wrote the stories because they have met and had a chance to interrogate Beverley Farmer. Perhaps I should say, though, that there’s an aspect of Prue’s account that bothers me, in that there seems to be an elision of authorship and textual authority. What does bringing Farmer into the classroom to account for her text(s) do to what Said (1984) called the worldliness of the text – to the text’s autonomous existence in the world? The effect of Farmer’s visit is to bring the students’ reading of her fiction into a closer alignment with Prue’s reading. The discovery that Farmer ‘is not a rabid, man hating feminist at all’ leads them to a reappraisal of their earlier (‘hasty’) readings of her work. But what if Farmer had been less generous, less endearing, less accommodating? Would this have provided a warrant for the students’ first readings of the stories? In contrast, when Monica and her students are working on Richard III, for example, it becomes much less easy to identify a single textual object. The text is the Cambridge School Shakespeare edition of the play, but it is also a series of still 162

DIFFERENCE IN THE CLASSROOM

images of Richard, assembled by Monica from an internet search and presented to her students very early on in the process of studying the play. The students’ discussion of these images enables them to open up questions about representation and character, about theatrical conventions and ideas of monarchy, about role and interpretation. The text is also two films, the Olivier (1955) and the McKellen (1995) versions, both of which are introduced into the classroom, compared, discussed, argued over, reflected on. In some sense, too, Richard III is instantiated in Monica’s classroom in a series of other pedagogic events, including role-plays which might at first glance not seem to stand in a particularly close relation to the Shakespearean drama but which are, as I have argued elsewhere (Yandell, 2008a), both sites of cultural making and meaningful in relation to the students’ exploration of Richard III. There’s a paradox here, perhaps. Shakespeare, icon of cultural authority, becomes in the classroom the most writerly of texts (Barthes, 1977). There is no fixed point, no stable, single text. The script itself is merely a prompt, a starting-point, an invitation to perform. And, as the past few decades of editorial scholarship have made increasingly plain, there is no fixity either in the Shakespearean canon or in the text of any single play. And even if we were to avail ourselves of Dr Who’s Tardis to bring Shakespeare into the classroom, this would not resolve matters, particularly given the conditions of theatrical production in which Shakespeare worked, conditions that were irreducibly collaborative: conditions, in other words, in which even the notion of individual authorship had no clearly-defined place. Four centuries on, interpretation is all. The plurality of prior readings both legitimises and renders inescapable the students’ own appropriations. This has preoccupied me for some time. In the 1990s, I chose to read The Merchant of Venice with my class of fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds in the school in Hackney, east London, where I spent most of my time as a teacher. My students read contributions to the debate about whether it was either possible or desirable to read the play outside the frame of the Holocaust, to attain an innocent reading through the pretence of historical ignorance, as it were (Barton, 1984, Wesker and Thacker, 1994). They explored the different interpretations available in two performances (the BBC Shakespeare production, directed by Jonathan Miller, with Warren Mitchell as Shylock [1980], and a Channel 4/Middle English version, made for schools, with Bob Peck as Shylock [1996]). And they also remade the text, writing in role as various characters. When I first wrote about this, I focused attention on Hong Hai, a student of Vietnamese heritage, writing as Shylock (Yandell, 1997). To characterise this activity as one that encourages empathy is, of course, valid, but there was far more going on than identification with the chosen character. In examining the text that she created, I traced the evidence it provides of close reading and engagement with The Merchant of Venice before speculating that the act of writing had provided Hong Hai with the opportunity to reflect on her own history, her orientation towards her Vietnamese heritage as well as towards the dominant culture of (white) British society. Writing in role involved a playful remaking, at a distance both from the lived experience of the writer and from the Shakespearean text that was being read. The distance created a space for the exploration of both 163

TURVEY AND YANDELL

Shakespeare and the writer’s lifeworld. Re-reading my own account now, I wonder if more emphasis should be placed on the playfulness of this space. My continued puzzling about the nature of the textual object – what and where the text is – isn’t entirely separable from my desire to offer a different account of what students’ encounters with the text (sometimes) look like. I want to reassert the materiality of the sign and of the sign-makers, and I want to attend to the embodied nature of textual activity in Monica’s classroom. Her students are used to exploring complex ideas and complex texts through collaborative, improvised role-play. In these explorations, students’ bodies, their clothes, the furniture and the physical organisation of the space of the classroom are all semiotically significant: all these material, multimodal resources are re-made in the interests of the sign-makers – and all, therefore, need to be attended to if we are to hope to produce an adequate account of the work that goes on in literature classrooms. Monica has a clearly worked-out rationale for the approach that she adopts: Why do I do role-play? Partly I suppose because I think that it helps to access abstract concepts. It gives pupils the opportunity to explore ideas, characters and concepts; to put themselves into a story and make it into something that makes sense to them. It allows them to bring their own world knowledge, their own context to that story whether it is historical or fictional. I think that it is difficult to explain anything without narrative and the role-play lets the pupils bring their own narratives into their learning. It shifts the power from the teacher to the pupil and invites them to work with peers to construct their own interpretations. The process is as important as the finished piece for in the course of preparing a role play they are talking, offering ideas, revising, contesting, incorporating, justifying, accepting. … In presenting they are throwing their interpretation into the ring to be picked up and developed by others sometimes in subsequent presentations, sometimes in class discussion, sometimes in writing. This process of course happens in other collaborative activities, in exploring text or images, but in these activities the teacher usually gives the resources and the talk (and hence the outcome) can be more restricted (Monica Brady, email to John Yandell, 2008). There are connections here with the practices described in the Netherlands case study. Empathetic engagement in lives and worlds different from the students’ own is seen as an important part of the work of the classroom. Students are engaging with texts by drawing on their resources of culture and history, the ‘funds of knowledge’ (Moll, 2000) that they bring with them to the classroom. This active and collaborative engagement is, simultaneously, serious and playful. Its relationship to the Shakespearean text is highly variable: sometimes, students incorporate lines, present recognisably Shakespearean characters; at other times, the activity will involve the exploration of a scenario, the relationship of which to the play that they are studying only becoming apparent in a subsequent lesson. Such work extends over time, and the effects are often not immediately discernible. Monica’s emphasis on process rather than product, and on the unpredictability of 164

DIFFERENCE IN THE CLASSROOM

the uses to which such interactions will subsequently be put, does not conform to the current fashion for measurable outcomes. Textual meaning is construed as irreducibly intertextual and social, arising out of the readers’ experience of other texts, other subjectivities, other histories. Textual appreciation – the aesthetic dimension of the experience of Shakespeare – tends to emerge less from any obvious focus on language or form than, almost tangentially, from the juxtaposition of different versions, different performances, different texts. Something else has occurred to me as I have reviewed the video footage of Monica’s lessons. Even when her students are not engaged in improvisation as a discrete activity, her classroom seems to be an arena of serious play. In class discussions of Richard III, students craft interventions that are, simultaneously, contributions to the official business of the lesson and part of a running gag at the expense of one of their peers. As they offer interpretations and evaluations of the text, they inhabit ever so slightly exaggerated scholarly roles, not quite parodic yet not quite their everyday selves. In the literature classroom, the play really is (and is not) the thing. CONCLUSION

Role-play in Monica’s classroom, like the conversations among Catherine’s students, needs to be seen through a Vygotskian lens. The relationship between cognitive development and semiotic activity is a complicated one: work in all semiotic modes, including language, enables the development of thought, gives learners access to resources beyond their immediate experience. Over time, signs – ‘loneliness’, ‘prejudice’, ‘power’ – are remade, filled with increasingly dense, rich meanings. In the process, a dialectical relationship is established between ‘scientific’ and ‘spontaneous’ concepts (Vygotsky, 1987): the everyday knowledge that students bring with them has the capacity to transform and reorganise the curricularised, canonical knowledge of schooling. Suzanne Miller refers to the ‘supportive social space’ that can be created in the literature classroom. These spaces are nothing less than Vygotsky’s ‘zones of proximal development’ with the teacher often taking a lead role in the early stages in order to provide questions and suggest lines of enquiry that push the pupils’ thinking forward.2 In the classrooms Miller observed where open forum discussions were based on ‘deeply respectful’ personal-emotional relations between teacher and pupils, she found that: Over time the dialogic strategies moved inward to become part of students’ repertoires for meaning-making. In varying ways each teacher mediated specific habits of mind by lending her ‘structuring consciousness’ (Vygotsky, 1978) to enable students to think in increasingly complex ways about texts, knowledge and the world (Miller, 2003: 312). We would expect that Miller’s Vygotskian model of dialogic, developmental processes would provide common ground for Prue, Ramon and Mies. The emphasis on respectful pedagogic relationships built over time seems to us to be absolutely 165

TURVEY AND YANDELL

central to any adequate account of the literature classroom. We recognise, too, that we all work in circumstances not of our making, negotiating our way through contradictions that are historical, structural and institutional. But we are acutely aware of the danger that accounts of dialogic practice can too easily smoothe over the fractures and disjunctions, can soften the dissonance of the different voices engaged in the dialogue. In our contribution, we have tended to focus on these moments, on the evidence that they provide of students thinking in increasingly complex ways that are not easily assimilable within dominant literary discourses. So when Suzanne Miller talks about ‘new ways of talking and thinking about text’ we take her to mean something that offers a challenge to existing practices, to established ways of doing literature – and to the authority of the teacher. NOTES 1

2

In what follows, we will be focusing very largely on the experience of English as a school subject within the state system in England. Even the term ‘state system’ marks a simplification of the complex map of schooling provision that is both highly stratified and atomised to the point of incoherence. There remains, however, a fairly clear line of divide between those schools that are state-funded, attended by over ninety per cent of the pupil population, and the private, fee-paying sector. In each of the other countries of the United Kingdom, the relationship between government policy and curriculum has been a somewhat different one. For an account of these differences, see Jones (2003). Like Miller, we understand the ZPD as a sociocultural space, not merely (as in more psychological/ technicist appropriations of Vygotsky) a way of referring to an individual’s capacity for further development. See also Daniels (2001) for a Bakhtinian, dialogic reading of the ZPD.

REFERENCES Ashton, P., & Simons, M. (Eds.). (1979). Our lives: Young people’s autobiographies. London: ILEA English Centre. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Barthes, R. (1977). Image music text. London: Fontana. Barton, J. (1984). Playing Shakespeare. London: Methuen. Britzman, D. P. (2003). Practice makes practice a critical study of learning to teach. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Daniels, H. (2001). Vygotsky and pedagogy. New York & London: RoutledgeFalmer. DfEE (Department for Education and Employment). (2001). Key stage 3 national strategy: Framework for teaching English: Years 7, 8 and 9. London: DfEE. Freire, P., & Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Jones, K. (2003). Education in Britain: 1944 to the present. Cambridge: Polity Press. Miller, S. M. (2003). How literature discussion shapes thinking: ZPDs for teaching/learning habits of the heart and mind. In A. Kozulin, B. Gindis, V. Ageyev, & S. Miller (Eds.), Vygotsky’s educational theory in cultural context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 289–316. Moger, R. & Richmond, J. (Eds.). (1985). Say what you think: Argument and discussion writing by London school students. London: ILEA English Centre. Moll, L. C. (2000). Inspired by Vygotsky: Ethnographic experiments in education. In C. D. Lee & P. Smagorinsky (Eds.), Vygotskian perspectives on literacy research (pp. 256–268). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Naidoo, B. (1985). Journey to Jo’burg: A South African story. London: Longman. 166

DIFFERENCE IN THE CLASSROOM QCDA [Qualifications and Curriculum Development Authority]. (2009). National curriculum. Retrieved January 6, 2010, from http://curriculum.qcda.gov.uk/key-stages-3–and-4/subjects/key-stage-4/english/ programme-of-study/index.aspx?tab=1 Said, E. W. (1984). The World, the text, and the critic. London: Faber and Faber. Searle, C. (Ed.). (1971). Stepney words. London: Reality Press (reprinted 1973, by Centerprise Press). Simons, M., Raleigh, M., & Ashton, P. (Eds.). (1982). City lines: Poems by London school students. London: ILEA English Centre. Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the Subaltern speak?. In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Urbana, IL, & Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Thompson, P. (2008). Learning through extended talk. Language and Education, 22(3), 241–256. Turvey, A. (1992). Interrupting the lecture: Cox seen from a classroom. In K. Jones (Ed.), English and the national curriculum: Cox’s revolution? (pp. 32–61). London: Kogan Page. Volosinov, V. N. (1929/1986). Marxism and the philosophy of language. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Problems of general psychology, including the volume thinking and speech. New York & London: Plenum. Wesker, A., & Thacker, D. (1994, April 13). The trial of Shylock. Guardian. Williams, R. (1958). Culture is ordinary. In N. MacKenzie (Ed.), Conviction (pp. 74–92). London: MacGibbon & Kee. Yandell, J. (1997). “Sir Oracle”: The merchant of Venice in the classroom. Changing English, 4(1), 105–122. Yandell, J. (2008a). Embodied readings: Exploring the multimodal social semiotic resources of the English classroom. English Teaching: Practice and Critique, 7(1), 36–56. Yandell, J. (2008b). Exploring multicultural literature: The text, the classroom and the world outside. Changing English, 15(1), 25–40.

Anne Turvey and John Yandell Institute of Education, University of London

167

MARK HOWIE

11. ‘AUTHENTICITY WAS NEVER REALLY THE QUESTION’ Reading, Ethics and the Historical Interruption of Literature Teaching by English

‘Criticism must be sensitive to the way in which language reveals the other and our responsibilities to the other’ (Eaglestone, 1997, pp. 7–8). ONE

The teaching of literature has historically had a concern with ethics (Eaglestone, 1997; Hunter, 1997; Scholes, 1989). Thus it is not surprising that the pieces by my Australian and Dutch co-contributors should emphasise the sort of reflection and judgement that allows readers to connect what is represented in texts to aspects of their being in the world. Evident in their contributions are practices which accord with Hunter’s identification of an enduring ethical emphasis in the teaching of literature in schools. We see in them what Hunter describes as the ‘superimposition in the … classroom’ (p. 315) of an ‘aesthetic pedagogy and its use as an instrument for … social and moral training’ (p. 319). Ramon, Mies and Piet-Hein begin by emphasising the importance of self-reflection in reading: ‘We will assume that identification and recognition of personal experiences can grant access to a text, so the text can be used for further personal development’. Prue writes of the importance of reflection, depicting it as a step to self-actualisation for students. Through engaging in reflective writing in response to literary texts, she argues, students can learn to ‘speak in their own voice’. In both of these examples we can also see the influence of ‘epi-reading’, a concept Eaglestone takes from a schema developed by Donoghue (1981), as perhaps the dominant reading practice in English studies, if not, as the Dutch contribution suggests, mother tongue education more generally. As Eaglestone explains it, the practice of epi-reading is founded on intentionality, or ‘the desire to hear … the absent person’ (Donoghue, quoted in Eaglestone, p. 3). In this practice, the reader transposes the words on the page into a ‘somehow corresponding situation of persons, voices, characters, conflicts, conciliations’ (Donoghue, quoted in Eaglestone, p. 3). I have, for the most part, read the texts of my co-contributors with a sense of affinity. As an Australian teacher of senior secondary English, I recognise the reading pedagogy depicted in these texts to take place in the space between two key historic models or discourses that also continue to underpin the curriculum in P-H. van de Ven and B. Doecke (eds.), Literary Praxis: A Conversational inquiry into the Teaching of Literature, 169–187. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

HOWIE

my home state of New South Wales (NSW). These are the ‘cultural heritage’ model, which understands literature as ‘Literature’, a canon of writing that is supposedly universally valued for being the best (intellectually, aesthetically and morally) that has been thought and written, and ‘growth pedagogy’ (Reid, 2003), which locates the focus of English teaching in the language and experience of young people, in contradistinction to any valuing of the ‘great’ texts of ‘our’ cultural heritage. It is certainly the case that tensions exist within senior secondary English in NSW, where traces of the past dominance and prestige of Literature have remained highly influential following the historical interruption of Literature teaching by (the New) English after the famous Dartmouth conference of 1966 (cf. Dixon, 1967; Peel, 2000). Dartmouth, of course, is associated with growth pedagogy, a subject model which opened up the possibility for young people to appropriate literary texts as a moment in the formation of their identities, in a way that is akin to – though not, as I shall explain, identical with – the ethical imperative that Eaglestone describes. As such, growth pedagogy has offered a sense of the possibilities for an ethic of reading that has perhaps never been fully realised in senior Secondary English in Australia. I will go on to argue that this has been so primarily because of the paradoxical reliance of personal growth on the enduring and overshadowing influence of Literature, through a shared grounding in epi-reading, for whatever purchase it has attained at this level. My contention, in short, is that the enduring influence of the discourse of Literature in schools exceeds the inclusion of ‘classic’ works on reading lists. It is perhaps even more evident in the prevailing influence of epireading, and the way this practice has come to be applied to a more expansive range of texts and textual forms. As Hunter argues, the notion that English and literature teaching offer ‘a privileged moral insight into all departments of ethical life’ (p. 332) has been remarkably enduring, despite changes in curriculum, including changes to reading lists and course structures and content (cf. Patterson, 2008). Recontextualised in terms of the secondary English or mother tongue classroom, Eaglestone’s understanding of ethical criticism enables a different sort of focus on the relationship between ethics and literature teaching to that of Hunter. Eaglestone moves considerations beyond the superimposition of ethics through particular pedagogies of reading and responding to literature. His thinking shifts attention instead to how particular pedagogical practices employed in the teaching of literature are being experienced by students as ethical subjects. In other words, Eaglestone’s notion of ethical criticism offers a way of ‘attending to the ethical in the textual’ (p. 7), and not just the ethical capacities that students might develop through an experience of texts that is defined by ‘a strong tradition of pastoral guidance and self-reflective practice’ (Patterson, 2008, p. 314). Student readers are not simply trained in ethics; rather, their lived experience of the classroom is ethically implicated and has ethical significance. As my prefacing quotation from Eaglestone implies, the act of reading bestows upon the reader the responsibility of responding in some form. Accordingly, I respond to my co-contributors by reflecting on my teaching of the NSW English Extension 2 course. In this course, as I will make clear, the ongoing tensions in secondary English between the historic subject discourses of Literature and growth-influenced 170

‘AUTHENTICITY WAS NEVER REALLY THE QUESTION’

English are very obvious. (Patterson suggests that the senior years curricula of other Australian states put greater emphasis on ethics than the NSW curriculum [2008, pp. 320–321]. This could well indicate that such tensions will also be obvious in classrooms in other states; certainly, as shall be seen, my reading of Prue’s contribution suggests that this is the case in Victoria.) Taking my lead from the work of Eaglestone on ethical criticism, I explore the possibilities for ethical selfreflection when students write in response to texts in an expressive manner, a pedagogy I associate most strongly with personal growth. Expressive writing of this sort might also be characterised as the translation of epi-reading into an overtly subjective critical writing practice, and therefore in keeping with the idea that such a reading is also the translation of words to acts (Eaglestone, p. 3), such as – in this particular example – the expression of a new moral sensibility. My engagement with the thinking of Eaglestone will take me in turn to the philosophy of Levinas, which informs Eaglestone’s understanding of ethics. My contention is that the defining practices of Literature teaching and personal growth pedagogy do not adequately prepare students to recognise and act in response to the way ‘language reveals the other and our responsibilities to the other’. This, it must be stressed, is not to deny that personal growth otherwise appears to have been a historic interruption of Literature teaching, its pedagogical ‘other’, promoting an alternative ethic through its emphasis on teachers engaging with the ‘otherness’ of their students, making space for their lives, language and voices in the official curriculum. However, as I will go on to explain, (growth-influenced) English retains the paradigmatic assumption of Literature teaching that the ‘realm of ethics is separate from the realm of the aesthetic, or from works of literature’, making it necessary for readers to proceed ‘through the text to a realm of ethics’ (Eaglestone, p. 30). In other words, both subject discourses, for all their differences, assume the separation of ethics and language. My own commitment is to a form of English studies that involves a revitalised commitment to ethics, heeding the ‘ethical call for interruption’ (Eaglestone, p. 164) by promoting a pluralistic understanding of reading and response and, consequently, the subject positions available to students. This is as distinct from the ‘cultural heritage model’, which advocates of growth pedagogy criticised, and from growth pedagogy itself. The ethic of reading to which I aspire understands the different reading positions available to student readers to be grounded in key historic models or discourses of the subject English. These models or discourses are sometimes represented as competing (Morgan, 1997, p. 17). A concern with ethics that welcomes the arrival of the other, in this instance the pedagogical other, is likely to suggest that these discourses are best approached in a way that resists the reductive logic of the same, which is characteristic, for example, of dialectical synthesis, or reading in a manner that is simply oppositional. Certainly, this is the position to the different subject discourses that I am advocating here, when considering their pedagogical recontextualisation. I have sought in my teaching to bring the subject models or discourses underpinning the NSW curriculum into a dynamic, transformative relationship (Howie, 2005). This is one that requires students to engage with the idea that 171

HOWIE

reading and the making of meaning are open-ended, contingent and provisional activities that are fully mediated. Meaning, as I understand it, is not transcendentally derived from, nor does it originate in, the unique and singular consciousness of the individual, be it the author or the reader. On these terms, an ethical understanding of reading and reading pedagogy is one that remains open to difference and even surprise, recognising – and, importantly, keeping in play – the meaning making possibilities stemming from the characteristic approaches of different subject models. In short, I argue that an ethical reading is one that instantiates a centrifugal movement outwards from a fixed centre, resisting a singular, definitive response or a ‘final’ word, all the while keeping students’ attention on the relationship between language, text and self-expression. Having worked through to this understanding, it is here that I find my sense of affinity with my co-contributors’ representations of their pedagogy lessens and becomes problematic. TWO

In my text I signal a particular stance towards a certain historical understanding and discourse of literature and its teaching, using grandiose capitalisation to represent it as ‘Literature’. Following Widdowson (1999), I do this to signal the rarefied nature of Literature as a concept and pedagogical instrument. Historically, exorbitant claims have been made for the institutionalised study of Literature. These claims have been succinctly summarised by Widdowson, who suggests that ‘By the middle of the twentieth century, in the Anglo-American tradition, the concept Literature was centrally established [as] a select(ive) and valuable aesthetic and moral resource to replenish those living in the spiritual desert of a mass civilization’ (p. 59). As a consequence of this historical development, students, particularly in the senior secondary years, have been expected to access such replenishing ethical and civilizing resources by learning the practices of criticism, in order that they might internalize – or make their own – certain moral messages. The aspirations held for Literature teaching in its liberal humanist guise, which give it a prophylactic function in response to rising secularism and the supposed depravities of modernity, set before it what Eaglestone calls an ‘emancipatory ethical mission’ (p. 15). The enduring influence of Literature has been particularly evident in 2010, with widespread attention being given to the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Noteworthy in commentary surrounding this event has been the emphasis placed on the ubiquity of the novel in classrooms throughout the western world (see, for example, Craven, 2010). In general, commentators have depicted the novel’s main character, Atticus Finch, as the supreme liberal individual. He has also been understood to reflect the humanistic, ahistorical and apolitical values of his creator. Craven’s epi-reading of Mockingbird, for example, rests on both his assertion that Atticus Finch is indisputably an archetype of goodness and his contention that Lee has escaped the net of racial politics and American history, instead writing in a universal and timeless voice that is ‘something like moral truth’. At this point, I feel it necessary to emphasise a certain problem, or paradox, for the ethical claims of the sort of reading practices Craven applies to Mockingbird 172

‘AUTHENTICITY WAS NEVER REALLY THE QUESTION’

when they are used in the classroom. In a liberal, humanist model of teaching Mockingbird, the student ‘self’ is brought into being and validated to the extent that he or she is willing to be subsumed by the literary other, identifying with Atticus Finch in order to take on the values of Harper Lee as his or her own. By the same token, as all of this suggests, the idealised other of any Literary text has always already been conjured into being before the act of reading begins. As I have argued above, within a humanist model of Literature teaching it is in fact this conjuring act that largely enables a text to be defined as Literary and worthy of study. It is entirely unremarkable that To Kill a Mockingbird should be so popular with teachers, for it presents an ideal of selfhood that is congruent with the ideals of liberal democracy. As Craven describes it, the novel is a ‘morality tale for millions’. It consequently depicts values and ways of being in the world that are certainly not going to be discovered for the first time in the dialogic exchanges that ideally characterise an English or Literature classroom. To the contrary, how most teachers will want students to respond to this novel has, half a century on, been well and truly decided before the students begin reading it. For example, one Australian teacher (Spires, 1999/2000) has outlined the professional isolation she experienced in seeking to question the dominant liberal, humanist approach to teaching Mockingbird of her colleagues. To the extent that reading Literature is indistinguishable from a particular understanding of criticism, the Literature student is by definition required to learn how to perform such criticism. Studying Literature might consequently be characterised as learning to operate from a set of pre-given strategies and understandings, or learning to do and be the same as every other reader-critic. A paradox is evident here. The great individualising mission of liberal, humanist criticism – Bloom (1994) writes of reading Literature as the ‘relation of an individual reader and writer’ (p. 17) – seems to be of a piece with normalisation, reducing ‘difference’ to ‘sameness’ by ascribing for students a particular way of approaching the task of reading, and setting in place boundaries of acceptability in terms of what can be said or written in response. I can return here to the example of To Kill a Mockingbird. Operating within the liberal, humanist model of Literary criticism, renowned Australian critic Craven responds to those who would dare to suggest that the novel has racist undertones by delimiting its meaning in definitive terms: ‘it should not be sneered at in the light of politically pious hindsight’. It therefore seems clear to me that Literature teaching strives for wholeness, completeness, unity, symmetry and closure. There is little room here for ineffable ‘otherness’. Evident in the emphasis that Literature has traditionally placed on attaining a definitive reading that makes clear an indisputable and universal moral message is a paradoxical quest for certainty that might be understood to be ethically lacking. This is so because of its reliance, as is evident in Craven’s reading of Mockingbird, on a ‘standard of correctness set by an author’s sense of life’ (Nussbaum, quoted in Eaglestone, p. 51). Such reliance on authorial intention, which does not hold up to sustained examination, as Eaglestone for one has shown, creates a totalising system which enacts a form of ‘violence’, in that it disallows ‘multiplicity in being’ (Levinas, 1969, p. 216). Admittedly, the humanist 173

HOWIE

understanding of reading as a process of identification and enactment made possible by authorial intention would appear, at first glance, to be defined by sympathy for the other, and consequently entirely ethical on the terms I have begun to outline here. This is an understanding, for example, that I recognise as underpinning the teaching of my co-contributor Mies, who describes using empathetic responses to fiction to open her students’ eyes to social inequality and injustice. However, Levinas argues that an ethical relationship with the other cannot be reduced to ‘a movement of sympathy merging us with him [sic]’ (p. 89). Moreover, taking his cue from Levinas, Eaglestone (pp. 48–52) makes the case for how identification and enactment demands a certain solidarity and symmetry – a refusal of surprise – that calls into question the ethical claims of empathic reading. Without denying its necessity at some point to teaching and learning in a Literature or English classroom (cf. Thomson, 1987), this sort of thinking about ethics gives us, at the very least, pause to reconsider the claims made in Mies’s piece and Craven’s commentary on Mockingbird as to the primacy of empathetic reading as a pedagogical goal. A further defining element of Literature teaching, in contradistinction to English, is its emphasis on reception at the expense of composition (Sawyer, 2006). I will subsequently go on to consider the implications of this hierarchy for varied types of expressive writing undertaken by students in response to texts, which Prue describes as students ‘speak[ing] in their own voice, of their own response’. My particular focus will be the possibilities for an ethical (self) criticism of the sort that Scholes (1989) advocates, in which we rewrite our lives as we read, through the pedagogy of having students reflect in writing on their own reading responses. THREE

The teaching of English in secondary schools has historically sought to differentiate itself from the teaching of Literature. English has come to include texts drawn from popular culture and – most significantly – students’ own texts (cf. Peel, 2000; Sawyer, 2006). Such a shift in orientation has significantly involved the movement from a central concern with Literary criticism, or responding to and evaluating the writing of others, to valuing student composition. The study of English is concerned with students reading the texts of others, the text that is the world around them, and the text of their own lives in order that they might actively give shape to their own experience in their own compositions. This echoes Scholes’s ethical injunction that we keep on reading in order that we might ‘keep on rewriting the texts that we read in the texts of our lives, and keep on rewriting our lives in the light of those texts’ (p. 155). English would appear to have embraced difference and heterogeneity, rather than the sameness reflected in a shared Literary tradition and the practices of liberal, humanist Literary criticism. It seemingly remains open ended and does not seek a definitive understanding or final word. Students are working out how to be in the world, in their own way and largely for themselves, in dialogue with significant others. To the extent that it is accurate to suggest that English students are expected to do more than internalise particular (already) authored and authorised views of being in the world, English seems to be ethical in the sense in which 174

‘AUTHENTICITY WAS NEVER REALLY THE QUESTION’

Scholes and Eaglestone appear to understand this word. English brings the realm of the ethical into the classroom and the realm of language, in a spirit of ‘fraternity and discourse’ (Levinas, p. 216) that remains interruptive and asymmetrical. This allows students the space to reflect upon and ‘rewrite’ their lives in response to the texts they read, meaning English resists the reduction of the other to the same, which is essentially the ‘mission’ of Literature teaching as I have described it above. Such, at least, is the ethical promise of English, not least because of the defining influence of personal growth pedagogy. For the way these arguments have been played out at the level of policy and in classrooms is obviously very complicated. One particular complication relates to the highly problematic notion of authorial intention, and how it is implicated in both the study of Literature and English. A concern with intentionality, which plays such a key role in the study of Literature, did not disappear with the historic movement from Literature to English. To the contrary, authorial intention – and its corollaries of presence, truth, and authenticity – can be understood to have actually made possible the shift from Literature to English. As Gilbert (1989) argues, (so-called New) English took the idea of criticism as a direct engagement with an author’s mind, intentions, preoccupations, and recontextualised it in terms of student composition, establishing the primacy of the pedagogical goal of students writing in a personal manner that is at once honest and sincere. This view of English accords with Eaglestone’s description of epireading, highlighting how authorial intention is actually as essential to the identity and being of English as it is Literature. Intention is an enduring and necessary supplement to students’ understanding of themselves as readers and as writers in both of these significant discourses of English studies, and this stems from the shared grounding of these discourses in the critical practice of epi-reading. Intentionality is essential to any understanding of texts, whether those written by established writers or students, as a direct expression of ‘self’, and elides contradiction and difference, collapsing meaning and form into one. Largely ignored by the proponents of epi-reading is the fact that ‘self’ expression, as a type of response that follows on from that form of ‘reading’ which is making sense or meaning of one’s own being and the surrounding world, is no less subject to the ‘exigencies of rhetoric and the vicissitudes of interpretation … to the whole regime of temporality and textuality’ (Scholes, p. 154) than a Literary critical response. Phenix (1990), for example, describes expressive writing as a form of self-talk that allows us to ‘be ourselves’ (p. 73). As Scholes’s formulation of ‘the whole regime of temporality and textuality’ suggests, it is never possible to posit a notion of ‘voice’ that is singular, authentic and present to itself, whether one is referring to writing done by students, or writing done by others to which students are responding. As it is impossible to appeal to the presence of the author behind the text as a way to secure meaning, an appeal to intention also cannot function as a gauge of the validity of a student’s interpretation. Moreover, if the ‘presence’ of the author behind the ‘text’ cannot secure the meaning of a literary work, students’ expressive writing similarly cannot be understood as the authentic expression of a transcendental consciousness. Such writing is always 175

HOWIE

constructed, always produced according to a set of protocols set in advance. There are always gaps (temporal, intellectual, emotional, physical …) between the student author and the autobiographical subject. This is the case with both the critical and the expressive writing students are required to produce in response to Literary texts. There is no ‘personal’ response in either case. Both forms of writing are examples of school writing, by which I mean writing that is doing certain kinds of identity work sanctioned by schooling. On these grounds, English and Literature teaching become largely indistinguishable because they are unified in (impossibly) presupposing a singular, whole and complete human agent. The ‘interruption’ of Literature teaching by English has perhaps not been as abrupt and definitive as some have suggested (see, for example, Donnelly, 2007). This suggestion of an ‘alternative’ history calls into question the (interruptive) ethical promise of English in its relationship with Literature, and focuses attention on the work being done in classrooms by teachers to bring some sort of disciplinary order to the relationship between Literature and English. FOUR

In the texts by my Australian and Dutch co-contributors, I see an evident tension between the power and status of Literature and the ethical promise that arises from reading and responding to Literary texts under the influence of other subject discourses or models. Such a tension inevitably creates paradoxes in reading pedagogy, as is evident in the way that – returning to the example at hand – the ethical promise of English in its interruption of Literature has been stymied. On my reading, Prue sets herself and her students the apparently impossible task of melding a liberal humanist discourse of Literature teaching with an emphasis on the (supposedly but impossibly) authentic self-reflection that English values. This is evident when one of her students reflects, with no hint of irony or incongruity, on the efforts she and others have made to ‘understand both the meaning Farmer had intended and what the stories meant to us’, as if these two different types and levels of interpretation can be reconciled and held at the same time in a Literature course. Prue’s emphasis on the presence of the author behind the text to secure ‘authentic’ meaning, which is actually made manifest in a rare classroom visit – ‘Fortunately for us’ – by the author being studied, has clearly been internalised by this student. Certain of Prue’s students have apparently come to believe – even if they remained unaware of this or could not express their awareness in the manner I am here – that the extent to which they are allowed to be able to ‘speak in their own voice’ is delimited by the degree of correlation between ‘their own response’ and what it has already been agreed that the author was likely to have meant, if not what she actually said she meant when she visited. A type of symmetry is clearly at work here. The responding student must genuflect before the implied figure of the author, her response being little more than a variation on the same, by which I mean a socially agreed interpretation as to what the author might have meant that has already been determined by and within the interests and ‘boundaries’ of liberal, humanist criticism. The apparently otherwise 176

‘AUTHENTICITY WAS NEVER REALLY THE QUESTION’

ethical movement towards self-realisation, or students finding their own ‘voice’ and in so doing interrupting a fixed and monologic understanding of the studied Literature, in effect sees them echoing a collective voice that is also somehow attributable at the same time to the monolithic figure of the author. Consequently, in Prue’s text we see the responses of students being disciplined, in the sense that they are brought into line with the sort of criticism demanded by the discipline of a liberal, humanist study of Literature. This eventuates despite Prue’s attempts to open her Literature classroom to influence of pedagogical strategies more directly associated with personal growth and English, as seen in her emphasis on students writing expressively, in an online and collaborative environment, to their reading. Despite Prue’s ethical orientation towards ‘opening up’ her Literature course to a pedagogical other, I still detect in her piece a sense that the reflective writing she has required of her students is not of the same value as meaning making processes more closely associated with Literature teaching. In other words, the relationship between Literature and English in Prue’s classroom appears to remain hierarchical and symmetrical, even as she stresses the disruptive value of pedagogies that are more growth orientated in nature. Of the classroom visit by the author her class is studying, Prue writes: She draws them in with her funny stories against herself and paints a picture of a young woman with whom they can all identify. The students are in awe. They find that she is not a rabid, man hating feminist at all. This is arresting for them, some comment that they need to rethink their hasty conclusions, that they might read her work differently now. In effect, by inviting the author (and her intentions) into her classroom, literally and otherwise, Prue is arguing that reading Farmer’s work ‘differently’ for her students means they should actually begin to read it as it should be read; that is, the way it might be conceived Farmer would have it be read. This amounts to the closing and fixing of a desired set of meanings. Farmer’s presence certainly provokes recognition of values and ways of being that initially went unrecognised by Prue’s students. In this way, the students do appear to be rewriting their lives in light of the text they have been reading. But paradoxically this also involves a kind of identity or identification with the author, a kind of collapsing of their ‘selves’ within the ‘self’ that Farmer offers them. Here we see Prue’s emphasis on expressive writing run smack against the enduring force of liberal, humanist criticism and the requirement that students read and respond to Literature in a sanctioned manner. The necessity of certain critical protocols, particularly the notion of authorial intention guiding students’ reading, does not sit readily with Prue’s professed belief that reflective writing (as an expression of the student self) will help them to refine and extend their understandings of Literature. In the context of a senior secondary English curriculum, emphasis on expressive writing is clearly underpinned by competing, perhaps even irreconcilable impulses. One impulse values instinctive (or pre-reflective) selfexpression. The other is rather suspicious of self-expression, instead valuing critical re-finement and emphasising (self) discipline. Prue herself describes this as rectifying 177

HOWIE

students’ ‘blind spots’. As such, her emphasis on what she calls metacognition runs the risk of opening the space of interiority only to close it, doing ‘violence ‘to her students’ understanding of themselves and their being by making alien aspects of themselves which they might otherwise value. I would emphasise that such a consequence is a structural inevitability, likely to be brought about by any attempt to open Literature to the influence of pedagogies more closely associated with English and personal growth. Certainly, it is a consequence that is clearly evident in one example of a student’s expressive writing that Prue quotes: ‘Unfortunately I’m not very good at metacognition … and sometimes I abandon logic for emotion and intuition.’ Represented here is a surprising turn of events: a student feeling they must apologise, in an English studies class no less, for feeling different and not wanting to be constrained by an imposed interpretation (in this case of their very being as a student). For all the work Prue’s students have done on learning how to continue to refine and extend their responses to Literature, the student in question at least has found this to have limited applicability to her own developing sense of self. Prue’s efforts to interrupt the study of Literature in her class, working towards a very different ethic of reading from that propagated by the powerful liberal, humanist discourse, would seem to have been undermined by the enduring force of authorial intention. Her efforts to create the pedagogical space for a very different understanding of the act of response, which acknowledges the value of reflective writing by students, actually reifies the notion of authorial intention, and paradoxically serves to highlight the gap between the more instinctive nature of students’ personal responses and the more disciplined responses they are apparently still expected to produce within the enacted curriculum. That this is so is attributable to the fact that such expressive writing is still intended to be critical in nature, which is to say it is the product of epi-reading. The very idea that drives Prue to open her pedagogy to other, asymmetrical influences, paradoxically also becomes the reason for effectively closing it off, as she does by literally inviting the author into her classroom and consequently (re)establishing a symmetrical relation between her students and the ‘otherness’ of the text they are studying. Prue’s thinking appears to be that if she can go directly to the original source of meaning, why not go beyond the text and do so. Her pedagogy ultimately cannot engage with Otherness, at least in the way that Eaglestone and Scholes suggest, because of the enduring disciplinary power of epi-reading, with its emphasis on authorial intention. FIVE

Prue’s ‘failure’ to bring about an ethical criticism in her classroom, as reflected in the examples she provides of her students’ expressive writing, is clearly not a consequence of some personal or pedagogical failing. It is a failure, as I have argued, that was structurally determined by a curriculum that has been formed not from the interruption of Literature by English, but from the subsuming of English by Literature, when the latter is understood as being of a piece with a form of criticism that privileges intention. Subsequently, hierarchies of power and value in 178

‘AUTHENTICITY WAS NEVER REALLY THE QUESTION’

relation to criticism and composition were consequently (re)formed in Prue’s classroom, and these appeared to marginalise the more growth-like expressive writing by her students that she otherwise sought to privilege. The structural limitations that inevitably made problematic the status of the expressive writing undertaken by Prue’s students would seem, from Piet-Hein’s contribution, to be more generally an issue of mother tongue education when it has a literary focus. Piet-Hein notes that ‘one can have a reading experience and subsequently reflect upon it in writing’. He also notes that experience ‘can be a skill as well as a discovery’. This sense of key structural differences being inherent in acts of reading and response, dividing each from the other, is very useful in highlighting that the experience of reading, and whatever understandings and reactions this might produce, is not to be conflated with the act of writing about this experience. It cannot be assumed that the writing a student produces about their reading is in fact an immediate and faithful transcription of the authentic, prewriting ‘discoveries’ he or she has made in the act of reading. An example from Mies’s contribution highlights what I mean. Mies expresses every confidence that the reading log entries her students have made in response to Blue is Bitter are authentic, or somehow ‘pre-textual, acontextual, [and] utterly unmediated’ (Lucy, 2010a, p. 17). They are, it would seem, understood by her to be significant indicators of moral development and the realisation of the ethical goals informing her teaching. However, a response such as that by Anna, who is quoted as having written ‘I did not know that boys can also be prostituted, how awful!’, casts doubt on this assertion. Anna might well have felt awful. However, given the confronting and distressing content of the book she was reading, as outlined by Mies, it could be argued that she was always going to write such a response, once the reading log task had been set. I remain unconvinced that Anna’s emotional response, as heart-felt as it appears to be, originates purely from or with her. From my experience, and as Prue’s reflections indicate, students are able to ‘read’ the hidden curriculum very incisively. It is not hard to imagine that Anna knew that the writing task before her required a certain sort of response, and that only a certain sort of response would be acceptable to her teacher, who had, after all, selected the novel for very overt reasons related to social justice education. Knowing her teacher was going to read and evaluate her response, Anna could hardly have written, say, ‘I did not know that boys can also be prostituted. It is pleasing to see that gender equality is now evident in even the most heinous of criminal activities. Our society has truly advanced.’ In the formation of Anna’s response, her ‘reading’ of her teacher’s intentions and desires will be integrated with her pre-existing understandings of sociality, community and morality, helping her to intuit the sort of ethical ‘self’ that is best (or most prudently) expressed in her present circumstances. And this is a ‘self’ that Mies was clearly already anticipating, displacing Anna’s inner-life as the singular and originating centre of her reading log response, including its morality. As I would suggest is the case with any form of expressive writing, a reading log is a performance. In it students perform being a reflecting reader and writer, creating a complex persona with which they should not be immediately equated. In 179

HOWIE

this sense, and despite the attempts of Ramon, Mies and Prue to distinguish between Literary (i.e. critical) and expressive responses to text, the subject position a reading log makes available to students is not so very different to that made available to them by a traditional critical response. To describe a reading log as a performance does not make the responses students have recorded untruthful or not genuine. But it does emphasise that intentionality cannot be secured by the apparent presence of the (student) author behind the text; it reminds us that, contrary to the claims of liberal, humanist criticism, intention is a ‘particular textual effect, distilled by critical readings but always exceeded by the text’ (Culler, 1983, p. 218). Mies is, by her own admission, more interested in promoting empathy for others, or epi-reading, than exploring issues of textuality. As she describes her pedagogy, she appears to treat the characters and the events in the novel she has selected for class study as if they have a life of their own, and are not representations. She expects her students to do the same. As a consequence, in this particular representation of her teaching, she apparently takes little concern with the textually mediated nature of the relationship between her students’ responses to their reading and the type of writing they are expected to do in their logs. She does not, for example, read and evaluate Anna’s response beyond its intentionality, or as anything other than the expression of her student’s inner-life. For this reason, at least on my reading of what is only a very partial representation of her classroom, she appears to have little interest in the sort of ethical questions relating to reading that theorists like Eaglestone pose, offering instead a genuine but problematic vision of ethics being engaged in the teaching of literature. In responding to Prue’s text I have observed that she encouraged her students to engage in metacommentary and online discussion that was supposed to somehow reflect their authentic ‘selves’ – the ‘self’ that freely engages with and responds to the text. I argued that this notion of writing as an expression of self elides the ways that writing is also a taught practice. So, too, with Mies’s class and the reading logs students were writing. In the interests of promoting a particular ethical understanding of reading and responding to Literature (or, as is more accurate for Mies’s class, literature), I have replied to both Mies and Prue by highlighting the limitations of appeals to authorial intention, whether in students’ own texts or those of others, to secure meaning, and the consequent need to teach students to be reflexive about their reflective and expressive writing. It has been my contention that teachers need, in the interests of an ethical understanding of reading and response, to help students to come to understand their expressive writing in response to Literature as a constructed, textual artefact, bringing into being a certain sort of self in a way that bears comparison with their supposedly more impersonal and objective critical writing. As a consequence, students might come to better understand the performative elements of such writing, and the reading practices upon which it depends. In fact, in my teaching of the Extension 2 course in NSW, I have found it to be the case that helping students to come to a deep understanding of reflective and expressive writing in response to texts, including their own, is integral to their success. In this course, responding to text in a personal way is a ‘skill’ as much as it is a discovery, and consequently it is something that can be enhanced by teaching 180

‘AUTHENTICITY WAS NEVER REALLY THE QUESTION’

students to understand their own authorial presence as an effect of textuality rather than intention. This, I would suggest, requires an ethic of reading that recognises the ethical dimensions of lived classroom experience, and which is sympathetic to the points of convergence to be found in the thinking of Scholes and Eaglestone. SIX

Since the introduction in 2000 of the current NSW syllabus (Board Of Studies, 1999) for the final two years of school, an elite minority of students have been able to undertake a major independent project as part of their matriculation year studies of English. This project takes the form of a major composition, which is submitted for external examination. Given it is centred upon composition, as opposed to reception, the course might be said to be the most overt manifestation in Australia of the historic interruption of Literature by English. Composition is broadly defined in this course. Students choose from options that allow them to work with and in traditional (or Literary) textual forms and non-traditional forms; students are also able to elect to complete a major critical study. It is a further requirement of the course that an accompanying Reflection Statement of 1500 words be completed and submitted with the major work. The main purpose of this document is to explain to the examiner the process the student has undertaken in completing their major work, as well as the work’s intended meaning and how this meaning has been realised through aspects of language and form. My critique of the assumptions of both ‘English’ and ‘Literature’ in no small part derives from the fact that I teach the Extension 2 course. Teaching in this course has provided me with an opportunity to think again about the relationship between the subject discourses of Literature and English, reflexively inquiring into the assumptions that underpin my own professional practice, and to explore possibilities for kinds of reading and response that have not hitherto been available to me in my work with students. In the course of teaching this new course, I feel that I have been able to reconceptualise what it means to ‘read’ and to ‘write’ in an English classroom. The very process of implementing this course – of grappling with the issues of curriculum design and implementation that a new course involves – has prompted me to rethink these dimensions of my practice. In particular, it has allowed me to me to recontextualise, and test out in new conditions, the ‘transformative model’ of programming for response that I have proposed elsewhere (Howie, 2005). In keeping with my theme here, I would like to recast that model in ethical terms. The way the model asks teachers and students to work, in a recursive manner, in and through certain ‘frames’, each derived from a different subject model or discourse underpinning the NSW curriculum, seems to me to be congruent with Eaglestone’s definition of ethical criticism as an ‘interruption … in many different forms’ (p. 170). Such an approach to programming seeks always to open out meaning, to encourage another response through different understandings of language and text, enabling – to the extent that this is possible in a school context, with imposed assessment requirements and so on – students to enact the ethic of ‘There [being] no final reading, no last word’ (Eaglestone, p. 179). 181

HOWIE

Space does not allow me to show how this programming model works, which is something I have done elsewhere (Howie, 2008 and 2009). Instead, I would like to focus here on some outcomes of its use, highlighting how it has helped one of my students, Sara, to come to rewrite a text she has read in the text of her life, and to rewrite her life in the light of this text. By way of comparison with the sort of expressive writing being undertaken by students in the classroom snapshots provided by my co-contributors, I will seek to highlight the textual strategies Sara has employed in her Reflection Statement, as she strives for an ethical form of textual criticism and expressive writing, resisting any appeal to intention for meaning or the validity of her interpretations. SEVEN

Sara’s major project was entitled De-fining Obama: Exploring Performativity and Authenticity in the Language of Identity Politics. (Her choice of a set of speeches as the basis for her project suggests a further interruption of Literature in the NSW curriculum, in this case by a broad definition of literature, which is able to accommodate the tradition of belle-lettres.) In her Reflection Statement, she summarised her project as follows. My major work … seeks to respond to questions of truth and ‘authenticity’ which arise in the study of language. Its exploration of the role and distance between language and identity inevitably leads to consideration of the fluidity identities assume apropos the ethical dimensions of response and criticism. A close reading of the language of Barack Obama, a figure who arguably epitomises the notion of ever-changing identity characteristic of postmodern times, highlights the inherent link between language and identity. In studying and responding to these themes in Obama’s speeches, through the critical frameworks of speech act theory and Derrida’s notion of iterability, my essay seeks to evaluate the validity of a distinction being drawn between authenticity and performativity in communication acts. From here I consider the implications of this for understanding identity. Eaglestone’s ethic of (critical) disruption is a very apt description of the different critical-creative strategies employed by Sara in her project. Sara actively writes against the ‘gap’ between the major work and the Reflection Statement, resisting the otherwise reductive functioning of the latter as a means to expound her supposed intentions as the singular author of the former. This is most obvious in certain choices she made in relation to the structural organisation and textuality of her Reflection Statement, which she chose to place before her major work when it was submitted to the NSW Board of Studies for examination. Sara’s Reflection Statement begins with a heading that reads ‘The Last Word … or, rather, not’. Tellingly, she does not close this off with a full stop. It then continues with a piece of italicised text that is placed between a top and bottom border, and which does not include a fully formed last word or –again– a full stop, ‘In a final gesture I return to the stage and stand upon it, perpetually. It seems that regardless of how I might try to resist, my performance will never come to an’. 182

‘AUTHENTICITY WAS NEVER REALLY THE QUESTION’

A series of three rhetorical questions follows: ‘What were my intentions? Were they authentic? Do these things matter?’. Here we see a carnivalised attitude (cf. Bakhtin, 1984) to the reflection statement being adopted, a critical-creative strategy that calls the whole enterprise of the reflection statement into question, most overtly its supposed instantiation of an authorial presence behind the composition. This, of course, is occurring even as Sara sets about fulfilling the formal requirements of this course component. Her central concern with performativity runs on from her essay on Obama, which actually comes after the reflection statement, blurring the lines between critical and expressive forms of response, but without recourse to intentionality. Sara’s experimentation, her performance, has not originated with her, as she acknowledges, but is being depicted as a condition of writing in general. The placement of the reflection in front of the essay is also a form of response by Sara to the task and subject position of being a critical reader of her own text. In this move, she takes the expressive writing required of her beyond the bounds of self-revelation and into an entirely other ethical realm, indicating that the project has left her with the responsibility to fashion and express her (reflective) self in a certain way. She apparently does so in order to enact the conclusions she has arrived at in her essay with regards to the ethical possibilities enabled by certain perspectives on language and text. Sara responds first and foremost in a textual manner to her understanding that she has been called into question by completing her project, as indicated by the first of her rhetorical questions. Sara’s critical reading and writing, in other words, become a way of being that interrupts the very idea of a singular, self-present consciousness and identity, which the Reflection Statement is otherwise expected to establish, and to which both traditional Literary criticism and growth orientated expressive writing refer for meaning and validation. In a sense, in keeping with the ethical aspirations of the transformative programming model I have been working with, Sara has interrupted the historical interruption of Literature by English, practising an alternative form of reading to epi-reading. (Of course, this not to suggest that such a disruption was something she intended.) The interruption of particular understandings of identity and being is certainly the focus of Sara’s writing in response to her own composition. The refusal of closure is a key element of the ethic enacted through her expressive response to her own writing, as well as her response to the various texts that she read in completing her project. The start of Sara’s Reflection Statement actually picks up from, but – most significantly – refuses to complete the ending of her essay. To help make this clearer, the final two paragraphs of Sara’s essay are reproduced below, with a minor edit for the sake of coherence. No, the performance is not yet over … It seems that as long as I continue to go on writing, this performance will also continue. Regardless of what I do, I, like Obama, will never escape the performance; the Other will always be watching and the authenticity of my performance will always remain questionable, even when that other is myself, as this conclusion makes clear. I have come this far and can only conclude, as my social contract with my reader necessitates, that authenticity was never really the question, even if it 183

HOWIE

was the question that got me this far, which is nowhere near as far as performance has taken President Barack Obama. In self-consciously adopting highly performative writing strategies, such as the creative use of punctuation and syntax at the start of her reflection statement, Sara displaces her authorial self from the centre of her expressive writing. Instead, we see a self that is inextricably textual and textualized, one that is made possible by the reading and writing she has undertaken in completing her major work. Moreover, it is expressed through practices that self-reflexively refer outwards to the very conclusions with regards to the relationship between language and identity, authenticity and performativity that she arrives at in her essay. Thus it seems that the questions of paradox and contradiction raised by the Obama persona and its use of rhetoric are not ones for dismantling by rhetoricians or academics with a totalizing system or theory, but instead might be observed for the ethical impact the performance has on society and what good the President might bring about. However, notions of ethicality, like democracy, can never be said to be complete, pure or entire in that the communications and text required to disseminate such ideals through society are inevitably caught in questions of paradox and contradiction. Regardless of the words or utterances that Obama uses in his attempt to move somewhat closer to democracy, he is inevitably, like anyone attempting to communicate, caught up in the limitations of the text. Therefore, the crafting through language of an identity that is pure and whole and entirely singular in meaning becomes an impossible task. In the organisation, physical placement (with regards to her essay) and language of her Reflection Statement, Sara seems to be making a case for the fact that she has not so much authored her essay, as it has authored her – at least the ‘her’ who is writing the Reflection Statement. This allows her to refuse the closure that comes with the last, all-defining last word of a singular and centred authorial presence. She further ‘opens out’ her work, and its (proper) being or identity, by taking it from the context of an examination process, and (re)defining it, as both a (literarycritical) work and a form of work, in a spirit of affinity with Derrida’s (Derrida, 1994) notion of a new international, particularly the idea and ideal of democracy to come. (Sara had, in the process of completing her project, undertaken some reading in this area.) She writes in her Reflection Statement, ‘Like all texts, [the] identity [of mine] may be unfixed; however, its role is evident and perpetual: to be read, reflected on, responded to and, as a consequence, open minds to the possibilities of democracy – the very promise inherent in Obama’s ascension’. In these words, I see the non-originary trace of what Eaglestone describes as the necessary ‘witnessing’ that is the ‘responsibility and duty’ of criticism (p. 170). As Sara’s teacher, it has been my great honour to be here, in this piece, a ‘witness’ to her work. It has been my privilege to respond to her writing, recontextualising it as part of a new and different dialogue, and consequently reshaping its identity and state of being, along with hers. This is a responsibility I have been willing to embrace with a sense of affinity – shared with Sara – for the new international. In fact, this 184

‘AUTHENTICITY WAS NEVER REALLY THE QUESTION’

is an affinity that I believe to be a defining element of English studies and essential to any understanding of ethical criticism (cf. Lucy, 2010b). The self-reflexive interruptive approach adopted by Sara conveys a very real sense of the way that students can, by embracing the idea that expressive writing is a textual performance, as opposed to the authentic expression of a present and singular self, begin to understand how they might rewrite the texts they have read in the texts of their lives, and consequently rewrite their lives and selves in the light of those texts. Such an outcome requires awareness on the part of teachers of the ethical limitations of the epi-reading practices that have come to define the discourses of Literature and English, most particularly their shared emphasis on intentionality and the symmetrical relationships this creates in classrooms. CONCLUSION

In my reading of the texts of my co-contributors, I have endeavoured to instantiate my belief, following Levinas and Derrida, that an ethical response is one of recognition, even fellow-feeling, but which nevertheless refuses absolute solidarity. I have therefore understood my ‘response-ability’ (Pope, 2002, p. 261) to be to locate through close and generous reading, in a non-traditional or Leavisite sense, ‘an interruption or alterity within [a text’s] dominant interpretation where reading discovers within a text insights to which the text is blind’ (Critchley, 1999, p. 30). In other words, to identify what the ‘said’ of the texts of my co-contributors cannot say. In this way, what Critchley (p. 31), paraphrasing Levinas, describes as the ‘passage to … the transcendence of the Other’ is produced. This brings us close to what Eaglestone appears to mean when he emphasises ‘interruption’ as a key defining feature of ethical criticism. My own text, of course, is now open to critical interruption. I make no claims as to a ‘final word’, or a definitive statement on my chosen themes. Instead, I only hope that this text will promote further dialogue. In the exploring the expressive writing of my own student, Sara, I have sought to illustrate how students might come to practice an ethical criticism in their expressive writing. I believe that Sara’s writing provides a real sense how students can, by embracing expressive writing as a textual performance, rather than the authentic expression of a present and singular self, find a way to negotiate the historical tensions that continue to exist between Literature and English – tensions that are very visible when students are required to conform to a systemic requirement to write in an expressive manner in response to their reading. The ethical critical alternative, as Sara’s writing appears to confirm, is not one that is reducible to common sense. Indeed, it requires teachers and students to remain open to the idea that we should resist a sense of solidarity with the self that is brought about by writing of a self-revealing nature, a notion which can help us move beyond the compromised promise of an ethic of reading that has resulted from the enduring influence of intentionality, as has been passed on from Literature to English. The idea, of course, that ‘There is nothing outside of the text’ (Derrida, 1997, p. 158) remains a controversial one, to the extent that it is now routinely depicted in public commentary in Australia and elsewhere to pose a threat to Western civilization (cf. Lucy, 2010a). I prefer to believe it is an entirely ethical belief, and one that actually 185

HOWIE

promotes ethical practices in English studies. Sara’s writing emphasises that it is also a belief that is on the side of nothing less than the idea and ideal of democracy. REFERENCES Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his world (H. Iswolsky, Trans.). Bloomington & Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press. Bloom, H. (1994). The western canon: The books and school of the ages. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company. Board of Studies. (1999). Stage 6 syllabus English: Preliminary and HSC courses. Sydney: NSW Board of Studies. Craven, P. (2010, July). Half a century of avid readers proves you can never kill a mockingbird. The Australian. Retrieved July, 2010, from http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/half-a-century-ofavid-readers-proves-you-can-never-kill-a-mockingbird/story-e6frg8n6–1225889676241 Critchley, S. (1999). The ethics of deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (2nd ed.). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Culler, J. (1983). On deconstruction: Theory and criticism after structuralism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Derrida, J. (1997). Of grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University. Derrida, J. (1994). Spectres of Marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international (P. Kamuf, Trans.). New York: Routledge. Dixon, J. (1967). Growth through English. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Donnelly, K. (2007). Dumbing down: Outcomes-based and politically correct – the impact of the culture wars on our schools. Prahran: Hardie Grant Books. Donoghue, D. (1981). Ferocious alphabets. London: Faber & Faber. Eaglestone, R. (1997). Ethical criticism: Reading after Levinas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gilbert, P. (1989). Writing, schooling, and deconstruction: From voice to text in the classroom. London and New York: Routledge. Howie, M. (2005). A transformative model for programming 7–10 English. English in Australia, 142, 57–63. Howie, M. (2008). Reel English? Putting students in the ‘frame’ in the teaching of film. In A. Burn & C. Durrant (Eds.), Media teaching: Language, audience and production (pp. 152–180). Kent Town: Wakefield Press/AATE. Howie, M. (2009). The subject(s) of fiction. In S. Gannon, M. Howie, & W. Sawyer (Eds.), Charged with meaning: Reviewing English (3rd ed., pp. 287–286). Putney: Phoenix Education. Hunter, I. (1997). After English: Toward a less critical literacy. In S. Muspratt, A. Luke, & P. Freebody (Eds.), Constructing critical literacies: Teaching and learning textual practice (pp. 315–334). St Leonards: Allen & Unwin. Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Lucy, N. (2010a). Introduction. In Postmodern Oz: Fear and loathing downunder (pp. 11–20). Fremantle: Fremantle Press. Lucy, N. (2010b). Everybody loves Raymond Williams: Critical literacy, cultural studies and the new international (pp. 33–53). In Postmodern Oz: Fear and loathing downunder (pp. 11–20). Fremantle: Fremantle Press. Morgan, W. (1997). Critical literacy in the classroom: The art of the possible. London: Routledge. Patterson, A. (2008). Teaching literature in Australia: Examining and reviewing senior English. Changing English, 15(3), 311–322.

186

‘AUTHENTICITY WAS NEVER REALLY THE QUESTION’ Peel, R. (2000). ‘English’ in England. In R. Peel, A. Patterson, & J. Gerlach (Eds.), Questions of English: Ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric, and the formation of the subject in England, Australia and the United States (pp. 39–115). London: RoutledgeFalmer. Phenix, J. Teaching writing: The nuts and bolts of running a day-to-day writing program. Ontario: Pembroke Publishers Limited. Pope, R. (2002). The English studies book: An introduction to language, literature and culture (2nd ed.). London and New York: Routledge. Reid, I. (2003). The persistent pedagogy of ‘Growth’. In B. Doecke, D. Homer, & H. Nixon (Eds.), English teachers at work: Narratives, counter narratives and arguments. Kent Town: Wakefield Press/AATE. Sawyer, W. (2006). The condition of music: The aesthetic turn in English. English in Australia, 41(2), 27–34. Scholes, R. (1989). Protocols of reading. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Spires, M. (1999/2000). Developing a critical literacy approach with To Kill a Mockingbird. English in Australia, 126, 53–59. Thomson, J. (1987). Understanding teenager’s reading: Reading process and the teaching of English. North Ryde: Methuen. Widdowson, P. (1999). Literature. London and New York: Routledge.

Mark Howie Springwood High School NSW, Australia

187

IRENE PIEPER

12. LITERATURE CLASSROOMS AND THEIR LIMITS

ESSAYING AN ESSAY

An essay in the style of Montaigne provides an attractive option that is not usually stressed in my academic writing, namely to articulate a subjective voice and to present a stream of reflections rather than a line of argument which is unfolded systematically in the course of the text. Joining a professional dialogue on literature classrooms via an essay seems especially appropriate: it is an ongoing challenge to talk about and deal with cases of teaching and learning in such a way that their complexities can be met – which asks both for focus and a respect for the dynamics of shifting perspectives. My contribution to our conversational inquiry is strongly influenced by discussions on literature education and related research in Germany. There seem to be considerable commonalities in education across countries and continents in the Western world, as the conversation presented in this volume shows, and yet as I engage in the cases written by Dutch and Australian literature teachers I am mindful of the way that my perspective has been shaped by my experiences as a teacher and researcher in Germany. Literature education has received a great deal of attention in Germany after the country participated in the international surveys on literacy outcomes and performed badly in PISA 2000. Suddenly it became apparent that our curricula had a rather dramatic blind spot: reading literacy was expected to have been developed by the end of primary education (usually grade 4), and so from grade 5 on not much attention was paid to enhancing reading competencies, the assumption being that students would be able to read and comprehend texts which were considered appropriate at a certain year level or which had traditionally been taught in certain years. This is central to any understanding of literary education because the domain ‘reading – dealing with texts and media’ in secondary education is at the same time the domain of literary education (cf. Pieper, 2007). Thus ‘Literaturdidaktik’ took up the challenge and has since then put more effort into developing a reading curriculum beyond primary school than ever before. At the same time the debate on ‘literarische Bildung’ has been renewed, a concept which stresses identity-formation through engaging with well accepted and highly valued, canonical literature and which is influenced by the idea of ‘Bildung’ as Wilhelm von Humboldt shaped it. At the moment this concept is taken up to counter-balance the more instrumental notion of reading literacy (cf. Rosebrock, 2008). However, ‘literarische Bildung’ had been criticised quite strongly as an P-H. van de Ven and B. Doecke (eds.), Literary Praxis: A Conversational inquiry into the Teaching of Literature, 189–202. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

PIEPER

elite-concept in the 1970s – a crucial time for the establishment of the discipline ‘Literaturdidaktik’ in the universities. The concept ‘Lese- und literarische Sozialisation’ (reading socialisation and literary socialisation) at that time became more prominent. It introduced a broader view to the formation of personality and is meant to be more inclusive, e.g. with respect to learners from lower socioeconomic backgrounds who are less likely to be introduced to literature through their families (cf. Pieper, 2010). The concept of socialisation, which is both a descriptive and a normative concept, points to the contextual aspects of learning and offers systematic insights which should provide a basis for adequate interventions. Re-reading some of the more programmatic studies of the 70s offers some déjàvu at this moment, because much of today’s discussion in Germany is about the gulf between learners from different socio-economic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Key issues were raised then that the educational system has still been unable to solve: how to design learning contexts in such a way that ‘Bildung’ is not what learners need to bring with them in order to unfold it further, but opportunities are offered for experiences which allow students to develop their potential as readers. And although there is a consensus that reading literacy should somehow be attended to, teacher educators and experts in the field of ‘Literaturdidaktik’ argue that an approach which emphasizes instrumental training has pronounced shortcomings in that it does not cover the richness of reading experiences and it does not even outline the pathway that students are able to follow to meaningful cultural practices. Moreover, such an approach might feed the illusion that educational success is simply a matter of being trained in certain skills and strategies (cf. Pieper et al., 2004; Bertschi-Kaufmann & Rosebrock, 2009). In contrast to such a reductionist approach – so the consensus appears to be amongst the voices in this ‘conversational inquiry’, at least – students should be entitled to manifold experiences with respect to language and literature. The elementary role of both language and literature is stressed internationally by a current Council-of-Europe-project which links this notion to the right of learners to language education and develops it further within a framework of pluri-lingual and intercultural education (Coste et al., 2009). Literature is seen to play an important role in education in many respects, not least because it can enable students to cross cultural and national boundaries (Pieper et al., 2007). So, when stressing the idea of meaningful literary praxis as something that is integral to identity formation, it is possible to establish links to the traditional concept of ‘literarische Bildung’, but in a more liberal, egalitarian, and learner-oriented sense that has a more worldly and transcultural character which affects the notion of literature in that it moves beyond the concept of canon. However, in the context of institutional learning a more instrumental approach towards reading literacy is not the only competitor to literary education in this richer sense. Another challenge within the German context has emerged with respect to the need to provide precise descriptions of competences which can be acquired in dealing with literature and which can or should be applied in understanding and interpreting literary texts. This research question obviously has significant educational implications for pedagogy, curriculum and assessment. Within the frame of literary 190

LITERATURE CLASSROOMS AND THEIR LIMITS

education, these competences should then of course be taught. This is another consequence of an outcomes-orientation in the educational system which has brought about new forms of assessment for literature and which has led to a renewed focus on a methodology of close reading. Meaning then follows exegetical procedures and can and should be justified by referring to the text (Kämper-van den Boogaart & Pieper, 2006). Thus, reading literature at school in a way takes up the philological tradition again, which was far less popular before 2000 and now has to be balanced against notions such as the one and only valid interpretation and unreflective processes of canonization and valorisation. It is therefore claimed that with regard to literature the ‘what and how to assess’ should be discussed in the light of literary theory and even cultural sociology (for a summary of the discussion see Abraham & Kepser, 2009). With regard to the learners one might ask: Is it possible to follow literary texts closely and in constant dialogue with other readers as well as in dialogue with the text, under the guidance of a teacher or even student-peers, within the institutional frame of the literature classroom, with an exam at the end – and still experience this as meaningful and as a worthwhile learning process? While formulating this question I realise that I insist on dialogue and implicitly argue conversation to be the form of dealing with literature in the ambitious frame of literary praxis alluded to above. This seems to be in line with the program of this whole conversational inquiry and the positions of the various contributors to it. Still, from a methodological/pedagogical point of view,1 dialogue about literature in the literature classroom remains one option among others. More activity and production based approaches have lately been emphasized in German teacher education – activities such as producing texts as responses to texts, designing dialogues, making drawings, acting out texts in the form of scenes or tableaux, often with the aim of shaping the learner’s way into the text and allowing for learnercentred individual meaning construction.2 Teacher educators and researchers have made a strong point about the tensions inherent in classroom dialogue, referring to Mehan’s reconstruction of the initiation– reply–evaluation (IRE) sequence (Mehan, 1979), and the dominance of the teacher’s own reading of a text and his or her mediation of the interpretation process within classroom settings. The IRE sequence does limit possible ways into the text (cf. Wieler, 1989). Scenarios construct learners as following a strict route with very little room for finding their own language or for developing their thoughts. I am thinking of the pattern which Ehlich and Rehbein call ‘teacher’s lecture with various roles’ where the teacher allocates parts of the text to be spoken to learners by posing precise and closed questions (‘Lehrervortrag mit verteilten Rollen’, Ehlich & Rehbein, 1986). A literary dialogue, if it is to be genuine, has to be arranged differently (Merkelbach, 1995; Härle & Steinbrenner, 2004). It should be oriented towards an understanding which is not based on dominance, but on cooperative communicative action as postulated by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. Habermas sees the ‘competences that make a subject capable of speaking and acting, that put him (sic) in a position to take part in processes of reaching understanding and thereby to assert his own identity’ as fundamental to the development of personality (Habermas, 1987/2006, 138). 191

PIEPER

Another route which links identity formation to conversations goes back to the philosopher, theologian and educational researcher, Friedrich Schleiermacher, who in 1798/99 wrote his ‘Versuch einer Theorie geselligen Betragens’ (‘Essay on a theory of social behaviour’). In this essay he attempted to link the ‘social’ to the romantic concept of socialising in the so-called salon (Schleiermacher, 2000). Here again personal development is a strong notion. Both the romantic Schleiermacher and the contemporary philosopher Habermas stress the link between identity formation and the shaping of society in constant dialogue with the traditions and cultural knowledge that constitute social life. They link their theoretical considerations to everyday life. Both learning and socialisation are important aspects of their theories, a presupposition being the wish to understand the other. Habermas insists that part of the process of understanding is the achievement of an agreement on what the situation is. This has a stabilizing function: In coming to an understanding with one another about their situation, participants in interaction stand in a cultural tradition that they at once use and renew; in coordinating their actions by way of intersubjectively recognizing criticisable validity claims, they are at once relying on membership in social groups and strengthening the integration of those same groups; through participating in interactions with competently acting reference persons, the growing child internalizes the value orientations of his social group and acquires generalized capacities for action. (Habermas, 2006, 137) What could be the status of literature in a dialogue of this type? What are the circumstances which can allow for such a dialogue? Does this presuppose a cultural and social homogeneity which is not a common feature in today’s classrooms. Isn’t this insistence on personal development via communication expecting a bit much when it comes to literary education? I have students in mind whom I taught in upper secondary in 2000 who made it perfectly clear that it would sometimes be quite a relief to deal with a clear cut task instead of doing all the talking. Thinking about literature as the centre of a dialogue amongst learners or between learners and teachers raises an important question concerning literary expertise. After all, literature has been the focus of quite a diverse body of literary knowledge, including theories and reflections across various disciplines. And what about the relation between achieving an understanding and exploring the manifold meanings a text might have for a community, maybe even involving heated controversies? Does the whole point of dialogue as invoked by Habermas’ sense lead into too much harmony? Jonathan Culler sees limits of aiming at well argued, yet moderate interpretations on the route of Umberto Eco’s ‘model reader’. This construct of the Italian Semioticist and Linguist points to a process of meaning construction which carefully follows the textual clues and aims at an adequate interpretation (Eco, 1999). The latter is brought into opposition to making use of the text. Culler, to the contrary, argues in favour of ‘overstanding’ the text (with a terminology that he finds in Wayne Booth; cf. Culler, 2007, 172), the just interpretation on the traces of the model reader not being stimulating and not leading into new knowledge. Culler justifies what is often criticised as ‘overinterpretation’: ‘overstanding’ the text 192

LITERATURE CLASSROOMS AND THEIR LIMITS

‘consists of pursuing questions that the text does not pose to its model reader. [ … ] it can be very important and productive to ask questions the text does not encourage one to ask about it.’ (Culler, 2007, pp. 172–173) From my own experience in teaching and teacher education I sense a sometimes strong discrepancy between the approaches of the literary academic and the hermeneutical praxis of students, even in upper secondary, who are preoccupied with coming to terms with a story rather than deconstructing meaning or comparing various interpretations of the text. In now turning to the conversations on literature and literature education presented in the Dutch and Australian cases, I would like to raise questions concerning the institutional frame of the classroom. Needless to say, this differs considerably from the free salon of the romantics and Habermas’s idea of a discourse without hierarchical restrictions. Classrooms raise a number of issues that complicate these ideals, including the relationship between the literary expert (the teacher) and the novices, and the ways of staging the dialogue (a term used by Laila Aase at the symposium on verbal understanding and literature at the IAIMTE conference 2007) need attention: in short the ways of bridging what might need bridging if circumstances are those of the real rather than of the ideal worlds of communication presented by Habermas and Schleiermacher and if development and learning are in focus. Expectations about literary dialogue should not, after all, present an impossible ideal that ultimately leads to disillusionment. I am aware that this lense is a subjective one, and it may leave a lot of noteworthy aspects in the shadow. At the same time I am conscious that each essay in this ensemble illuminates different dimensions of a literary education, tackling the question of the meaning of a literary education from the writer’s own situation and concerns. My own perspective is one which foregrounds the way classroom settings mediate the exchanges that occur within them, and which considers the potential of such exchanges not only but also as a product of those institutional settings. RAMON’S ROUTE THROUGH PRE-ACADEMIC LITERARY EDUCATION

All three cases feature an aspect of literary education which I have not looked at yet, but is foregrounded in Ramon’s reflections: the attitudes and expectations about literature that a teacher might have developed through his or her own socialisation. Ramon explains his own passion for literature by going back to his school days as a student and sees these experiences as a driving force for choosing literary studies and a professional career as a literature teacher. This passion has developed a somehow postmodern academic character in that Ramon knows how to apply diverse concepts from literary theory to a literary text. This is not a matter of preferring one theory over another, but of recognising the potential of each to facilitate an alternative reading of a text: From the knowledge I have gained from these ideas, I believe that combining these different approaches when reading and analysing a text is most rewarding. I want to pass this capacity on to my students. I want to make sure that by the end of their high school education they are able to read a book in different ways and that they are able to use different approaches. 193

PIEPER

Reading this I wonder about the attribute ‘rewarding’. I suppose that from Ramon’s perspective this is a kind of intellectual gratification which moves beyond personal enjoyment with regard to a story to a different form of appreciation. The quote above links this experience to a teaching aim that turns out to be ambitious. Ramon provides the students with tasks which he has linked to theoretical approaches to literature. The intended group work is designed beautifully and it should lay out the path towards the acquisition of tools for advanced readings in this pre-academic classroom. I am interested in the implicit notion of competence in the design of the lesson: Ramon clearly aims to inculcate a set of strategies and a knowledge which can be applied again to reading other literary texts – a competence that is a much more technical concept than the philosophically based one by Habermas which I mentioned above. Ramon uses the term ‘tools’ several times towards the end of his reflections and invokes the notion of an ‘extensive interpretive repertoire’ as something he wants his students to develop. However, his thoughts on the lesson and on the follow-up-discussion with Mies and Piet-Hein show some dissatisfaction. In a plenary session the students are much more inclined to discuss the protagonist than to compare their approaches. Suddenly the teacher’s role changes: during the group work he had handed over responsibility to the students to a large extent: they were required to work their way through a task based on a specific theoretical perspective, then form new groups where expertise could be exchanged. Now that things do not work out, Ramon takes the lead and his reflections show some frustration: ‘they are not yet ready to read a story in the way that I read it.’ In trying to analyse the mismatch of lesson design and students’ performance, Ramon points to the story he has chosen, which he sees as too difficult for his students’ level of literary competence. Here I wonder about consequences: from this observation his more directive teaching might be seen as being entirely appropriate. If students need more scaffolding in order to advance to this level of engagement, the expert might be needed to a larger extent. So, one way of reading this case could be that Ramon is showing the necessary flexibility to re-arrange his design in the course of the lesson. And I have some sympathy for reading it in this way because choosing an ‘adequate’ story seems to me to be an art in itself: it would be closing the process of engaging in literary learning if the challenge of dealing with a difficult text was always to be avoided. How do we balance these two sides of one coin, looking for something that is ‘adequate’ and at the same time a demanding piece of literature? After all, teaching can be given and arrangements can be made in order to assist students in finding their ways into the text. It could be argued that in literary education we should look for ‘instructional’ texts: texts which partly exceed the learners’ literary competence but have a potential to develop students’ competences (are ‘instructive’) especially if mediation (‘instruction’) is provided in classroom contexts. Adequate texts in classroom contexts thus differ from those which parents might rightly consider as adequate birthday gifts or which peers recommend to each other for leisure reading. This of course does not mean that motivations and interests of students should be ignored but that a careful text-choice should not only look at where learners are but also at where they should move to. 194

LITERATURE CLASSROOMS AND THEIR LIMITS

Ramon himself concludes that his aim of providing tools is not achieved. Instead the ‘students seem emotionally detached from the text and this may be the reason they are stuck’. While he himself experiences a combination of different approaches as rewarding, the students do not seem to benefit from being provided with tools to engage in this kind of interpretive activity. Maybe the questions which could derive from their readings are not yet to be dealt with in such a differentiated way but are to be found closer to their experience? Perhaps Ramon’s frustration also points to one of the pitfalls of teaching competencies in this more technical sense: in order to stress what can be generalised and transferred the significance of the chosen piece of literature, which is somehow unique (though not necessarily high art), gets lost. Yet the story does have some content and meaning. Thus, Ramon decides to ‘put much more emphasis on the reading experience’ in the future. At the end of his reflections – or rather, of the insights that he has presented to us – Ramon seems to aim at a different balance which puts more stress on the personal approach to the text as a basis for a conversation that can be more and more advanced. I here sense more strongly than before the notion of identity formation as providing a context and rationale for reading literature. It is, however, in my opinion one of the dilemmas of pre-academic and even academic literature teaching to balance the need to establish a personal link with the text with encouragement for a sensitive and critical reading which listens to the text and other readings and – then or at the same time? – argues an in-depth-understanding. Ramon does not only aim at this but also at a dynamic process of meaning construction and a comparative approach of interpretations that is systematically arranged around different theoretical approaches. Perhaps practice here has to get in the way of theory? After all, even literary critics would probably rather argue their own point than that of their colleagues or competitors; they are not necessarily able to detach themselves from their preferred approach but remain convinced of its rightness. However, I do appreciate the ambitions Ramon brings into the classroom. It seems to me that his trust in the students’ potential and his intellectual respect open the route to engaging with the challenges of literary study for students and teachers alike. MIES’ ROUTE TO SOCIALLY ENGAGED READING

Mies might be said to start where Ramon ends: She underlines the importance of identification with protagonists, engagement in the story and involvement. What the two seem to share is that they are both passionate readers – though probably in different ways. Mies’ ambitions are not only related to experiencing what is presented in a piece of literature. By choosing youth literature for the class she wants ‘to engage in a discussion of social topics’ and when students even take the initiative to raise money for a charity she feels satisfaction: ‘I have reached my goal, “to induce compassion and fear”. And what is more, I have incited an actual willingness to get up and do something against social evils’. And to underline the value of this experience she borrows from one of her favourite authors, Joost van den Vondel, who aims at this classic form of engagement according to his preface to the tragedy of Jephta. Mies arranges her lesson as a form of inquiry. She wants to know whether students of the age of 13/14 who are said to be driven by an interest in plot and storyline, as 195

PIEPER

well as a desire ‘to escape reality’, can take the step towards a socially engaged reading. Piet-Hein later elaborates upon the relationship between the aesthetical and the ethical dimension of literature and literature education, pointing to problematical disjunctions and restrictive positions. In Mies’ class I sense a strong pedagogical dimension of literature teaching that is reflected in the text she has chosen for study, namely an example of youth literature which is by definition rather heteronymous than autonomous: youth literature is situated in the context of socialisation and education and takes over functions with regard to its prior addressees. A pedagogical and normative dimension is included, although not always explicit. In an interesting article on youth literature in the literature classroom Bettina Hurrelmann points to another tension: the ‘Sitz im Leben’ (‘setting in life’) of children’s and youth’ literature is not usually the classroom but rather leisure time, family surroundings, peers (Hurrelmann 2002). So, in a way, school crosses borders, and it is not surprising that Mies compares her way of dealing with the book Blue is bitter to a book-club-setting which is also an arrangement outside the institutional frame of school education. This is also shown by the way Mies aims at creating an atmosphere of ‘trust and intimacy’. Hurrelmann is in favour of reading children’s and youth literature in school and has been an important supporter of bringing those books into school. However, she insists that the change of the ‘Sitz im Leben’ needs to be acknowledged and I wonder about the systematic differences of the space created in school from the informal one of a family setting. For example there is a physical and emotional closeness between parents and children in reading together in family contexts which certainly influences the reading experience. In primary education and with younger learners in secondary school it is a learning process in itself to keep some distance, be it towards teachers, be it in dealing with daily life themes. The classroom is a far more public space than the family. Within an expert-discussion I talked about youth literature in school and the development of competences with four teachers of lower secondary Gymnasium.3 One of them, let’s call him Anders, brought up the issue of ‘emotionalising’ via literature. He was very critical about it and when we asked for an explanation he expressed his concerns about not crossing the border by ‘functionalising’ emotions and being ‘too suggestive’ or even ‘manipulative’: ‘Das ist doch auch bestimmt der Grund, warum viele dann dieses Thema Drittes Reich einfach satt haben, weil sie diesen Prozess nicht mehr wollen, sie wollen nicht mehr ständig diese Keule auf dem Kopf haben und dann “so, jetzt denk mal nach”.’ (‘I am sure this is why students [in Germany] are so fed up with reading about the Third Reich because they don’t want this process any more, this being hit on their head with a cudgel and then “now think”.’ Transcript Hildesheim 5/2010, 91/92, my translation). Anders is also a teacher of philosophy, who insists on showing respect towards the personality of the other, and I was impressed by his determination to make room for emancipatory thinking and to preserve a critical distance. There remains, of course, the other side, which was pointed out by one of his colleagues who insisted that at times it may be necessary to create emotional closeness so that students can get involved. 196

LITERATURE CLASSROOMS AND THEIR LIMITS

Here, the ethical becomes an issue not only of literature but also of pedagogy in general. I suppose that to achieve the right and responsible balance is not something that teacher educators could systematically instruct their students to achieve or that teachers could plan in detail. It is perhaps less something that can be dictated by a set of principles, but is rather situational and linked to experience, not to mention the personal style that a teacher develops in facilitating relationships in class. However, when reading Mies’s account of her teaching, it struck me that the institutional frame is not only a restriction to literature teaching, but can also provide a room where students can deal with strong and challenging experiences. They can thereby develop ethical judgements. This means, however, that they should have the option to identify as well as to distance themselves – which should be beneficial when looking at issues more closely. If involvement is too strong the emotional experience can be overwhelming and is possibly appreciated as gratifying. But this experiential closeness can come into the way of reflection and readers can miss out on the complexities of the conflicts presented. This is why the recognition and analysis of perspectives and other literary techniques is not only a (pre)academic task in higher education but also a way of realising how a narrator or an author supports certain views, contrasts different perspectives, makes room for the identification of ethical dilemmas etc. The concept of empathy takes into account these complexities in that it moves beyond identification in the sense of involvement with one character and aims at developing engaged forms of multiperspectivity (e.g. Rösch, 2007). Also, it is via a more distanced and critical view that ‘overstanding the text’ in the sense of Culler can be a conscious and productive process. Classroom communication can offer room for a critical and enriching exchange which should be carefully developed over the years. I realise that Mies provided individual writing tasks and think about the dialogue of the writer with his or her own text. This might also provide a safe and beneficial environment, including the prospect of an exclusive exchange with the teacher, which is something that is very important to younger students. To experience this dialogic thinking via writing as enriching, though, is quite demanding for learners. PRUE’S ROUTE TO A ‘JOINT CONSTRUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE’

Re-reading Prue’s dialogue with Bella now, after dealing with the reflections offered by Ramon, Mies and Piet-Hein, I think that Prue could be said to share both Ramon’s more academic interest and ambition and Mies’ engaged approach. Prue appears to be motivated by a belief that students and teacher can work together, in order to think about writing in a way that illuminates the world they share with one another, and to reflect on how they want to live in it. She writes: ‘Talk, writing, and talking about writing, are not ends in themselves but also a way of helping us to construct our futures – both public and private’. Engaging in the process of learning how to interpret Farmer’s text thus becomes relevant for the way the students think about their lives. Although the communication that occurs around Farmer’s book is strongly linked to social issues, the enlightening interactions in which the students engage also appear to 197

PIEPER

have at their heart an awareness which is an aesthetic one. For Prue’s teaching is clearly driven by a desire to develop a literary expertise, too. Her aim is to impart hermeneutical skills that enable her students to ‘approach a discussion of the stories via a close examination of short passages – to increase their confidence in moving from the particular to the general – the approach they need to demonstrate in the passage analysis task in the end of year exam’. She offers theoretical insights e.g. of Freudian analysis in order to have the students participate in ‘analytical discourse’ and she encourages them to think about their own thinking in the light of an ‘intellectual character’ by providing them with a quote from Ron Ritchhart’s book. Thus, Prue offers a rich arrangement that allows for a deep encounter with Farmer’s stories but also stresses the conscious intellectual development of her students. Preparing for exams at the same time scarcely seems to pose a problem. The whole encounter between Prue and Bella shows that students and teacher alike have emancipated themselves from perceiving exams as external obligations that determine everything they do. Moreover, the classroom seems to have become a space for a postmodern variant of the romantics’ salon: Strict boundaries are so ‘naturalised’ in schools that we become nervous of blurring them, but I like it when I do. Students bring their recess talk with them into class. They flick in and out of a personal chat as they prepare for the day’s lesson. I see such informality as a way of learning about each other, and hence contributing to our ability to have conversation about an idea or a text or a piece of writing. Prue joins in and takes part in the learning, she often uses the ‘we’, and she considers the process they are going through as a ‘joint construction of knowledge’. Another boundary of the classroom thus dissolves: teacher and students here form a community, despite the fact that Prue does some scaffolding and supervises her students’ learning process. She also varies the arrangements: group activities, plenary discussions, blogs and teacher-student-dialogue allow for different kinds and levels of interaction. There is an impressive sovereignty in Prue’s reflections as well as in her design of the lesson which is certainly encouraged by the professional dialogue of the two teachers. Both enjoy the reflective space which has opened up between and around them and which allows an opportunity for clarifying aims and thinking about pedagogy. And I wonder why such an arrangement which is so obviously beneficial is the exception in our German schools rather than the rule. Time is needed, as well as respect and trust between the participants in such conversations – but time is probably the most difficult and expensive part. Teachers who work full time hardly find the opportunity to visit each other in class because they are teaching themselves during school hours. Bella clearly sees the exceptional aspect of the whole arrangement: This idea of talking for the sake of talking about education feels a little special. No workshop activities to structure our thinking or outside experts to talk to us about how teaching happens and should be done. We are two colleagues who share a passion for English teaching and we have this unique opportunity to talk to each other about what we know and do, from a unique 198

LITERATURE CLASSROOMS AND THEIR LIMITS

perspective – the inside of a classroom. It is a privilege to be allowed into another teacher’s classroom. However, especially in this Australian case I feel the need to look at what is around the classroom in a more attentive and focused way. Bella senses the extraordinariness of the place, an elite girls’ school, when she compares it to an ordinary Australian government school: At a glance what strikes me about the students whom I see here compared to the students that I taught at my old school is an almost intangible sense of place and social cohesion; it is in the way they talk, the way they walk, in their gazes, in how they make use of the school’s physical resources and in how they wear their uniforms. Bella realises that the whole setting confirms ‘the right of a certain “I” to exist and name the world’. In this setting, preconditions for an education on the route to ‘literarische Bildung’ in its strong sense can surely be described as optimal. There is a consensus about values, habitus and lifestyle in Bourdieu’s sense; there is choice, even in the very concrete sense that students decide to do literature; there is certainly more proximity between teacher and students than in difficult suburbs where the distance between the educated teacher and the learners’ families is often quite extreme. Research on reading socialisation shows that less fortunate students often cannot experience institutional settings as spaces for exploration and learning and struggle with more open and egalitarian arrangements (Groeben/Schroeder, 2004): their families might well not share the emancipatory ideas of those who, because of their higher socioeconomic status and their accumulated cultural capital, form part of a consensus on the liberal educational practices which I sense forms the context for Prue’s approach to teaching. So those students might not be able to respond to an invitation like the one Prue offers to join a conversation about literature. They might even feel more comfortable in a setting that is more strictly regulated. And again I feel that societies lose a lot of the integrative potential of school if they arrange for selecting students by de-facto-economical differences, excluding those students who do not have access to the modern world’s wealth. This affects literary education in a very significant way: schools that cater for disadvantaged students are often more likely to adopt a simplistic and functionalist logic in order to equip students with basic skills rather than seeing the need to provide them with rich encounters with culture in its various forms. The place of literature in the curriculum is often questioned, as in German basic secondary education at the Hauptschule (Pieper et al., 2004). Would an emphasis on more variety and less social uniformity in schools have the potential to provide for more social cohesion and cultural participation that reflects our colourful and diverse societies? SURPASSING THE LIMITS OF THE CLASSROOM

Re-reading my reflections I realise that the question of how to surpass the limits of classroom dialogue which can be determined by formal expectations, pressure to perform well, expectations to succeed in exams, motivations to tackle tasks rather 199

PIEPER

than to engage in meaningful debate and problem-solving, has become an important anchor-point for my thinking. I think that literature – perhaps like philosophy, ethics, religion, and possibly music – is a subject which has more potential to provide a context for a sense of identity formation and the shaping of responsible interactions. However, literary praxis in the Western world has until now been more common in middle and upper class environments, and I feel that there are other environments – including schools that cater for disadvantaged communities – where belief and trust in the meaningfulness of literary works is especially needed, even though it may be much harder to achieve. Mies points to Mary Kooy’s Canadian book-clubs which might serve as an example. One of my own projects in two schools of the Hauptschule in Hildesheim again showed how difficult it was to engage students and encourage an exchange about their reading. Their reading books often remained a rather alien praxis to them, even in Grade 7 and 8. I would consider the academic prospects of literary intellectualism as another aspect of delimiting the classroom: an approach which is close to emotional experience and much determined by an engagement in the story is extended towards more reflective readings and even towards the development of the habitus of an intellectual character. Such an approach moves beyond the general educational aims of schooling and surpasses institutional restrictions. Ramon’s reflections show how carefully a route to a more academic conception of literature has to be shaped. It seems to me that giving up the – at first glance perhaps naïve – reading of a literary text as conveying a meaningful message that might be understood and potentially has something to offer would be a loss. This does not necessarily imply an approach which aims at a close familiarity with the text and involvement all the way through, but foremost a responsible attitude towards the students and the questions they are capable to reach out to. Very little has been said about text choice and meaning construction in class. It would be tempting to bring in a literary dialogue with even younger readers and watch for its potential for students and teachers alike. Is it perhaps in dialogue with learners that stretching interpretation beyond the sound and decent in the sense of Culler, perhaps because of a ‘naïve’ yet interested approach, is productive? Should students always be aware of the difference between interpreting and overstanding the text – a point which I made earlier? And when do perhaps we have to admit that we missed the text instead of strengthening its potential? Is this a point to be made at all? NOTES 1

2

3

‘Methodisch’ is what I would use in German. In ‘English proper’ it is, however, rather the pedagogical point of view, I have learnt. These approaches form part of the so called “Handlungs- und Produktionsorientierung”. See Spinner, 2008; Waldmann, 2007. The expert-discussion, where teachers are addressed as experts for their professional field, was carried out in May 2010 as part of the international project LIFT-2 which is situated in the EUComenius-programme. LIFT-2 aims at the development of an international literature framework for secondary education. The project is led by the University of Groningen (Theo Witte). The other

200

LITERATURE CLASSROOMS AND THEIR LIMITS contributing countries are Germany, Rumania, the Czech Republic, Portugal and Finland. The experts discussed which novels would be suitable for which group of age and had a set of criteria to describe the texts. They elaborated about characteristics of learners within their group-discussion. The project is inspired by a model which Witte has proposed in 2008 (Witte, 2008).

REFERENCES Abraham, U., & Kepser, M. (2009). Literaturdidaktik Deutsch. Eine Einführung. Berlin: Schmidt. Bertschi-Kaufmann, A., & Rosebrock, C. (2009). Literalität. Bildungsaufgabe und Forschungsfeld. Weinheim, München: Juventa (Lesesozialisation und Medien). Coste, D., Cavalli, M., Criúan, A., & van de Ven, P-H. (2009). Plurilingual and intercultural education as a right. Strasbourg: Council of Europe, Language Policy Division. www.coe.int/lang. Culler, J. (2007). The literary in theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. Eco, U. (1999). Die Grenzen der Interpretation. München: dtv. Ehlich, K., & Rehbein, J. (1986). Muster und Institution. Untersuchungen zur schulischen Kommunikation. Tübingen: Narr. Groeben, N., & Schroeder, S. (2004). Versuch einer synopse: Sozialisationsinstanzen – Ko-Konstruktion. In N. Groeben & B. Hurrelmann (Eds.), Lesesozialisation in der Mediengesellschaft. Ein Forschungsüberblick (pp. 306–350). Weinheim, München: Juventa. Habermas, J. (2006). The theory of communicative action. Vol. 2: Lifeworld and system: The critique of functionalist reason (T. McCarthy, Trans.). Cambridge, Oxford: Polity Press in Cooperation with Blackwell. Reprint of the 1987 edition. Härle, G. & Steinbrenner, M. (Ed.). (2004). Kein endgültiges Wort. Die Wiederentdeckung des Gesprächs im Literaturunterricht. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider. Hurrelmann, B. (2002). Kinder- und Jugendliteratur im Unterricht. In K.-M. Bogdal & H. Korte (Ed.), Grundzüge der Literaturdidaktik (pp. 134–146). München: dtv. Kämper-van den Boogaart, M., & Pieper, I. (2008). Literarisch Lesen. In M. Böhnisch (Ed.), Didaktik Deutsch Sonderheft. Beiträge zum 16. Symposion Deutsch-didaktik ‘Kompetenzen im Deutschunterricht’ (pp. 46–65). Mehan, H. (1979). Learning lessons. Social organization in the classroom. Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard UP. Merkelbach, V. (1995). Zur Theorie und Didaktik des literarischen Gesprächs. In H. Christ, et al. (Ed.), ‘Ja aber es kann doch sein …’ In der Schule literarische Gespräche führen (pp. 12–52). Frankfurt: Lang. Pieper, I. (2010). Lese- und literarische Sozialisation. In W. Ulrich (Ed.), Deutschunterricht in Theorie und Praxis (dtp). Band XI: Lese- und Literaturunterricht I (pp. 87–147). Baltmannsweiler: Schneider. Pieper, I. (2007). Reading literature: A major domain in German primary and secondary education under challenge. In W. Martyniuk (Ed.), Towards a common framework of reference for languages of school education? (Section 9, pp. 362–376). Krakau: Universitas. http://www.universitas.com.pl/ ksiazka/2463. Pieper, I., Rosebrock, C., Wirthwein, H., & Volz, S. (2004). Lesesozialisation in schriftfernen Lebenswelten. Lektüre und Mediengebrauch von Hautpschülerinnen. Weinheim: Juventa. Pieper, I. (Ed.), Aase, L., Fleming, M., & Samihaian, F. (2007). Text, literature and ‘Bildung’. Strasbourg: Council of Europe: Language Policy Division. Retrieved from www.coe.int/lang. Rösch, H. (2007). Empathisch lesen lernen. In I. Honnef-Becker (Ed.), Dialoge zwischen den Kulturen. Interkulturelle Literatur und ihre Didaktik (pp. 76–98). Baltmannsweiler: Schneider. Rosebrock, C. (2008). Lesesozialisation und Leseförderung. In M. Kämper-van den Boogaart (Ed.), Deutsch Didaktik. Leitfaden für die Sekundarstufe I und II (pp. 163–183). Berlin: Cornelsen Scriptor. Schleiermacher, F. D. E. (2000). Versuch einer theorie geselligen Betragens (1798/99). In F. Schleiermacher (Ed.), Texte zur Pädagogik. Kommentierte Studienausgabe (Bd. 1 / M. Winkler & J. Brachmann, Ed., pp. 15–35). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Spinner, K. H. (2008). Handlungs- und Produktionsorientierung. In M. Kämper-van den Boogaart (Ed.), Deutsch Didaktik. Ein Leitfaden für die Sekundarstufe I und II. Berlin: Cornelsen Scriptor.

201

PIEPER Waldmann, G. (2007). Produktiver umgang mit literatur im Unterricht. Grundriss einer produktiven Hermeneutik. Theorie, Didaktik, Verfahren, Modelle. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider. Wieler, P. (1989). Sprachliches Handeln im Literaturunterricht als didaktisches Problem. Bern: Lang. Witte, T. (2008). Het oog van de meester [The Eye of the Master]. Delft: Eburon.

Irene Pieper Department of German Language and Literature University of Hildesheim, Germany

202

MARY KOOY

13. READING THE WORD AND THE WORLD Teachers and Students Renegotiate Literature Reading, Teaching and Learning

Entering the two classroom worlds in the Netherlands and Australia provides a window into the problems, possibilities, and practices in engaging students in literature in ways that shift significantly from standard literary practices in schools. Though worlds apart, they explore territory that stake new claims, pose new questions, and point the way forward. Both take teacher and student learning seriously. They attend to them judiciously. But they are not the same. They share common goals for literature teaching, but each comes to the pedagogy and curriculum in ways that differ significantly. Given the two distinctive national and educational contexts (the Netherlands and Australia) of the cases, we expect difference. Each study, situated within a larger, contextual realm, reflects its particular informing culture, history, practices, and understanding of content within existing conceptions of teaching and learning. Each study represents a departure, a digging deeper, a shift in pedagogy, exploring the possibility of enhanced student engagement in literary texts, despite policy mandates that paradoxically work against this. The two cases re-view the teaching and learning of literature. Each involves classroom teachers and a supportive colleague or critical friend. Each creates learning experiences both in the classroom and in dialogue with a professional peer. Each works to make sense of and reconstruct a developing theory, a praxis for teaching and learning literature. Each, however, approaches the research from distinctive perspectives, contexts, and goals (Arnot, Pedder, & Reay, 2003). My contribution to this ‘conversational inquiry’ arises out of my ongoing research around reading, literature and learning. In 2000, I initiated a four-year research project with nine novice secondary English teachers (Kooy, 2006, 2006a) who began teaching at the onset of the study. The core of the project involved reading and reflecting on literature. We collaboratively established a book club called, ‘books and brunch’. The success of the group may be attributed to the fact that it became a source for mutually selecting the literature, maintaining a reading life, telling the stories of teaching and life, and collaboratively creating new professional knowledge – critical features in a hostile, educational environment where ‘cutbacks’ included no support or mentoring for novice teachers. The group developed into a meaningful context and community for learning over the course of four years (Kooy, 2006, 2006a). It was my good fortune to function both as researcher and P-H. van de Ven and B. Doecke (eds.), Literary Praxis: A Conversational inquiry into the Teaching of Literature, 203–216. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

KOOY

participant, simultaneously reading and joining the discussion and conducting the research. The details of this research have been reported elsewhere (Kooy, 2006, 2006a). Among its key findings were that this group of novice teachers: (a) developed their professional learning dialogically and socially through reading books together; (b) cultivated relationships, critical to a learning community, over time; and, (c) determined choice as central to motivation and engagement. In discussions with the teachers, I also drew conclusions about how these occasions provided support for continuing professional learning and the resilience of the teachers in handling the day-to-day challenges of their professional lives, in that their experiences of interactively participating in discussions around literary texts often created narratives of teaching that shaped their evolving professional knowledge. It was noteworthy that these women teachers, though novices (like their students of literature in the schools), were able collaboratively to cultivate a professional community for learning. The conclusions I reached in dialogue with them enhanced their sense of the support they needed for their continuing professional learning and built their resilience when handling the day-to-day challenges of their professional lives. An exciting development for me, however, was the way these teachers took up the principles of learning from engaging with text that we had identified as underpinning their conversations and applied them in establishing book clubs for young people in their schools. In 2006, six of the teachers agreed to continue with the research to investigate how the professional knowledge they had developed over the four years (in teaching and research) would transition into their schools. For the purpose of this chapter I will focus on two of the six teacher participants who created book clubs that included students, namely Sandra’s student book club, and Evelyn’s mother-daughter book club. These two groups, like the other four, met outside of class time and space. Initially it surprised me that the teachers did not choose specific classes as research sites. In reflecting, it seems that their outside-class choices provided an alternative space for transitioning from professional to pedagogical knowledge. The two groups that I have chosen to focus on seem to me to provide interesting perspectives on the ‘conversational inquiry’ being enacted in this volume, as they model contrasting ways of developing student engagement, collaborative construction of knowledge in community, and critical analysis of literature (Fielding & Rudduck, 2002). The two groups under discussion shared common features. Both groups consisted of a research teacher, all female participants, volunteers, who collaboratively planned the meetings, selected the books, participated in group interviews at the beginning and end of each academic year. Research funding and the schools supplied books and food for each member. The research teachers each had a supportive colleague who joined the group in 2006. The research teacher supported and organized the meetings and both teachers participated to varying degrees in the discussions, though both groups, essentially, were student-led. Members of the research team (two graduate assistants and I) attended and videotaped each meeting but maintained a peripheral role in the discussions. 204

READING THE WORD AND THE WORLD

Group 1: Sandra’s group emerged in response to earlier requests by a group of Grade 11 and 12 black girls in her inner city public secondary school who wanted to participate in a book club like she did (they had learnt about her participation in a book club, i.e. in the first phase of this research). She approached her principal who offered to use the school’s literacy funds to purchase the books; the research funds covered the costs of lunch. Word spread and 16 young women (12 black, 2 Asian, 2 white) arrived for the first meeting (along with Sandra, her colleague Helen, a research assistant, and me). In our opening discussion, eight of the girls noted they had never owned a book. The arrival of books remained a highlight over each of the four years (with many asking daily: ‘Are the books here yet, Miss?’). Membership rotated as senior students graduated and others joined. The numbers and racial ratios remained relatively stable, however. Group 2: Evelyn taught in the same urban Catholic high school she herself had attended. Since her time as a student, the school transitioned from an all-white to a primarily black student body. Evelyn designed her group in consultation with her principal. They agreed to invite Grade 9 students and their mothers. They focused on Grade 9 students, with the aim of offering a ‘club’ to students new to the school. Rebecca joined as a student teacher and by year four (2009– 2010), received a permanent position in the school. Evelyn and Rebecca urged the girls to invite their mothers, because in their black, high-density, low socioeconomic neighbourhood, few parents came to the school so this was a grassroots attempt to draw in the parents. Membership in this all-female book club group remained stable over the four years, with 14 girls and three mothers. Agreement to remain all-girl and not admit new members remained consistent over the four years (although regularly, boys, smelling the food, would knock on the staff room door and ask to join, pleading their desire to read good books). In connecting to the case studies in the volume, it is worth noting that the nature and purpose of the two groups are distinctive from their classroom counterparts in the study; that is, all members are volunteers who collaboratively chose the books, led the discussions, participated in seven annual meetings and two reflective interviews, and maintained sustained membership. At this point, preliminary findings suggest: (a) tapping into students’ experiences of reading provides rich and valuable data on teaching and learning; (b) being able to exercise choice with regard to the text for study opened up other forms of inclusion, most notably agreed protocols about how to engage with and discuss the books; (c) relationships that develop over time through shared experiences build trust and opened new avenues for learning; and (d) listening to and engaging with the largely unheard student voices heightened awareness of the importance of engaging those directly affected in educational practice and curriculum. LISTENING TO THE STUDENT VOICES: TEACHING AND LEARNING LITERATURE

This section comprises two vignettes about the operation of the book clubs in two different secondary schools. I wrote these vignettes at the time that I was 205

KOOY

implementing this research project on book clubs. Membership in each club consisted of two white teachers and predominantly black girls. I have chosen these vignettes to gesture towards the range of ways in which the book clubs were organised without pretending to give a comprehensive account. In the first vignette, I describe the moment when students selected the controversial book, PUSH (coinciding with the production and press around the movie, Precious, based on the book), a decision that generated such intense interest that well over 20 girls arrived at the door. The discourse differs markedly from the conventional literature discussions in a classroom. The second vignette captures moments from an exit interview that brings four years (Grades 9–12) of book club membership to a close. Here the members, all black, and two of their mothers and their teachers, conduct a reflective conversation around literature teaching and learning. At this point, they are effectively taking on the role of knowledgeable teachers, educating me and the teachers who were present about the complexities of reading as they experienced it at school (MacBeath, et al., 2003). Group 1: Bringing Literature to Life through Interactive Dialogue The students in Room 117 were still waiting for the lunch bell when the researcher with the video camera arrived and started setting up. As they left, they noticed another adult arriving (another ‘outsider,’ not one of their teachers) with enough bags of hot meals to feed a crowd. The crowd in question was the student book club that invaded their classroom at lunch every month or so and was noticeable in other ways: students in no wise necessarily considered ‘bookish’ crowded around hallway windows or were draped (sitting, standing, leaning) on stairs, discussing the latest book club novel; talking about books including issues of prostitution, and street violence, of rape and incest, books that departed – sometimes significantly such as in PUSH – from books in their English classes. Each had participated, in fact, in selecting this book. You could tell that made a difference because they were telling others they should read them, and having arguments about them, and saying this one was better than that one, and ‘I’ll tell you why’. This particular meeting begins as the students started to trickle in, some poking their heads in and disappearing before returning a few minutes later. Gradually, they all assemble, hungry for the food but hungrier, it would soon be evident, to talk. All entered the room very anxious to register their opinion on the story of Precious, the main character. What happened next was nothing like a disciplined discussion; because the time was short and the things they needed to say weren’t, they just launched their opinions across the room and to the persons beside them, striving and competing to be heard, barely waiting for anyone to finish speaking before cutting in. One girl, closest to the door, literally positioned herself on the edge of her seat, perched on her knees, lurching forward into the empty circle their desks made, and waving her arm now and then, until she captured the first opportunity she could to say what she needed to say: that she had been through an attempted rape by her stepdad and that Precious’ story was her story too. And that was just the beginning. 206

READING THE WORD AND THE WORLD

This scene occurred in January, 2010, at an inner city school in Toronto with a pronounced population of visible minority (black) students. Viewed through a traditional evaluative lens, it represents a departure from normalized student discussions in schools: students arriving at different times, overlapping talk, no lesson plan in place, sensitive topics arising unpremeditated. Looked at another way, it is a picture of passionate discussion following engaged reading, and chords of relevance between literature and life being struck in youthful minds. It is a picture, arguably, that reflects the innate appetite for learning through story and dialogue (Kooy, 2006). The exchanges tackle the deep issues in the book: Alisa: Jamila: Kasmira: Evelyn: Shawnika: Latreese: Jamila: Latreese:

Breelyn: Gerree: Kasmira: Evelyn:

When you’re so used to something [the ongoing abuse], you don’t know what’s right from wrong. She said she knew that it was wrong … She liked the feeling but mentally she knew it was wrong. Her hormones are coming into play. I liked that she talks about the confusion. Her body is supposed to feel pleasure but it really angers me that that is what he takes away from her – and that he uses physical violence … I love she wrote over and over, ‘I’m so confused’ … I hate him … you bastard … I wanted to ask, you know how school kicked her out because she was pregnant, what do you think about that, were they right? Maybe she didn’t want to deal with the fact that she was pregnant? Miss B found out she (Aleese) was pregnant, she was like, ‘oh, I know how you can get free diapers’, and … do you have this … you know? She was right on it … and ‘we have to talk about school’. It gave her hope; she’s not by herself. In this book, they try to close down doors for you It’s like, ‘when you’re pregnant you’re done …’ Yeah, and that’s not right I think principal felt bad after he kicked her out when he saw that school was only way to get out of house for her.

The discussion turns to the change in Precious’ life when a teacher advocates for her: Gerree: Janine: Alisa: Latreese:

I think it’s the knowledge that comes first … you know when you go to school, you learn skills … And she learned other people’s stories and realized – In that school, she learned she was not alone, there were others worse off. She never wanted to explain herself – until she went to the meeting …

Toward the end of the meeting, in a completely unscripted moment, Jamila has as insight about the book club reading experiences: Miss, if you had books like these in schools, our essays would be amazing. In these kinds of essays, you can talk about other people’s life stories. Look how 207

KOOY

amazing it is [the discussion], and look how long our discussion was … imagine the books. What was it – Streetcar Desire … What does that have to do with me? What do I know about years and years ago? It’s like – we’re not going to like it but we have to read it, understand it. But it’s not interesting. We’re not going to study it, and our essays will be dull and boring … Their spontaneous half-hour’s talk, the individual reflections and responses that criss-crossed the room freely, revealed a significant degree of literary analysis: opinions and perspectives supported with precise recollections of details in the text, reflections on multiple themes and tensions in the narrative, and connections to current social topics. Thus their relationship to the novel, in which they had invested numerous hours of reading time, added importantly to their growing repertoire of literary, social and intellectual capacities. Janine’s sudden connection and comparison between her reading experiences in the book club and her literature classes prompts her to teach the teacher (Evelyn) that the question of the canon and the related pedagogy may need reviewing and rethinking, perhaps even including the voices of the students (Arnot, et al., 2003; Cook-Sather, 2009; Holdsworth, 2005). Group 2: Student Voice on Teaching and Learning Literature At another high school, in a different area of town, a group of female students begins to gather in the staff room of their newly built school. Little groups gather around a few round tables distributed in one area of the large room. By 6:00 PM, the food has arrived and is distributed on the extensive counter and the girls begin to fill their plates, talking, laughing and preparing for the talk that will ensue. The research assistant sets up the video camera while I find a chair and arrange my papers on my lap. By 6:30, all girls (14 of the 15 at this meeting) wander over to the sofas and chairs. Six sit together on a sofa intended for four; two others sit at the extreme end of another sofa. Soon, two mothers arrive. They help themselves to food and drink and find a space among the girls; one sits next to her daughter. The chatter is comfortable, relaxed, interactive. This is the fourth year of the group meetings; the girls and their mothers have been together since Grade 9, not at lunch but after school and work hours so that some of their mothers could participate. The group, made up entirely of black, female students, three mothers, two teachers and two researchers has been meeting about every six during each of the four school years. Each left school on a bus, some worked for a few hours, others looked after siblings, but each took the bus (sometimes with a young sibling in tow) back to the school for book club that began with a hot meal at 6:00 PM. Frequently, the staff room did not empty until 8:30 PM. Their self-led discussions range across multiple points of interest in the novels, often leading into deep debate: on how much sympathy the main character deserves (Winter, the errant daughter of a drug-dealer in The Coldest Winter Ever), on the trustworthiness of strangers (Lovely Bones); on whether and when it’s right to engage in a physical fight (The Color Purple; and the story about gangs), on what can be done about the signs of suicide (13 Reasons). 208

READING THE WORD AND THE WORLD

In this final meeting in their senior, Grade 12 year (June, 2009), the teachers and students participate in a group exit interview. The topic veers toward the question of reading itself. The students delved into a reflection on books they had read for school, on ‘Flowers for Algernon’, A Clockwork Orange, and Shakespearean plays. They pondered why some works of fiction were more appealing in the classroom context than others and exchanged questions based on their recent school English reading: Was ‘Flowers for Algernon’ boring, or was it the way it was taught? How can A Clockwork Orange be made more accessible when even the movie is hard to understand? And why was Shakespeare so prominent in the curriculum? LaTonya, who asked the last question, responds to a fellow student who laments being required to read and learn Shakespeare in the original English verse: ‘But that’s not exactly what I mean – it’s not just I’m bored … why is it a must?’ Perceiving the conversation continues to turn on critiquing the value of Shakespeare in the curriculum, she insists further: ‘No, no, no, I’m not saying I don’t like Shakespeare – Shakespeare is good, but why do they push it so much? Three, four, five plays by Shakespeare – some people want variety …’ Reading this vignette now, I can see that LaTonya is not contesting the merit of Shakespearean learning experiences – indeed she stresses her appreciation of the works. What she is seeking is insight into the rationale for Shakespeare’s centrality in the English curriculum at her school. LaTonya thus voices the learner’s need to understand not only the ‘what’ but the ‘wherefore’ of engagement with literary texts. She calls attention to the learner’s position as the subject of inherited choices and asks whether these choices have been well-considered (Flutter & Rudduck, 2004). She is furthermore testing her freedom, in this dialogic space, to penetrate the Wizard’s fortress: Why this book and not others? Why your choice and not mine? In questioning the choice of required reading in English class, these budding critics also consider the critical role that teaching approaches play in students’ motivation (or lack of motivation) to engage in the reading. Shakia reflects: I think if a book is boring, what could make it more interesting? Not everything has to relate to our lives – but give us a visual … activities we can understand. Mrs. S made us take a play and rearrange it – we got bonus points for the best lines, did games with the book … Anita comments on the limits of engagement when the motivation is weak: ‘Miss N said she opened our bank accounts and would put ten cents in each time we read (aloud), but I still said “No”.’ When, in this particular discussion, the theme of choice in book selection develops further, Enka relates the experience of the outcome of an independent study unit the previous year. Students had to choose to work on two of three books – Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Scarlet Letter. She did not find this level of choice helpful. She encountered difficulties reading The Scarlett Letter: I tried my hardest. I went through the first page, and it was dense – like three pages in one condensed. And it was so boring – I didn’t understand what was 209

KOOY

going on – nothing. And lots of people felt that way. We all had to do the ISU [independent study unit] – we all talked about it, came to school ‘Oh did you read this part?’ – ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah …’ kind of like a book club meeting. Enka’s anecdote reminds me of the importance of the teacher’s pedagogical role in combination with sound curriculum: In the absence of the teacher’s creative efforts to motivate engagement with the literature, even the student’s best efforts can end in frustration. It is important to note that the student members in this particular group – in contrast to the discussion that PUSH prompted in the other group described in my previous vignette – displayed considerable skill in collaboration (turn-taking, deferring, extending, etc.). This could reflect the fact that they had developed relationships, understanding one another, and creating possibilities for dialogue and reflection over time. At this point, they had been meeting (voluntarily) for four years. The group membership had been consistent and virtually all attended each of the meetings. In this particular discussion, and in similar discussions that occurred with other book clubs, three themes arose: (a) the value of the book club in expanding awareness of multiple perspectives; (b) its role in strengthening the participants’ confidence and skill in expressing opinions and developing new knowledge; and (c) the ways some traditional classroom practices, though apparently more geared toward supporting academic objectives, fall short of serving the need for intellectual development. By contrast, the discourse that developed in each book club through learning negotiation, developing relationships, and cultivating dialogue for learning and inquiry through sustained experience of interacting with other people extended everyone’s intellectual horizons. Although the dialogue posed intellectual challenges that the participants sometimes found daunting, they were prepared to meet them because of their commitment to the conversation – we could call it a ‘conversational inquiry’ – of which they were a part (Cook-Sather, 2008; Fielding & Bragg, 2003). LEARNING AND TEACHING FOR INFORMED LITERARY PRAXIS

The evidence documented in the book clubs contributes to a growing body of research disrupting the commonplaces of education (Craig, 2008; Schwab, 1973) to reveal how dialogic, participatory, and democratic practices might go further to support successful learning in school. In the study, we identified ten ‘marks of learning’, arising from the book club experiences that students linked to possibilities, approaches, and preferences for literature study: 1. Participating with peers in exploratory and critical conversations; 2. Choosing the text; 3. Connecting to the book (at emotional, personal, cultural and social levels); 4. Being motivated to read (having a purpose and plans); 5. Making sense and negotiating meaning in a social context; 6. Posing and solving authentic problems; 7. Questioning, challenging and resisting texts; 8. Engaging deeply with texts about relevant issues; 9. Seeing multiple perspectives; and 10. Experiencing change in one’s thinking, actions, perspectives. Although the students in the out-of-class book club point to the universal potential for learning through their intersubjective inquiries, they reach, to some 210

READING THE WORD AND THE WORLD

extent, into the practices and experiences in literature classrooms. That is, while ‘involving students in dialogue about their own learning helps young people become better learners’, it also provides insights for teachers that enable them to ‘improve their pedagogy’ (Kordalewski, 1999). Encouraging students to interrogate and help construct educational experiences means allowing teachers to learn from and with their students, to strengthen habits of inquiry, reflection, and dialogue which are key to informing and improving practice. CROSSING INTO THE CASE STUDIES: RENEGOTIATING THE CONTOURS OF LITERARY EVENTS

Piet-Hein, Ramon, Mies in The Netherlands and Prue and Bella in Australia pursue literature teaching by closely observing, planning, enacting, and listening in their classes and engaging in interactive dialogue with each other. These classroom teachers use student texts and voices to inform and gauge their reflections on the literary events that occur in their classrooms. Their shared passion for keeping literature central in their classes defends against the widespread pressures to reduce the aesthetics of literature to a ‘focus on linguistic competence and fluency’, as the Dutch educators write in the introduction to their case. My familiarity and involvement with the Dutch cases leads to me to focus on the research inquiry of Ramon and Mies, who, with Piet-Hein, investigate and reflect on the ways their goals, perceptions, and expectations of literature shape a renewing praxis for literature teaching and learning. Ramon and Mies share a commitment to engage in professional learning in order to enhance their teaching practice. Both are in a Dutch department that provides ‘the freedom they need to design their own teaching methods’ and allows them to select their own literary texts. Both share a desire to critically and deeply engage their students in the study of literature. Each, however, is shaped by distinctive perceptions of literature that, not surprisingly, affect the ways they enact their pedagogies in their classrooms. Ramon’s perspective links to his own transformational literary experiences in university that equipped him for critical literary analysis. Initially, he is convinced that this will provide the framework for his teaching and at the same time, prepare his students for the standardized exam. His initial foray into organizing students into five groups with each focusing on one literary lens (text, reader, author, sociological, time and space) fails to materialize in the student texts. When the students fall short of Ramon’s expectations, he recognizes that he has pressed them into complex narrative interpretations currently beyond their reach. The strategy seems to leave his students disengaged, something that Ramon obviously did not intend: ‘Actually, I don’t think I reached what I was hoping for. Why was that?’ He recognizes the gaps. Students seem unprepared, only too ready to summarize in language that mimics his own. He was all too ready to lead the discussions and steer students toward an accepted ‘structural analysis’ of the story. He tries to explain it by using Witte’s categories of literature reasoning and attributes their failure to ‘limited literary competence’. In troubling the inconsistencies and tensions, together with 211

KOOY

Piet-Hein, Ramon begins to re-view his conceptions of students, the place of the literary text, literary learning, received knowledge, and critical tools for reading. Mies comes to a similar point in her teaching, but her journey differs significantly. She has the freedom to select the texts and pedagogy without being concerned about a mandated final examination. Mies had participated in a conference session where I had presented my research showing a video-tape of young people discussing the book, Sold (the same group discussion that I have described in my first vignette). Mies was prompted to find a parallel text in Dutch (Blauw is Bitter) and to read it aloud to the class. This is what she describes in this volume. Through her reading she brings the students into the imaginative world of the story and involves them in reflections on paper, encouraging them to record reactions to the content and context, to write poems, collaboratively prepare a ‘placemat’, and ultimately to participate in collaborative social action: raising funds for an organization that rescues young Filipino prostitutes. Mies is more hopeful about the effects of her literature lessons as she reveals in her dialogue with Piet-Hein. She is particularly impressed by the students’ empathy and emotional involvement, the quality of their writing, and their self-directed social action arising out of their engagement with the issues raised by the text. But this prompts Piet-Hein to inquire into the limitations of her approach; he senses a certain lack of ‘objective’ cultural knowledge, a place to situate the events, and the subjective nature of the responses. This in turn makes me feel that Mies has not gone far enough. And yet what might the next steps be? How will the students’ subsequent literary study take them beyond their existing boundaries? But I still want to affirm the way each of the cases presented in this volume embodies conversational inquiries that, in the Freirian (1970) sense, begin with action (for example, introducing new ways of engaging students in reading) which the teachers then re-view through reflection and critical dialogue with others, give rise to further action. The process departs significantly from the traditional one-shot workshop where teachers are expected to take in the ‘received knowledge’ (whether or not it is actually relevant to their specific institutional setting) and act upon it (i.e., apply it in the classroom). The teachers in the cases participate, as Bella writes, in ‘acts of praxis and resistance’, firmly planted in their individual schools and literature classes. INVITING THE BOOK CLUB STUDENTS AND TEACHERS INTO CONVERSATIONAL INQUIRY

When Prue expresses a desire to cultivate ‘conversational inquiry’, so helpful in her own learning with her students, she raises a critical theoretical point. While teacher voices have only recently entered educational research (at least in the research on professional communities of learning), little of the discourse includes student voices. Prue’s ‘conversational inquiry’ opens paths for teachers to become learners and for their students to become teachers. The absence of voice is linked to powerlessness, which not only inhibits the educational success of all children (Lodge, 2007), but is especially devastating to the educational experience of 212

READING THE WORD AND THE WORLD

children from diverse, marginalized, and/or economically disadvantaged cultures in societies that often expect parental and governmental authoritarianism (Freire, 1970). Negotiating their own learning empowers students to occupy the ‘enabling center of their educations, not the disabling margins’ (Shor, 1996, 2000). The students in the book club study cultivated a context where their voices could be meaningful, where they felt that by speaking out they could make a difference, and push their learning forward. If we imaginatively bring the voices of the book club students into conversation with the teachers in the Dutch and Australian cases, what might we find? We imagine entering Prue’s class where she and Bella wander among the students. The observing students will find students in this classroom engaged in exploration and critical examination of the shared text. They listen intently to the negotiating of meaning (the language is at times uncertain, one student finishes another’s thought), the problem-solving and problem-posing, the ways these students alter their views of the text (through, for example, the author’s visit). They listen in on the small groups as they negotiate and take in multiple perspectives on the text. They also point to elements they could not find – at least in this, their brief, imaginary encounter. They want to experience tangible evidence of the students’ deep desire to learn. They want to see choice in selecting texts (the most common positive attribute of the book club experiences). When I asked why this was so important and why they generally chose such difficult social issues in their choices (e.g., Sold, PUSH), they responded with clear conviction: (a) we learn from the situation to prepare for a life that may include such horrors – either personally or to family and friends, and, (b) we learn how rich we are, and (c) our knowledge of the world expands. At the same time, they want to be exposed to texts they might not encounter on their own. They want challenge, to be able to resist (while allowing others the freedom not to resist and to be swept up by the story). In one book club meeting, Latreese chose not to read The Book of Negroes, saying she had tired of reading about black history and the painful abuse her people suffered at the hands of slave traders and owners. Latreese attended the meeting, however, acknowledging her resistance on the one hand, and yet supporting her peers on the other. In each of the cases, teachers move forward by attempting to rethink their perceptions, pedagogies, and the practices of literary study in their classes. They attend to the voices of their students in order to gauge the construction and development of knowledge. They look back in reflection through dialogue. Each, through interactive and ongoing dialogue, examines, interprets, and begins the difficult challenge of reconstructing their perspectives and practices. I remain struck, however, by the learning the teachers who participated in the book clubs experienced by making what was arguably a more radical intervention in the reading practices of their students. By including themselves in the dialogic learning experiences they staged for their students, the teachers gained valuable cultural knowledge (about ethnic as well as other individual and collective life experiences), and developed a ‘listening pedagogy’ (Janusik, 2010; Paciotti & Bolick, 2009) which nourished their professional efficacy while also supporting the self-efficacy and motivation of their students (Pekril & Levin, 2007). 213

KOOY

The voices of the students dominated the discourse in each book club. It was the students who make the book choices, led the discussions, and participated most predominantly in the interviews. Over time, the teachers became increasingly more peripheral in the discussions, more observer than participant. Kordalewski (1999) observed: ‘When students have a voice in classroom processes, they share in decision-making and the construction of knowledge. The teacher, consequently, becomes a co-learner and facilitator as well as a source of knowledge.’ Yet, I also have to admit that the teachers involved did not always take up the knowledge about teaching and learning that we gained through implementing the book clubs and apply it in their ordinary classes. This is perhaps because the outside-of-class structure of the book group, teachers, confident that students found a sustained, supportive and dynamic context for dialogue around texts and critical issues, prevented such a link being made. The obstacles posed by schools as institutions to facilitating the type of ‘conversational inquiry’ that occurred in the book clubs remain huge (Lodge, 2007). But it remains the case that a reflexive relationship exists between teaching and learning (Kordalewski, 1999; see also, Pekril & Levin, 2007). It is impossible to speak of ‘student voice’ without also paying attention to ‘teacher voice’. The importance of the latter may be easy to overlook while the monologic model of teaching continues to dominate. The prevalence of ‘speaking’ can be a weak indication of authentic communication, when the talk is scripted, rather than dialogic, when it posits boundaries to knowledge, and closes off the universal potential for learning through inter-subjective inquiry. Allowing students to interrogate and help construct educational experiences also means allowing teachers to learn from students, to strengthen habits of inquiry, reflection and dialogue which are key to the improvement of practice. In spite of a growing body of research on teacher learning and development, little, if any, finds its way into school districts, schools, and classrooms. This raises red flags in times of a continuous flow of educational initiatives, curricula, policies and standards. Since a growing body of research indicates that the final gatekeeper, the teacher, determines the reality of implementation and application, she has become a significant contender in the drive to reform, change and improve student performance. Awareness of the teacher role has driven educational Ministries to find ways to ‘teach’ teachers. All too frequently, this results in increasing the traditional, one-shot, ‘visiting expert’ format that long ago lost its relevance and currency (Clark, 2001; Kooy, 2006). The case study teachers disrupt the norm by working closely with others who have a stake in the ways literature is taught and learnt. Surely this represents a significant valuing of teachers’ professional knowledge. In this respect, the cases provide a valuable comment on what happened in the book clubs. As I analyse the data set produced in the course of implementing the book clubs, I re-view how the teachers situated themselves in the dialogical spaces that were created. Why, I ask, did we not see more transition into classroom practice? The import of this research, with its focus on learning and literature, clearly brought the focus back on to teachers. But I am aware that others might ask: 214

READING THE WORD AND THE WORLD

‘So what?’ So what if teachers meet in a sustained, professional book club (Phase 1 of the research)? So what if they use the knowledge developed to establish groups in their individual schools (Phase 2)? So what if these site-based groups developed into powerful communities of learning? The accounts of teaching and learning by the teachers in the Dutch and Australian case studies show worthy attempts to facilitate a ‘conversational inquiry’ within the conventional space of the classroom, but this space ultimately limits what they achieve. The book clubs in the study reveal potential for student engagement located completely outside the conventional space of the school. Paradoxically, however, this means that it remained a challenge for the teachers involved in the book clubs to imagine or apply what they had learnt in their typical literature classes. The institutional structures and routines associated with school still pose powerful obstacles to any change. With this in mind, the Dutch and Australian cases provide a model of reflective practice that could begin to address this situation. The book club teachers seem currently prevented from engaging in this kind of reflective practice when they are swept up in the hurly-burly of the day-to-day. A step towards meaningful reform involves creating a bridge between the dialogical space of the book club and the conventional space of the classroom and to find ways and discourses that examine the liminal spaces between the two paradigms of literature teaching and learning. For that to emerge, teachers and students need time and opportunity to negotiate and to engage in ‘conversational inquiry’ within the school (Cook-Sather, 2008; Mansfield, et al., 2007). The evocative possibilities for those stakeholders most vested in literature education, has the potential to bring forward ways for reading the word and the world. REFERENCES Arnot, M., McIntyre, D., Pedder, D., & Reay, D. (2003). Consultation in the classroom: Developing dialogue about teaching and learning. Cambridge: Pearson Publishing. Clark, C. (Ed.). (2001). Talking shop: Authentic conversation and teacher learning. New York: Teachers College Press. Cook-Sather, A. (2008). Authorizing students’ perspectives: Toward trust, dialogue and change in education. Educational Researcher, 31(4), 3–14. Craig, C. (2008). Joseph Schwab, self-study of teaching and teacher education practices proponent? A personal perspective. Teaching and Teacher Education, 24(8), 1993–2001. Fielding, M., & Bragg, S. (2003). Students as researchers: Making a difference. Cambridge: Pearson. Fielding, M., & Rudduck, J. (2002). The transformative potential of student voice: Confronting the power issues. In Symposium on student consultation, community and democrative tradition. Paper presented at the annual conference of the British Education Research Association, University of Exeter, UK. Flutter, J., & Rudduck, J. (2004). Consulting pupils: What’s in it for schools? London: Routledge Falmer. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum. Holdsworth, R. (2005). Taking young people seriously means giving them serious things to do. In J. Mason & T. Fattore (Eds.), Children taken seriously in theory, policy and practice (No. 12 in the Children in Charge Series). London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Janusik, L. A. (2010). Listening pedagogy: Where do we go from here? In Listening and human communication in the 21st century (A. D. Wolvin, Ed., Chap. 9). Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

215

KOOY Kooy, M. (2006). Telling stories in book clubs: Women teachers and professional development. Toronto: Springer. Kooy, M. (2006a). The telling stories of novice teachers: Constructing teacher knowledge in book clubs. Teaching and Teacher Education, 22(6), 661–674. Kordalewski, J. (1999). Incorporating student voice into teaching practice [electronic resource]. In J. Kordalewski (Ed.), ERIC clearinghouse on teaching and teacher education (pp. 1–4). Washington, DC. Lodge, C. (2007). Engaging student voice to improve pedagogy and learning: An exploration of examples of innovative pedagogical approaches for school improvement. International Journal of Pedagogies and Learning, 4–19. Mansfield, J., Collins, R., Moore, J., Mahar, S., & Wanrne, C. (2007). Student voice: A historical perspective and new directions (41 p.). Paper No. 10. Research and Innovation Division, Dept. of Education, Melbourne, AU. McBeath, J., Demetriou, H., Rudduck, J., & Yyers, K. (2003). Consulting pupils: A toolkit for teachers. Cambridge: Pearson Publishing. Paciotti, K., & Bolick, M. (2009). A listening pedagogy: Insights of pre-service elementary teachers in multi-cultural classrooms. Leadership Online Journal, 7(4). Retrieved April 29, 2011, from http:// www.academicleadership.org/article/A_Listening_Pedagogy_Insights_of_PreService_Elementary_Teachers_in_Multi-cultural_Classrooms Pekril, S., & Levin, B. (2007). Building student voice for school improvement. In D. Thiessen & A. CookSather (Eds.), International handbook of student experience in elementary and secondary school (pp. 711–726). New York: Springer. Schwab, J. J. (1973). The practical three: Translation into curriculum. School Review, 83, 501–522. Shor, I. (1996). When students have power: Negotiating authority in a critical pedagogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mary Kooy Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Ontario Institute for Studies in Education The University of Toronto, Canada

216

PART 4: CONTINUING THE CONVERSATION

PIET-HEIN VAN DE VEN AND BRENTON DOECKE

14. LITERARY PRAXIS (A Concluding Essay)

We began our inquiry by listening to the conversations between young people in Prue’s and Ramon’s classrooms, as they tried to convey their impressions of the books they were reading. The writers who have contributed to this volume have likewise been struggling with words in an effort to tease out what it means to teach literature. They have been engaging with the accounts that Prue, Ramon and Mies have given of their teaching ‘in an effort to jointly construct meaning and reach understanding’ – to echo our description of the interpretive discussions in Prue’s and Ramon’s classes. This is not to say that they have felt compelled to achieve consensus about the value of literature teaching. Their essays might instead be read as initially suspending their beliefs about literature teaching in order to arrive anew at a sense of its value. And they have engaged in this inquiry in a dialogical spirit, fully conscious that the words they are using are spaces for conflicting meanings and values. In the process of writing their essays, they have each weighed up the words they have chosen, gauging whether those words name precisely what they feel about the value of literature and literature teaching. We can attest to this as their editors in the course of engaging with them as they have progressively taken their essays through several drafts in order to understand what they do as teachers of literature. WHAT HAVE WE LEARNT THROUGH FACILITATING THIS CONVERSATIONAL INQUIRY?

Each of the contributors to the foregoing conversation writes from a standpoint from within the world of which they are a part (cf. Goldman, 1977, p. 6), conveying a deeply felt sense of their situation as teachers of literature and their obligations towards their students. They all view the activity of interpreting texts as crucially bound up with the need to negotiate the social relationships that comprise any classroom. We have seen that they differ with respect to the attitude of care that teachers ought to feel towards their students. Mies, for example, sees her primary role as one of sensitizing the young people in her classroom to the plight of those who are less fortunate than themselves, an emancipatory gesture that Laila Aase and Tony Petrosky feel obliged to question. Prue attempts to cultivate a sensitivity on the part of her students to the words on the page, a literary critical disposition that Laila commends, while Mark Howie questions the way she apparently privileges P-H. van de Ven and B. Doecke (eds.), Literary Praxis: A Conversational inquiry into the Teaching of Literature, 219–225. © 2011 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.

VAN DE VEN AND DOECKE

the author as the source of the meaning of the text. Ramon, on the other hand, wants to enable his students to experience the interpretive possibilities opened up by a range of literary critical frameworks – an aim that he himself begins to doubt in the face of his students’ apparent resistance to the text he has chosen for study. Yet for all these differences in their pedagogies, it seems fair to say that the contributors to this volume are united in their sense that teaching literature involves a capacity to respond to young people, to reach out and engage in a dialogue with them that taps into their worlds of experience and imagination. They all locate their decision making about curriculum and pedagogy, and the theoretical rationales they give for their practice, within their ongoing interactions with their students. Thus they continually reflect on how the young people in their classrooms are making meaning from texts and reaching judgments about the representations of life offered to them in the books they are studying. We use the word ‘praxis’ to name this kind of professional engagement. This is because the word embraces a sense of continually reflecting on the ongoing activity that you find in classrooms. Everyday something is happening; everyday teachers and their students are caught up in meaning-making practices that exceed their intentions as actors within school settings (cf. Barnes, 1975/1992, p. 14); everyday they actively create the world around them. As players within this world, Prue and Ramon and Mies seek to understand what is going on, reflexively monitoring their words and actions as they interact with the young people who share the social space of the classroom with them. They seek to ‘know’ what they are doing, developing their understanding of the intellectual and pedagogical traditions in which they work, as well as learning from their practice and trying to grasp the full implications of what they do. As we have seen, this has involved turning the spotlight on themselves and interrogating their values and beliefs as teachers of literature, reflecting on the matches and mismatches between their intentions and what they actually achieve in their lessons (cf. Kemmis, 2005, pp. 407–408). It is hardly surprising that the essays written in response to their accounts of their work acknowledge their courage in allowing their teaching to become an object of scrutiny. But to cast Prue, Ramon and Mies as heroes of their own tales does not really do justice to the impulse behind the writing they have done. Indeed, to the extent that such a construction might be conflated with managerial notions of individual accomplishment, as though the excellence of any teacher is not ultimately a function of the community in which he or she works, it is actually misleading. One of the paradoxes of schooling is the way that it constructs both teachers and students as individuals, as though to prevent them from recognizing the intensely intersubjective nature of what happens in schools. Everybody, to borrow from Leont’ev, is fixated on his or her individual job, instead of seeing their actions as part of the larger social activity of schooling (see Engestroem et al., 2003, p. 4). Rather than experiencing this larger activity as a collaborative venture, and sensing how their actions contribute to the renewal of culture each day, teachers and students are instead ‘hailed’ or ‘interpellated’ as individuals, to borrow from Althusser’s influential account of ideology (Althusser, 2008, p. 44). They are confronted by 220

LITERARY PRAXIS

structures with which they cannot identify, continually subject to the surveillance of performance appraisal that requires them to show that their work as individuals meets certain pre-defined standards into which they have had no input. It is obvious that the attitude of inquiry adopted by Prue, Ramon and Mies conflicts with the assumptions underpinning such performance appraisal in significant ways. By engaging in dialogue with educators in other settings, they are making an attempt to transcend the deeply alienating situation imposed by standards-based reforms, and enacting a deeper form of accountability to their colleagues and students than that typically reflected in performance appraisal. They are seeking to understand the meaning of their work as an expression of a larger network of social relationships, as part of the collective process by which society renews itself, and rejecting the way neo-liberal reforms construct them as isolated individuals vis-àvis anonymous structures. Through engaging in conversations with each other, the contributors to this volume have all been obliged to grapple with a sense of difference as much as sameness as they have sought to appreciate how they each understand and enact their identities as teachers of literature. And this sense of difference has thrown their own values and beliefs into relief, prompting them to identify the intellectual and pedagogical traditions that mediate their professional practice, as well as to scrutinise the institutional structures that shape their work as teachers of literature. There is a critical dimension to the authors’ inquiry that might be described as a confrontation with ‘self’. This involves acknowledging how one’s self or identity is the product of one’s circumstances and upbringing, of the language and culture into which one has been born, of how one’s unique sensibility is actually an expression of ‘an ensemble of social relations’ (Marx, 1969, pp. 12–13). But the inquiry has not simply involved the identification of structures and controls and a denial of agency. This confrontation with self is also a positive vision of one’s own making, and of how people collectively renew their lives each day. The inquiry has affirmed rich forms of subjectivity and social engagement as an alternative to the way neoliberalism reduces ‘individuals’ to factors contributing to the growth of the ‘economy’. Even a recognition of the way teaching and learning are currently being transformed by standards-based reforms is ultimately an insight into our sociability, into the way our lives are bound up with the lives of others (cf. Smith, 2005). Such reforms mediate already-existing relationships, affecting the way teachers and their students negotiate those relationships without ever being able to efface them. Our starting point for this conversational inquiry was the world of performance appraisal embodied in PISA and other standardised testing, a world that is conceived (to borrow from Goldmann) as ‘a purely external objectivity, independent of or opposed to the subject’ (Goldmann, 1977, p. 43). The reflexivity enacted by Prue, Ramon and Mies and their commentators provides a counterpoint to the way such practices construct classrooms, exposing their dreadful presumption of treating these complex social spaces as though they simply lend themselves to the ‘transparency’ (a key word in the neo-liberal lexicon) of the classifications and measurements of an outside observer or ‘expert’ (see, e.g. the My School website: http:// www.myschool.edu.au/). This notion of ‘objectivity’ within the context of the 221

VAN DE VEN AND DOECKE

interactions of classroom life finally makes no sense, when ‘reality’ is experienced as a constant process of negotiation between ‘subject’ and ‘object’, as a shifting set of relationships involving ‘me’ and ‘you’, requiring continual interpretation, judgment and an adjustment of expectations on the part of both teachers and their pupils, when – in short – it involves the interactions that we associate with ‘reading’. The foregoing essays have each shown students variously taking up their teachers’ invitations to engage in dialogue about the meaning of the life they share with others as they engage with literary texts. We might think of the ‘rewards’ that Sandy Harris distributes to her students in a secondary school in Auckland (see Terry Locke’s chapter), or of Nathalie’s question about the meaning of the word ‘marooned’ (see the chapter by Anne Turvey and John Yandell) or of the ethos of the Hauptschule in Germany (see Irene Pieper’s chapter) or the participation of minority students in after-school book clubs in Toronto (see Mary Kooy’s chapter) – these and other chapters in this volume all conjure up images of specific settings and social relationships that resist being reduced to the sameness of numbers. Classrooms may comprise all sorts of solid, material ‘things’, such as desks, chairs, laptops, books, folders, lockers and electronic whiteboards, but they cannot finally be experienced and understood as a world that is simply ‘there’. The immediacy of the everyday life in classrooms is the product of social relationships, relationships that ultimately extend beyond the physical space of a room. They extend, too, beyond the individuals who occupy that space to embrace a complex network of relationships as they are played out in society as a whole, including (to limit ourselves to the chapters that we have just mentioned) the differences between Pakeha and Maori and Pacific Islander cultures, the displacement experienced through migrating from the West Indies to East London, the struggle of Turkish people to find a place for themselves in modern Germany, and the history of visible minority students in an inner city school in Toronto. Our request to our contributors to write ‘essays’ has been driven by a recognition that we need to generate new ways of representing classroom interactions, foregrounding the complexities of those interactions as a process that eludes the generalising mentality embodied in practices such as standardised testing. This means apprehending the here-and-now within an ever-changing network of relationships that exceeds our capacity to grasp everything that is going on, making the everyday a focus for continuing inquiry. And this does not involve simply fitting everything together, as though it is a matter of synchronously locating classrooms within a larger social space that stretches beyond our immediate view. It also embraces a recognition that any representation of social phenomena is inadequate because the phenomena it seeks to capture has already ceased to exist. Another way to say this is that the present always contains within it the history of existing social relationships, collective memories that shape what happens. Even when, as individuals, we may not have lived that history, the past remains an inescapable dimension of our experience of the present. And the same might be said about the ways our hopes and expectations mediate our engagement with the here-and-now. Thus we have tried to represent teaching not just as an activity limited by the immediacy of day-to-day life in the 222

LITERARY PRAXIS

classroom, but as involving ongoing reflection that connects the present with the past and the future. Where does literature teaching fit into a world of neo-liberal reforms, where everything is mapped out in advance, and education is conceived primarily as a matter of inculcating the requisite knowledge and skills for people to take their places in a 21st century economy? Policy makers do not want to grapple with the paradox that their futuristic scenarios reflect decidedly contemporary values and assumptions. Education within a neo-liberal framework can never be about realising potential that might exceed the boundaries of the present and create the conditions for a new society, for a completely different sense of how life might be lived than it is lived currently. To make a distinction that Shirley Grundy posed some years ago, the school curriculum is typically conceived as a ‘product’ rather than a ‘praxis’, as though its primary purpose is to give young people technical skills (including ‘functional’ literacy skills) to operate within a world that is conceptualised largely as one subject to manipulation and control, as distinct from one that is open to significant transformation that might accord with a vision of a truly humane society (Grundy, 1987. pp. 11–12). Drawing on Habermas, Grundy argues that this reduction of curriculum to narrowly technical interests is at the expense of acknowledging the interpretive and emancipatory dimensions of knowledge and social life (Grundy, 1987; Habermas, 1972), of a way of ‘knowing’ that posits the world as one of our own making and as therefore open to the possibility of being changed through our own actions. Within the framework of neo-liberal reforms, debates about literature teaching are reduced to securing its place alongside other subject areas, as though curriculum, as ‘product’, embodies knowledge that exists in a realm outside the social transactions that constitute everyday life (cf. Wells, 1999). This gives rise to a very traditional understanding of literature teaching, involving a belief in the value of ‘great’ literary works that supposedly embody ‘our’ culture (this is what is happening in Australia with the introduction of a national curriculum). Is it our fate, then, as literature teachers to reproduce a division between a ‘literary’ culture and an everyday world where people employ technical skills? This appears to be the scenario reflected in Laila Aase’s anecdote about a student in a technical stream in Norway, whose parents assured him that, after leaving school, they had never found it necessary to read another short story and who therefore concurred with his view that reading stories was a complete waste of time – an anecdote that is also echoed by Irene Pieper’s account of the curriculum offered in similar educational settings in Germany. This binary between ‘literary’ culture and vocational education continues to compromise our work as literature teachers, even when (as in Prue Gill’s classroom) literature teaching is informed by post-structuralist understandings that have the potential to destabilise texts and their meanings and thus to disrupt any notion that literature is part of a fixed tradition or ‘high’ culture. The privileged conditions in which Prue is working means that she cannot escape being constructed as engaging in an elite pursuit, as several of the contributors to this volume have pointed out. The intellectual rigour of the essays that comprise this volume is shown by the way the authors do not shy away from the contradictory character of literature 223

VAN DE VEN AND DOECKE

teaching and the history that has created the world in which we find ourselves. They recognise that the binaries to which we have just referred – between so-called ‘culture’ and everyday life, between an academic ‘education’ and vocational ‘training’, between those who have ‘academic’ ability and those who are more ‘practically’ oriented – reflect entrenched structures and practices that shape the experiences of young people as they make their way through school. That those who are consigned to a vocational education are typically young people from working class or other disadvantaged communities is another inescapable dimension of the way school systems in western countries are disenfranchising whole groups of students and denying recognition of their lives and local cultures. The emphasis of neo-liberal educational reforms is squarely on canonical forms of knowledge, the ‘products’ of western science and culture, rather than on facilitating classroom dialogue that is genuinely respectful of the attitudes and values that teachers and students are bringing to their exchanges with one another. The sense of the promise of literature teaching that emerges from the foregoing conversational inquiry is all the more compelling because it is something that can only be realised when teachers reflexively engage with their own education as educators, as well as monitoring their exchanges with students, fully aware of the structures and traditions that mediate their relationships with them. Although Prue works in an elite private school, she is clearly driven by a democratic spirit which presupposes that the sensitivity towards words and meaning that she values can enhance an awareness of life’s possibilities by all students, wherever they might be located. The structures in which she works may militate against this, driving a wedge between a so-called ‘literary’ education and the functional literacy prized by the young person in Laila’s anecdote, and thus reducing the value of both. But this should not mean giving up on the prospect of transcending this binary, and believing that the literary sensibility that Prue values should be part of everyday life. We conclude by affirming the importance of a literary praxis, conceiving a literary education as more than a body of skills and knowledge, or as a tradition of highly valued works that reflect ‘the best that has been thought and known in this world’, as Matthew Arnold famously expressed it, but as opening up the possibility of a more fully aware or ‘knowing’ engagement with everyday life (Kemmis, 2005; cf. Roberts, 2006). The glimpse of the conversations between students in Ramon’s and Prue’s classrooms with which we began this inquiry, when they self-consciously use the words available to them in an effort to understand the nature of the experiences presented to them in the texts they were reading, might also serve as the concluding moment of this book. This remains a significant image, not only of what students do with texts within classroom settings, but of our situation as educators, when we experience moments involving a recognition of the materiality of language, of the way language mediates our relationships with one another and the world around us, as against the facile notions of transparency of neoliberalism. To suppose that language provides simply a window on the world out ‘there’ is to accept reality as it is given. It is to abandon the possibility of thinking otherwise, of imagining different worlds. 224

LITERARY PRAXIS

But here our writing stops, even though there can be no stopping, no simple précis in a final paragraph that might sum up the understandings that we have reached. Any new understanding is always a process of reconstructing existing understandings and beliefs. This is what we hope is occurring as you read this final sentence, and reflect anew on the situations in the Dutch and Australian literature classrooms and the other classroom settings described in the foregoing exchanges as they might contrast with your own experiences. REFERENCES Althusser, L. (2008). On ideology. London: Verso. Barnes, D. (1975/1992). From communication to curriculum (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. Engeström, Y., Miettinen, R., & Punamäki, R.-L. (Eds). (2003). Perspectives on activity theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldmann, L. (1977). Lukács and Heidegger: Towards a new philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Grundy, S. (1987). Curriculum: Product or Praxis. London: The Falmer Press. Habermas, J. (1978). Knowledge and human interests (2nd ed.). London: Heinemann Educational Books. Kemmis, S. (2005). Knowing practice: Searching for saliences. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 13(3), 391–426. Marx, K. (1969). Theses on Feuerbach. In K. Marx & F. Engels (Eds.), Selected works (Vol. 1, pp. 13–15). Moscow: Progress Publishers. Roberts, J. (3006). Philosophizing the everyday: Revolutionary praxis and the fate of cultural theory. London: Pluto Press. Smith, D. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press. Wells, G. (1999). Dialogic inquiry: Towards socio logical practice and theory of education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Piet-Hein van de Ven Graduate School of Education Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands Brenton Doecke School of Education Faculty of Arts and Education Deakin University, Australia

225

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Laila Aase is Associate Professor (emeritus) of didactics of Norwegian language and literature at the University of Bergen, Norway. She has worked in teacher education since 1978 and produced a number of books and articles in the field of didactics of language and literature in school. She also has written a number of text books for the subject of Norwegian in upper secondary school. Brenton Doecke is Chair in Education and Director: Centre for Partnerships and Projects in Education (CPPE) at Deakin University, Melbourne. His research interests include English Curriculum and Pedagogy, Professional Identity and the impact of Standards-Based Reforms. He played a leading role, as a member of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English, in the development of the Standards for Teachers of English Language and Literacy in Australia (STELLA), providing an alternative to neo-liberal constructions of professional practice. His most recent publications include a co-authored book with Douglas McClenaghan, Confronting Practice: Classroom Based Inquiries into Language and Learning (2011), Putney NSW: Phoenix Education. Prue Gill is currently working part-time with pre-service teachers at Monash University, having recently retired from the secondary classroom after more than thirty years as a teacher of English, Literature and Theory of Knowledge. She has taught in a variety of settings – government and private secondary schools, TAFE, and the tertiary sector, and in different types of classroom, including inter-disciplinary and vertical groupings. She has been involved in the Victorian Certificate of Education English curriculum development since its pilot years, and in the external assessment of year 12 English and Literature. She is a past president of the Victorian Association for the Teaching of English. Ramon Groenendijk studied Dutch language and literature at Radboud University, followed by Comparative Literature, also at Radboud University. After receiving his Master of Education degree, he started working at Zwijsen College Veghel, where he still teaches. Besides teaching, he is also carrying out a PhD-research concerning the literary development of students. Mark Howie is Deputy Principal at Springwood High School in NSW and a former president of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE)., Mark has taught English for many years in a range of public schools, most recently as the Head Teacher of English at Penrith High School. Mark has contributed to a number of publications in the areas of English curriculum and teaching, including co-editing ‘Only Connect…’: English Teaching, Schooling and Community (with Brenton Doecke and Wayne Sawyer) for Wakefield Press and AATE and Charged with Meaning: Reviewing English 3rd Edition (with Susanne Gannon and Wayne Sawyer) for Phoenix Education.

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Bella Illesca is an English teacher who has worked in government and nongovernment schools in Australia and overseas. She taught in the English Education program at Monash University where she also worked as a Research Assistant on a number of projects exploring language and literacy and teachers’ professional learning, professional identity and professional ethics. She has since been working as a Research Fellow at Deakin University. In 2006 she completed her Masters thesis, Literacy and Accountability: The changing shape of English teachers’ work and has since authored and co-authored a number of publications, including: Doecke, Kostogriz and Illesca (2010). Seeing ‘things’ differently: Recognition, ethics and praxis. English Teaching: Practice and Critique September, Volume 9, Number 2, pp. 81–98. http://education.waikato.ac.nz/research/files/etpc/files/2010v9n2dial1.pdf Mary Kooy is an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning and Director of the Centre for Teacher Education and Development at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto in Canada. Her research interests include professional learning and development for teachers. Her longitudinal research began in 2000 with novice teachers (Telling Stories in Book Clubs: Women Teachers and Professional Development), continued as school-based research (2006–2010). The longitudinal inquiry, now entering phase three, will explore the effects on an online professional community distributed across Canada. Dr Kooy teaches courses in Graduate Programs in professional learning communities, teacher induction, and curriculum innovation. Terry Locke is Chairperson of the Arts and Language Education Department in the Faculty of Education at the University of Waikato. His research interests include the teaching of literature, constructions of English, teaching writing, and the literacy/ ICT nexus. His latest book (edited) is Beyond the Grammar Wars (Routledge, 2010). He is coordinating editor of the journal, English Teaching: Practice and Critique. Graham Parr is a senior lecturer in English Education at Monash University, Australia, having previously taught English and Literature for 14 years in secondary schools in Australia and the US. His research interests include teacher professional learning, literature teaching, English curriculum and pedagogy, teacher education and educational work more broadly. Recent publications include Writing=Learning (co-edited with Brenton Doecke) and the Report of the National Mapping of Teacher Professional Learning in Australia project (co-authored with Brenton Doecke and Sue North). His new book, drawing on his awarding-winning PhD, is called Inquiry-based professional learning: Speaking back to standards-based reforms. Anthony R. Petrosky, the Associate Dean of the School of Education at the University of Pittsburgh, holds a joint appointment as a Professor in the School of Education and the English Department. Along with Stephanie McConachie, he codirects the English Language Arts Disciplinary Literacy Project in the Institute for 228

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Learning (IFL) at the Learning Research and Development Center. As a part of this Institute project, he has worked with professional learning and curriculum development in English for school and district leaders in the public schools of Austin, Dallas, Denver, New York City, Forth Worth, Prince George’s County, and Pittsburgh. McConachie and Petrosky are the co-editors of Content Matters: A Disciplinary Literacy Approach to Improving Student Learning, a recent (2010) collection of reports on the IFL Disciplinary Literacy Project, as well as co-authors of chapters in the book. He was the Principal Investigator and Co-Director of the Early Adolescence English Language Arts Assessment Development Lab for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards which developed the first national board certification for English teachers. Irene Pieper is Professor in Literary studies and Literary Education (Literaturdidaktik) in the Department of German language and literature at the University of Hildesheim, Germany. Her research interests include reading socialisation, development of literary competences, literature teaching and learning. She currently focuses on learners’ understanding of poetic metaphor. Besides, she is involved with the Council of Europe’s project on the languages of education and the development of the platform of resources for plurilingual and intercultural education. Mies Pols-Haaijman was born behind the book-printery of her grandfather in the old city of Deventer and is the daughter of two teachers. It is therefore not surprising that her main interest lies with books. It was not only her hobby, but later on her profession. She studied Dutch history and literature in Amsterdam and Afrikaans in Pretoria; was a lecturer at the University of South Africa and Pretoria in Linguistics and later on in Dutch art, culture and literature. Back in Holland, she worked as a teacher and practical trainer of young teachers. She is married and has 4 children and 4 grandchildren. Anne Turvey is a lecturer in education whose responsibilities have included subject leader for the PGCE English and Drama; course tutor for the Masters of Teacher and the MA Module ‘Literature, Feminism and the Curriculum’; Chair of London Association for the Teaching of English (LATE) and Committee member National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) ITE. Publications include ‘Transformations in learning and teaching through Initial Teacher Education’, (2006), with D. Stevens et al. in Literacy, Vol. 40, 2; ‘Who’d be an English Teacher?’, (2005), in Changing English, Vol. 12, 1; ‘The Space Between: Shared Understanding of the Teaching of Grammar in English and France to Year 7 Learners’ (2002) with K. Turner in Language Awareness Vol. II: 2. Piet-Hein van de Ven is a former secondary school teacher in Dutch language and literature. From 1978–1998 he was a senior researcher and assistant professor at the Department of Dutch language and literature studies and the Department of Business Communication, Radboud University, Nijmegen. His research has focused on teacher education, on subject related methodology (vakdidactiek) for the 229

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

teaching and learning of the school subject Dutch, and on language abilities. From 1999, he has been an Associate Professor (vakdidaktiek) and teacher educator in Dutch language and linguistics at the Graduate School of Education, Radboud University Nijmegen. Between 2003–2007 he was also Professor HAN-University Arnhem-Nijmegen, Faculty of Education. His present research focuses on the practice of the school subject Dutch and on teachers’ professional development. This research includes historical and international-comparative perspectives. John Yandell taught in inner London secondary schools for twenty years, including eleven years as head of English at Kingsland School, Hackney. For the past seven years he has led the Secondary PGCE English and English with Drama course at the Institute of Education. Recent publications include Critical Practice in Teacher Education: a study of professional learning, which he co-edited with Ruth Heilbronn, as well as papers in Changing English, Cambridge Journal of Education, English in Education and English Teaching: Practice and Critique. He is currently engaged in research on how literature is read in English classrooms in urban secondary schools. Theo Witte is assisting professor and teacher trainer (language and literature) at the University Centre of Learning & Teaching at the University of Groningen (Netherlands). In 2008 he finished his PhD at the University of Groningen on the thesis ‘The eye of the master. An analysis of the development of literary competence in upper secondary classes’. His research interests include literature education, differentiation, literary development, and interaction and learning. Since 2009 he has led a European project with the aim of a Literary Framework for European teachers in secondary education. In 2010 he started an investigation into the development of lyrical competence at children from 4 to 18 years.

230

INDEX

A Achebe, C., 130, 152 Aesthetic, 44, 52, 64, 65, 79, 83, 92, 97, 100, 101, 124, 131, 132, 165, 169, 171, 172, 198, 211 Agard, J., 140, 154 Agnitio, 60, 65, 66, 99, 148 Angelou, M., 152 Aristotle, 125, 126 Australian Association for the Teaching of English (AATE), 3 Australian national curriculum, 40, 74, 82, 223 Authorial intention, 116, 118, 173–175, 177, 178, 180

Classroom talk, 10, 111, 137, 141, 157 Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, 92 Critical literacy, 115, 116, 211 Culler, J., 192, 197, 200 Curriculum, 3, 4, 6, 13, 17, 18, 24, 34, 36, 37, 39, 44, 45, 54, 74–76, 82–84, 89–92, 94, 97, 101, 104, 115, 125, 132–134, 151–154, 161, 169–171, 177–179, 181, 182, 189, 190, 199, 203, 205, 209, 210, 220, 223 D Dartmouth Conference, 170 Delaney, S., 152 Delta Plan, 92 Democracy, 37, 39, 109, 111, 125, 154, 173, 184, 185 Derrida, J., 12, 182, 184, 185 De Tocqueville, A., 109–111, 119 Developmental psychology, 92, 97 Developmental stages of response, 64 Dhondy, F., 152 Dialogical inquiry, 36–37 Dialogism, 11 Dixon, J., 77, 78 Dutch educational system, 92, 100 Dutch national curriculum, 45, 90

B Bahktin, M., 11, 13, 16, 19, 43, 44, 77, 80, 110–112, 157, 158 Barnes, D., 18, 38 Barthes, R., 114, 115 Benjamin, W., 16 Bildung, 124–127, 131, 133–135, 189, 190, 199 Bleasdale, A., 152 Book clubs, 56, 57, 75, 196, 200, 203–208, 210, 212–215, 222 Booth, W., 192 Bourdieu, 199 Boyd, B., 112, 117–119 Bracke, D., 56, 65, 116, 118 Britton, J., 78 Britzman, D., 158

E Eaglestone, R., 169–175, 178, 180–182, 184, 185 Eagleton, T., 15, 78, 112, 114 Eco, U., 192 Elsschot, W., 90 Emecheta, B., 152 Empathy, 53, 59, 64, 66, 116–120, 131, 132, 154, 163, 180, 197, 212

C Canon wars, 161 Chaucer, G., 153 Classrooms, 3, 9, 23, 44, 69, 89, 109, 123, 138, 151–166, 169, 189–200, 203, 219

231

INDEX

English National Curriculum, 161 Epi-reading, 169–172, 175, 178, 180, 183, 185 Ethics, 169–185, 200 Evocriticism, 116–120

Intertextuality, 36, 111 Iser, W., 97, 116, 130

F Farmer, B., 23, 25, 28–32, 34–36, 38, 77, 79, 114–116, 140, 141, 145, 146, 153, 155, 162, 176, 177, 197, 198 Fish, S., 78 Freire, P., 153, 213 Frow, J., 75, 76, 82

K Kaye, G., 152 Kracauer, S., 73 Kress. G., 37

G German educational system, 190 Growth pedagogy, 154, 160, 170, 171, 175 Guy, R., 152 H Habermas, J., 191–194, 223 Hartley, L., 153 Haug, F., 16, 70, 76 Heteroglossia, 16, 111 Hines, B., 152 Homer, 117 Honneth, A., 80, 81, 83 Howard, J., 82 Humboldt, A., 189 Hunter, I., 78, 79, 169, 170 I Ideology, 12, 13, 78, 109, 134, 135 Initiation-reply-evaluation sequence191 Intentional fallacy, 115, 118 International Association for the Improvement of Mother Tongue Education (IAIMTE), 3, 193 International Mother Tongue Education Network (IMEN), 3, 5, 6 Interpretive community, 93, 97, 99 232

J Jane Eyre, 155–157

L Learning-to-learn paradigm, 92, 100 Leavis, F.R., 185 Lee, H., 172, 173 Lesson planning, 18 Levinas, E., 171, 174, 185 Liberal humanism, 172 Literacy, 4, 18, 40, 44, 72, 75, 115, 116, 124, 153, 189, 190, 205, 223, 224 Literary canon, 38, 45, 91, 124 Literary competence, 45, 51, 92, 93, 97, 100, 101, 124–127, 129, 130, 135, 194, 211 Literary criticism, 111, 112, 114, 116, 118, 173, 174, 183 Literary development process, 93–94 Literary theory, 19, 40, 47, 95, 96, 117, 191, 193 M Maori and Pasifika students, 112 Marx, K., 13, 221 Memory work, 16 Montaigne, M., 10, 16, 189 Morality, 79, 173, 179 Multicultural classroom project, 112 N Naidoo, B., 152 Narrative, 16, 17, 32, 104, 105, 119, 132, 144, 164, 204, 208, 211 National Literacy Strategy, 154 Needle, J., 152

INDEX

Neoliberalism, 224 New Criticism, 116 New South Wales English Curriculum, 170 Norwegian, 12, 123–135 O Oakeshott, M., 144 Obama, B., 182–184 Orwell, G., 83 P Pedagogical content knowledge, 91 Performativity, 151, 182–184 Phronesis, 111, 126 Poetry, 93, 105, 115, 134, 144, 152, 154 Popular culture, 75, 174 Postcolonial literature, 75 Postmodernism, 116 Poststructuralism, 116 Practitioner research, 72, 82 Professional identity, 70, 75, 76 Professional learning, 13, 24, 44, 63, 69–72, 76, 82–84, 204, 211 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), 4, 6, 11, 13, 124, 189, 221 R Reader response, 46–48, 56, 58–59, 64, 65, 78, 116, 147–150 Reception theory, 47 Recognition, 43, 66, 80, 81, 83, 110, 139, 143, 147, 153, 154, 158, 177, 185, 197, 221, 222, 224, 228 Reid, I., 13, 27, 38, 73, 74, 76, 77, 80, 170 Reid, V.S., 152 Rhys, J., 155 Richard III, 162, 163, 165 Ritchhart, R., 26, 31, 32, 198 Role play, 163, 164 Rosenblatt, L., 116, 132

S Said, E., 27, 40, 162 Schleiermacher, F., 192, 193 Scholarship of teaching, 24 Scholes, R., 78, 169, 174, 175, 178, 181 Selvon, S., 152 Shakespeare, W., 153, 161–165, 209 Shulman, L., 24, 91 Siddhartha, 140 Sillitoe, A., 152 Smith, D., 16, 17, 69, 75, 221 Social justice, 109, 179 Spivak, G., 69, 73, 78, 81–83, 152 Standardized testing, 4, 5, 27, 139, 221, 222 Standards-based reforms, 3, 4, 6, 7, 11, 13, 69, 74, 221, 227, 228 Steinbeck, J., 161, 162 Storytelling, 117 T Taylor, M., 152 Teacher competencies, 89 Tennyson, A., 153 The Merchant of Venice, 163 To Kill a Mockingbird, 140, 172, 173, 209 U United States Urban Public Education, 139 V Van Aalten, T., 47, 48, 51, 96, 97, 115, 116, 143 Van den Vondel, J., 53, 54, 119, 195 Vocational education, 133, 223, 224 Volosinov, V.N., 152 Vygotsky, 95, 165 W Walker, A., 152 Whitman, W., 112 Williams, R., 83, 152 233

INDEX

Y Youth literature, 195, 196

234

Z Zone of proximal development, 95, 97, 100, 101