LITERATURE and ‘DEVELOPMENT’
Submitted by:
Larissa McLean Davies
Abstract:
The study of literature has never had an easy relationship with the idea of ‘development’ in education. The term ‘development’ in the past brought with it suggestions of the cognitive and psychological and connotations of linearity that sat uneasily with ‘the cultural praxis … in which arguments about the value of literature and a literary education have traditionally been played out’ (Doecke, 2016:9). This is despite the fact that literary criticism – especially of the reader response schools - has had an historical tradition of the psychological and the cognitive, seeing reading as a process which depends upon the psychological needs of readers, for example (Bleich, 1978; Holland, 1975), or relating cognition and evaluation as co-defining features of response (Harding, 1962; Bleich, 1980: 143). In the L1 educational arena, developmental models for literary response are not unknown historically (Protherough, 1983; Thomson, 1987; Witte et al 2012) and more recently, advocacy of scientific approaches to literary study in learning environments has pursued this work while continuing to ascribe to a literary education traditional humanising role around empathy and moral imagination (Burke et al, 2016). Moreover, developmental psychology itself today works with paradigms other than the linear. While none of this is unproblematic, it nevertheless raises a number of questions around literature and development in the 21st century that will be taken up in this symposium such as: what is interplay of cognitive and affective approaches to literary learning and development in contemporary classrooms? How are text focussed, and student focussed notions of development reconciled (Witte et al)? How does official curricula frame literary development, and how does this impact on teachers’ work with students? And what is the relationship between particular pedagogical strategies and approaches to students’ literary development? To this end, Paper 1 will draw on research undertaken in the Australian context to investigate the role of notions of literary development in contemporary literary curricula. It will consider specifically the place of taxonomies in curricula design, and the implications of this for practice. Paper 2 will explore the role of literature in the development of students’ affective responses to texts and draw on research undertaken with teachers in England to consider the impacts of official curricula and mandated texts lists on students’ affective development. Finally, Paper 3 will investigate principles and strategies through which teachers in Denmark might work out programs for ‘literary development’ in their classrooms, and what these interventions might mean for our understandings of the impacts of literature on students’ ontological development.
References
Bleich, D. (1978) Subjective Criticism, Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bleich, D. (1980) ‘Epistemological assumptions in the study of response’, in J.P. Tompkins, Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism, Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press: 134-163.
Burke, M., Fialho, O. & Zyngier, S. (eds) (2016), Scientific Approaches to Literature in Learning Environments. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Doecke, B. (2016) ‘Understanding literary reading: the need for a scientific approach? Review essay: Michael Burke, Olivia Fialho and Sonia Zyngier (eds) (2016), Scientific Approaches to Literature in Learning Environments’, L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 16: 1-11 http://dx.doi.org/10.17239/L1ESLL-2016.16.01.07.
Harding, D. W. (1962) ‘Psychological processes in the reading of fiction’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 2 (2), April:133-147.
Holland, N. (1975) 5 Readers Reading, New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
Protherough, R. (1983) Developing Response to Fiction, Milton Keynes & Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Thomson, J. (1987) Understanding Teenagers’ Reading: Reading Processes and the Teaching of Literature, Ryde, New York & London: Methuen, Nichols Publishing & Croom Helm.
Witte, T., Rijlaarsdam, G., and Schram, D. (2012). An Empirically Grounded Theory of Literary Development. Teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge on Literary Development in Upper Secondary Education. L1- Educational Studies in Language and Literature, Vol. 12, pp1-33. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED562547.
Keywords: literature, curriculum, English, development, knowledge
- Larissa McLean Davies & Wayne Sawyer
This paper explores the ways in which knowledge about literature and growth in response to literature at the secondary level are conceived of, and mediated through, policy documentation in the form of official written curriculum. The paper considers the ways in which ‘development’ is represented in the Australian Curriculum: English. The curriculum – Australia’s first national curriculum – has two incarnations: Foundation (ages 5-6)– Year 10 (ages 15-16) and the Senior Years 11-12. Discussion will largely focus on the F-10 document, in which L1 English is presented as three Strands: Language, Literature and Literacy. The analysis will examine statements and positions on/assumptions about development in the L1 English Curriculum generally and in the Literature Strand specifically. The analysis of the Literature Strand will specifically examine discourses about development in terms of both literary knowledge and response. This paper will thus offer a mapping of this terrain of development in literary knowledge and in response to literature in an official policy context. The paper will also examine this work on development in the light of key historical studies of growth in response in the Anglophone context, viz: Protherough’s Developing Response to Fiction (UK), Thomson’s Understanding Teenagers Reading (Australia) and Applebee’s The Child’s Concept of Story (US). This latter is not presented as an exercise which finds this research and/or the Australian Curriculum wanting, but rather as a thought exercise in which policy and research are treated as potentially mutually informing as a basis for curriculum theorising around the problematic relationship between literary knowledge, growth in response and development.
Keywords: English curriculum, development, literature, response
References:
Applebee, A.N. (1978) The Child’s Concept of Story, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Protherough, R. (1983) Developing Response to Fiction, Milton Keynes & Philadelphia: Open University Press.
Thomson, J. (1987) Understanding Teenagers’ Reading: Reading Processes and the Teaching of Literature, Ryde, New York & London: Methuen, Nichols Publishing & Croom Helm.
- Andy Goodwyn
This paper takes up questions of the role of literature in the personal development of students, of their sense ‘knowing’ (Medway 1980) and of being in the world. It draws on reader response theory (Protherough 1983; Rosenblatt 1978, 1995) and Darwinian literary theory (Carroll 2004, 2011) as frameworks for understanding what we mean when we say a text ‘matters’ and to examine the relationship of such responses to text to the concept of human development. We have the personal level ‘this text matters to me’ and the societal level ‘this text matters to many people’, the rationale for the latter often being that such a text stores important human knowledge, making it ‘worth’ studying. ‘Matters’ here is broadly defined as ‘having importance and substance’; in terms of a literary text the working definition more speculatively is ‘a text which has importance and substance for individuals and for some members of society’. The affective is conceptualised as one powerful element in why a text matters especially to the individual reader, who may be a student or a teacher of literature. One agent in making texts matter is the teacher and one of their purposes is to develop reader responses and facilitate their articulation in discussion and in writing.
The paper will report on a qualitative research project with thirty pre-service and experienced teachers of English in England which set out to investigate what makes a text ‘matter’. Teachers of English as a mother tongue sometimes select texts [we categorise these as ‘unofficial texts’] but they also teach texts that are selected by mediating agencies [especially in England] such as Ministries of Education, Examination Boards and so on. ‘Official texts’ create a complex matrix of feelings around the questions of why texts matter, and what students studying these texts are supposed to ‘develop’. Experienced teachers in this research were asked to reflect on the potential tensions that they dealt with when teaching ‘official’ or ‘authorised’ texts to students and the demands of working with texts they ‘liked’ or disliked’ and also their sense of how they deployed texts to develop readers’ responses and to increase their sophistication. Pre-service teachers were asked to reflect on how they experienced these tensions and issues regarding the development of affective responses to literature, in the context of mandated curricula, as they journeyed towards becoming fully qualified teachers.
Keywords: Literary Darwinism; reader response, human development
References:
Carroll, J. (2004) Literary Darwinism: Evolution, Human Nature and Literature. Routledge, New York.
Carroll, J. (2011) Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice. State University of New York Press, Albany.
Medway, Peter. “The Content of English.” English in Education 14, no. 3 (September 1980): 13.
Protherough, R. (1983) Developing Response to Fiction. Open University Press, Milton Keynes
Rosenblatt, L. (1995, 5th ed.) Literature as Exploration. MLA Press, New York.
Rosenblatt, L. (1978) The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work. Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale.
- Nikolaj Elf & Tina Høegh
This paper explores the kinds of development and learning that can take place through specific strategies and approaches to the teaching of literature employed in Danish classrooms. We hypothesize that sets of inquiry-based principles, strategies and designed material prompted through how teachers work out literary events in classrooms lead to students’ ontogenetic literary development on microgenetic and meso-level timescales.
The presentation departs from an ongoing large-scale project entitled “Improving the Quality of Danish and Math in Danish lower Secondary education” funded by the Danish Ministry of Education and involving more than 180 schools on secondary level. A multiple intervention research program was designed, which establishes an initial ‘program theory’ for creating change (Pawson & Tilley, 1997). The program theory was revised iteratively throughout the four interconnected phases in the project program: 1) A pre-study, including a systematic review (Elf & Hansen, 2017); 2) small-scale interventions for developing and testing an initial course design in the developmental phase; 3) a pilot study, including 15 schools; and 4) three rounds of Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) with different samples applying a test battery inspired by Frederking et al. (2012). Furthermore, the pilot and RCT was complemented with ethnographic fieldwork in five schools.
In this presentation we focus on introducing the program theory and analysing data from ethnographic field work conducted in schools participating in the last RCT round. The overall program theory, based on a phenomenological approach to inquiry-based literature teaching (Hansen, Elf, Gissel, & Steffensen, submitted), argues that six intervention features, including 1) aesthetic experience and embodiment and 2) analytic understanding and reflection as core features as well as 3) instructional clarity, 4) scaffolding, 5) externalisation and 6) engaging strategies could lead to aesthetic-analytical text comprehension and personal development outcomes.
For empirical analysis, we focus on video and interview data from two classrooms teaching the same course design for several weeks. Data are analysed applying nexus analysis (Scollon & Scollon, 2004), textmaking micro-analysis (Høegh, 2017) and time-scales analysis (Wortham, 2003). Focusing on events emphasizing bodily experiences oral dialogue in the classroom, analyses indicate that designed material informed by the program theory may lead to students’ ontogenetic development of aesthetic repertoires and, more specifically, inquiry-based strategies which students identify with on a personal level. Video data and interviews recorded weeks later within the same course design suggest that the systematic teaching of inquiry-based strategies nurture ontogenetic developments not only on a microgenetic time-scale but also on a more permanent meso-level time-scale.
Keywords: classroom studies; inquiry-based strategies; secondary education
References:
Elf, N., & Hansen, T. I. (Eds.). (2017). Hvad vi véd om undersøgelsesorienteret undervisning i dansk. Og hvordan vi kan bruge denne viden til at skabe bedre kvalitet i danskfagets litteraturundervisning i grundskolen. [What we know about inquiry-based teacing in Danish. And how we can use this knowledge to improve the quality of literature education in compulsory school Danish.] Odense: Læremiddel.dk - Nationalt videncenter for læremidler. 126 p. plus appendices. Available online: https://www.emu.dk/modul/kvalitet-i-dansk-og-matematik-kidm-forundersøgelse.
Frederking, V., Henschel, S., Meier, C., Roick, T., Stanat, P., & Dickhäuser, O. (2012). Beyond functional aspects of reading literacy: Theoretical structure and empirical validity of literary literacy. L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature, 12, 35-58.
Hansen, T. I., Elf, N., Gissel, S. T., & Steffensen, T. (submitted). A Phenomenological Approach to Inquiry-Based Teaching of Literature.
Høegh, T. (2017). Observation and analysis through textmaking. In D. Duncker & B. Perregaard (Eds.), Creativity and Continuity: Perspectives on the Dynamics of Language Conventionalisation (pp. 331-352). Copenhagen: U Press.
Pawson, R., & Tilley, N. (1997). Realistic Evaluation. London: SAGE.
Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2004). Nexus Analysis: discourse and the emerging internet. London: Routledge.
Wortham, S. (2003). Curriculum as a resource for the development of social identity. Sociology of Education, 76, 228-246.