Placing the Experience of Post-16 Literature
Where is Post-16 Literature?
Student teachers, especially those straight out of university, might most helpfully start to address the nature of post-16 literature by being encouraged to 'place' their own experiences of study at that educational stage. The following questions might be asked:
- How would they place post-16 literature in relation to
- Literature at GCSE
- Literature at university
- Does the post-16 study of literature differ conceptually from that before and after it?
- Does it unproblematically develop out of GCSE and into university literary study?
As the source of an introductory discussion, these questions usefully allow the student teachers to share and debate the many different ways in which they have experienced literature at these three levels. With university English degrees varying so widely in content, this discussion also allows student teachers to evaluate, in a comparative way, those elements in their degrees which, at this initial stage, they hope to bring back into the post-16 classroom.
It's rare that student teachers, in their discussion of appropriate models, suggest an unproblematic continuum or stepping-stones or ladder as model for the three phases. Indeed student teachers often voice or conceptualise a model in which their experiences of post-16 literature are seen as the apex of a series in which literature at both GCSE and university are seen as somehow less personally meaningful.
Why that might be is itself a question that student teachers should be encouraged to debate.
