Placing the Experience of Post-16 Literature
The Post-16 Sacred Space
Quite regularly, student teachers conceptualise their experiences of literature post-16 as a 'sacred space'. The following notions are often expressed and lend themselves to debate.
- Literature at GCSE can be routine and numbing
- Literature at university can be intimidating and 'over-theorised'
Between these stages post-16 literature can be seen as a space surrounded by two models of study which place less value on the individual student:
- An instrumentalist and utilitarian approach at GCSE focused on pass-rates and league-tables
- An academic professionalism at university in which students can feel neglected as inconvenient diversions from income-generating research and publications
In debating this 'sacred space' model, student teachers might be encouraged to place the post-16 literary experience in terms of two triangular models:
- The place where there is the maximum of energy flowing between student, text and teacher
- The place where there is a uniquely balanced and creative interplay between these different models of what is at the centre of English. (See Moss, 2004, pp.245-259.)
- The literary experience
- The firing up of critical literacy
- The growth in student personal development
Another helpful model for student teachers to debate is one that measures the post-16 experience, from the point of view of the teacher, as on a continuum between two 'objects':
- Teaching the students
- Teaching the text
At post-16 it could be argued that the experience is one in which these two objects are in balance. Elsewhere the balance tips in one of two directions.
- At GCSE teachers are teaching students
- At university teachers are teaching texts – or, rather, textualities or discourses
The student's engagement with literature in this sacred space is where the following three outcomes can be most energetically achieved:
- Intellectual development
- Critical independence
- The communal interpretive act
A crucial factor is the amount of time available to work with the text in post-16 work, an amount of time and a relative elasticity of time not available in either the phase before or after post-16. The result is that the texts themselves are felt as conceptually very different in those phases:
- At GCSE, and before, students experience bits of books and the few whole books studied can be 'studied to death'. The text is perceived as a mechanism for testing.
- At university, texts can be perceived as studied exclusively in a network of often bewildering discourses
The role and status of the teacher is, correspondingly, perceived as very different in the three levels. In a good post-16 classroom, the role of the teacher - as described by student teachers - is an enabler, first-among-equals and, graphically, as a lightning-conductor, eliciting, sharing and valuing the student's individual response.
- At GCSE teachers are perceived as pseudo-parents, dispensing the knowledge, telling the students 'what to think about the book'
- At university the teacher is perceived as the sage or priest who assumes that students can absorb wisdom through research or osmosis
Student teachers should be encouraged to critique the model outlined above. The next web-page provides some history and context in order to do so.
