Strategies and Issues in the Classroom
Strategies and Building Blocks
Student teachers would be well-advised to consider how they would respond to an anxiety commonly voiced by students in the early stages of post-16 literature study: that the kinds of reading encouraged are 'reading too much into the text' and 'spoiling it'. The 'problem' only exists because of the older-style assumption described above, that meaning lies inside texts like a nut in a shell as opposed to being a product of a process which crucially involves the reader. The simple dichotomy between the passive receiver of meaning and the active maker of meaning is one that should be shared with students from the outset.
- We make sense of the world by making meanings based on difference and this could be valuably explored by getting the students to recognize the particular power of binary opposites in the making of meaning – and of entrenching prejudice. A discussion along these lines would not only see the governing binary opposites in a simple text like a fairy-tale (fairy-godmother / wicked stepmother; naughty-boy Peter Rabbit, good bunny sisters) but could rapidly move to sexual politics, orientalism and so on.
The active involvement of the reader in the making of meaning suggests that of all the 'schools' within 'theory' relevant in the post-16 literature classroom, it is reader-response criticism that most tellingly connects with students' evolving critical reading powers. The way the reader is addressed, positioned, included – or excluded – by texts, and the kinds of competencies assumed by texts, can be simply demonstrated through looking at advertisements or, say, at the opening paragraphs of very different novels.
- The opening of Jane Eyre (to pick up just one feature) goes out of its way to position, for clearly strategic and ideological reasons, the reader in a way that duplicates Jane's own position – ensconced in layers within layers (wrapped in the curtain in the window-seat in an otherwise deserted room), alone and reading – as the reader is doing. And readers of 19th century novels read in private and in wraps of comfort. The effect is a doubled kind of intimacy.
- The opening of The Catcher in the Rye addresses the reader as if s/he is an aggressively intrusive kind of psychiatrist, needling the patient for information that the patient seems unwilling to give ('if you really want to hear about it...'), though as experienced readers we have the competence (where does it come from?) to realize instantly that it's information that Holden really does want to unburden and needs to share but doesn't want to admit that he does (out of fear of being thought weak) – thus the aggression in the voice.
- The positioning and addressing of the reader could hardly be more different. Readers of texts of all kinds negotiate, often with difficulty, through this positioning-effect. Readers may also refuse to be positioned or addressed by texts – and students should be encouraged to instance occasions when this has happened to them and why. In the same way, certain texts exclude certain readers. Who? Why?
We began by noticing that students accuse teachers of 'spoiling' texts by encouraging active readings. The notion is that texts can be 'innocent'. This too needs discussion, with the important recognition that there's no such thing as an innocent, or a guilty text. It's only the reading that can be described as innocent or (in Edward Said's term) worldly.
The simplest way of exploring the role of reading and readers with students is to work with the least threatening of texts, like familiar fairy-tales, the shortest and simplest of short-stories and the most skeletal of poems. Examples follow.
- A good exercise is to get students to collectively tell each other the Red Riding-Hood story. Two notions are worth comment from the outset: that by doing that they would be duplicating the oral and the collective origins of folk-tales (who is the tale's 'author'; what is an 'author'? (See Bennett, 2005)) and, in the students' disagreements over detail, demonstrating the fluidity and variability of tales as they have evolved over time (what is the notion of 'the correct version' of a text?).
- The way the story has evolved from the oral rite-of-passage celebration of female cunning (with its ritualized cannibalism), through Perrault and the Grimm brothers, to contemporary and feminist versions – and the socio-political and cultural functions served by the various versions in their various cultures - has been well documented by Jack Zipes. (See Zipes, 1993). Zipes' readings of tales are vivid demonstrations of the dynamic relations between texts and contexts. The very different endings in the different versions lend themselves to the discussion of endings and closure in texts.
- Other ways of reading folk-tales and fairy-tales could easily be shared with students, such as Bettelheim's psychoanalytic and Russian formalists' approaches. Exploring in this area is, again, a vivid way of engaging with 'different interpretations'.
- Student teachers could valuably suggest and collect resources from the folk-tale and fairy-tale tradition to explore ways of opening out for enquiry some of the most basic assumptions about narrative.
- Examples that always work well in the post-16 classroom are Potter's 'Peter Rabbit' and, for its multiple endings, sexual codings and political ambivalence, Wilde's 'Happy Prince' (for the latter see Jacobs, 2001).
- A very short story like Hemingway's 'Cat in the Rain' provides very valuable material for discussion and debate because in terms of 'plot' so little if anything 'happens'. Students will recognize the difference between explicit and implicit meaning and student teachers could be encouraged to devise classroom activities to dramatise the difference.
- A good exercise is for students to play the role of teachers drawing up a list of six or so questions designed to lead other students to consider the importance of what is not said in the story.
- Poems such as Williams' 'Red wheel-barrow' or 'This is just to say' lend themselves to some lively debate about the nature of poetry itself. Students out of GCSE frequently express an antagonism towards (and a fear of) poetry. Student teachers should consider ways of demystifying poetry, drawing out its nature as game and play.
- An excellent resource is Jeffrey Wainwright's Poetry: the Basics (Wainwright, 2004)
- Terry Eagleton's How to Read a Poem is surprisingly practical-critical, even Leavisite in its readings, but contains lively discussion of poetry's place in education (Eagleton, 2007)
Starting from the simplest of texts to explore some crucial assumptions about literature and reading has the benefit of providing a level playing-field for a post-16 group who are possibly meeting each other for the first time, having made a choice not only to study English but to be in post-16 education at all. Simple texts help establish a collaborative framework – or, one could argue, to re-establish it, if one takes the view that the secondary years lose sight of it after the primary years. The spirit of the best primary activities should inform the best post-16 classrooms.
Starting from the simple, building from the simplest of blocks, also applies to the teacher's questions to the class. If the aim is for the student to 'do it' without the teacher – to ask the questions herself – then the process should start from questions that everyone can answer. Teachers regularly observe that students with varied and disappointing GCSE profiles develop into autonomous readers of considerable power over two years of working with literature. Taking the whole class along from the start brings more students further and for longer than teacher or student might have anticipated.
To move from simple to more demanding questions also mirrors the way we read and student teachers should make their practices reflexive of this. As we read, we negotiate a route from somatic pleasure, to paraphraseable content through to analysis and evaluation. Students need a toe-hold to attach themselves to potentially daunting literary texts.
- They first need questions and answers to clear away obstacles in the way of their securing that toehold.
- Examples might include lexical difficulties in older texts, or references that assume certain cultural competencies. Student teachers need to be reminded of this. Wordsworth's famous account of his boyhood terror during a secret evening row – in Prelude Book 1 - is literally meaningless to students who don't happen to know that rowers face away from where they're rowing to.
- Student teachers might consider what they would do in the first lesson with Hamlet, after reading the first scene. One answer is to clear away the biggest obstacle to comprehension that sits for 30 lines of inaction in the middle of the scene – Horatio's complicated and wordy retrospective narrative about old Hamlet and Old Fortinbras. How would student teachers clear this away?
- Further questions about content – say, the 'plot' or 'story' of a poem – can then in turn lead to more challenging activities and more questions.
- Establishing a toe-hold on the text should involve starting from bodily or somatic pleasure. Poems and narratives bring somatic pleasure before they bring anything else and, given what we know about multiple intelligences (see Gardner, 1983), activities that encourage an 'ingesting' of the text are good places to start – and to end.
- Students need to possess the text in ways that involve more than the intellect. This is particularly urgent at post-16 after years in which texts are perceived by students as belonging not to them but to the institutions in which texts are instrumentally deployed.
Two related principles to establish also at the outset, to further the process of students' owning or possessing the text, are these.
- All reading is comparative
- All texts are implicated in other texts intertextually
Single texts can be paradoxically more intimidating than texts studied comparatively. The notion that texts belong in a network of other texts (which in turn operate within and upon other social and cultural networks) encourages the habit of reading contextually and, therefore, actively. Raymond Williams put it well in 1979 (Williams, 1996, pp84-91):
- 'The most important thing is always to be able to relay literature as active... The biggest difficulty is taking [texts] as if they were exhibits in a museum'
- To counter that tendency to fetishise the individual text (a tendency inherent in the exam system) student teachers should consider how to make the students' reading as explicitly and actively comparative as they can, seeking to establish the intertextual energies within all texts
- The post-2008 literature curriculum Assessment Objective AO3 with its focus on 'exploring connections and comparisons' is something that student teachers should prioritize wherever possible in their practices and planning
- Further ways of demystifying or countering the fetish of the text might focus on the students' readings or analyses as interventions in the text, just as texts themselves are interventions in social process. (See Pope, 1995.)
- Other ways of encouraging comparative reading and ownership are these:
- Students sharing and editing each others' drafts
- Students sharing reading audits
- Students keeping reading-journals to develop awareness of the role of their own responses in the making of meaning
- Teachers ensuring that assignments are tailored to these processes of ownership, coursework in particular being individually negotiated
- Again, the post-2008 A-level literature curriculum suggests the importance of individually negotiated coursework
The post-16 literature classroom is, as I've implied, the space where some of the most exciting, challenging and far-reaching experiences can be made available to students and teachers. Working with notoriously 'difficult' texts can do just that. They can convey an enormous punch by the very nature of their difficulty – and because the difficulty is the function of such texts, what they are 'about'. The post-16 literature classroom is, again, the ideal space for students to experience the sheer affective power of such texts as these:
- The film version of Beckett's play Not I (1976 [1973]).
- Geoffrey Hill's poem 'September Song' (1967). (Both texts are presented in full and discussed in Jacobs, 2001.)
- Students working with and through the impact of these extraordinary texts, can move – even if painfully – towards an understanding that the very notion of owning or possessing texts such as these is an acute ethical problem.
Underpinning all strategies and principles for the teaching of post-16 literature is the notion that what the students and teacher are engaged in matters. What students value in the teaching of literature is not only the teacher's skills, subject knowledge or personality, but above all the passion and enthusiasm brought into that dynamic three-way encounter between students, text and teacher, in the special space where they come together and matter.
