Teaching Literature at Key Stage 3 and 4

Early Stages

Pre-course tasks

The period between the interview and the start of the course is an opportunity for student teachers to begin to make the move from their own experience of literature as pupils to a consideration of what the experience might be like for other readers – and, in particular, for the young people whom they are about to meet as pupils. We ask our student teachers to:

• read a range of teenage fiction (from a list we supply) and say which they have enjoyed
• talk to a GCSE pupil about a novel they are reading in school and compare the pupil's reading with their own
• see a Shakespeare play, either as film or in the theatre, and think about how the production might be viewed by teenagers.

The student teacher is asked to reflect on these experiences in writing. This task prompts the student teacher to engage in very specific ways with the shaping influence of reading positions and reading histories. This piece of writing forms the basis of the discussion between the student teacher and the tutor in the first week of the course.