Prose
Teaching examples of non-fiction
The concept of literature is a problematic one. The very word suggests to most people some sort of venerable writing, the best of which constitutes a literary tradition. But we also speak of 'reading the literature' when deciding which car or hi-fi to buy, and, to avoid arguments of definition, it may be best to broaden the scope of inclusion. Certainly, for teaching purposes, this aspiration towards inclusiveness seems appropriate: in the reality of the classroom, comparisons across genres, periods, authors and texts can usefully illuminate our responses to either fiction or non-fiction. In terms of the latter, many of the most contemporary and imaginative stimuli may be found under the umbrella title of 'media-based texts', and these are examined elsewhere e.g. in the Media pages of the ITE English website. There are, however, also many good examples of printed non-fiction and educational publishers have been quick to anthologise and present relevant texts, taking in, for instance, travel literature, journals, biography and polemical writing. The two texts we look at next are quite different from each other, but student teachers can nevertheless explore how each can be successfully taught as an example of non-fictional literature, and how each demands an essentially aesthetic response not qualitatively unlike that given to the poems and fiction we have looked at previously.
The Diary of Anne Frank has long been widely read by secondary school age youngsters – perhaps more often as an individually read text than as a class reader, but nevertheless with a distinctive place in the English curriculum. Despite its painfully harrowing subject matter – or possibly to some extent because of it – the evocative yet matter-of-fact narrative of the trapped Jewish girl in Nazi occupied wartime Holland speaks intimately across the divide of time, culture and personal experience. From an ITE perspective, its power can be witnessed in the inspiring film, based on a true story, Freedom Writers (2007), focusing on a beginning English teacher's use of the text, among other resources, to transform a difficult class in Long Beach, California. There is a growing sub-genre of literature portraying the Holocaust: fictional texts such as Friedrich (Richter, 1987), The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (Boyne, 2006), The Devil in Vienna (Orgel, 1978) and The Final Journey (Pausewang, 1992), all of which are appropriate to 11-16 year olds, or Fugitive Pieces (Michaels, 1996), Captain Corelli's Mandolin (de Bernieres, 1994), The Reader (Schlink, 1997), and Time's Arrow (Amis, 1991), all of which are suitable for a range of readerships. The ITE tutor could also include the graphic novel 'Maus' by Art Spiegelman (used for example in some London secondary schools) which is a comic strip on the Holocaust (the cats are the Nazis and the mice represent the Jews - at one point the mice are trapped in a tunnel in the shape of a swastika). Student teachers need to raise pertinent questions with pupils about whether the Holocaust should be used as a source for a comic strip and debate reasons for studying the Holocaust. Ian McEwan's picture book, movingly illustrated by Innocenti, Rose Blanche (1985), cuts right across the age range here, and adds a further reading dimension in the combination of words with pictures. Effective teaching could focus creatively on cross-genre fertilisation, comparing, say, our emotional responses to fiction and non-fiction and going on to tease out the differences between them. Under which category, for instance, does Schindler's Ark (Keneally, 1982) fall? Similarly, good use could be made of the inter-disciplinary dimension of the curriculum, all too easily forgotten and ignored in the understandable concentration on the subject-based National Curriculum structure. Many pupils study the Holocaust through history and religious education lessons, and there is an excellent opportunity here to encourage student teachers to discover more about cross-curricular research and learning.
