Teaching Literature at Key Stage 3 and 4

Prose

The teaching of myths: planning a scheme of work

For all student teachers, the move from planning single lessons to planning 'challenging, well-organised sequences of lessons' is a difficult one. Knowing what you want the pupils 'to know, understand and be able to do' means knowing where you want to go as well as how a particular group of pupils might get there. This 'end point' is partly determined by curriculum requirements and assessment objectives. But it should also be based on two considerations: (1) the teacher's knowledge of the pupils, knowledge that is built up over time so that the plans for those 'sequences within lessons' specified in the Standards for QTS will attend to the particularities of learners and contexts; (2) the teacher's knowledge and enthusiasm for the subject matter and the scope provided to develop this, both in the early stages of planning and as ideas are 'tried out' in the classroom.

When student teachers are asked to prepare a sequence of lessons early in their practical teaching or before they have got to know a class, it is daunting, sometimes overwhelming. Planning activities, outcomes and assessment over a period of time takes support from school colleagues and subject tutors. Attention must be paid to progression, classroom organisation, estimating the learning needs of pupils and formative assessment and feedback. What 'works' for one teacher does not work for all as most student teachers discover when they try to take on a SOW from a colleague or from a published source.

With these constraints in mind, it seems best to focus on 'key questions/key principles' that need to be addressed as part of planning any sequence of lessons. We have chosen a topic – Ovid's Metamorphoses and Greek myths – as a way to organise this work. Myths are also an area of 'subject knowledge' that many student teachers have enjoyed in the past; others are quite unfamiliar with the literature. The role of myths in 'other cultural traditions' is another aspect of the work we would want to emphasise. The work on myths can lead student teachers to the preparation of rich and varied resources from many media and to planning lessons that draw on a wide range of teaching and learning strategies: the reading of different versions of Ovid; drama-based work; analysing visual images; story-telling; creative writing in a number of genres.

There are many reasons for Ovid's renewed appeal. Such qualities as his mischief and cleverness, his deliberate use of shock – not always relished in the past – are contemporary values. Then, too, the stories have direct, obvious and powerful affinities with contemporary reality. They offer a mythical key to most of the more extreme forms of human behaviour and suffering, especially ones we think of as peculiarly modern: holocaust, plague, sexual harassment, rape, incest, seduction, pollution, sex-change, suicide, hetero- and homosexual love, torture, war, child-battering, depression and intoxication form the bulk of the themes. The stories are highly dramatic, proceeding with a kind of psychological perfect pitch from the natural to the supernatural, and delivering their emotional climaxes largely by means of brilliant visual effects of physical transformation. (Hoffman and Lasdun, 1994)