Why literature matters & How to approach teaching literature in an ELA classroom

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Why literature matters & How to approach teaching literature in an ELA classroom

Smith

The Time Machine Angle

"In short, we can take part in the Great Conversation of humanity"

"Reading actively allows us to converse with the greatest minds in history"

The Mirror Angle

"What we create can open up heretofore hidden or forgotten recesses. It can move us in new and pow- erful ways. It can reintroduce us to ourselves."

"None of us reads the same exact thing"

The Empathy Angle

"Great writers captivate us with our concerns and exploit our identification with these fictitious folk"

"We often read to find out what happens to people about whom we care"

The Escape Angle

"It can put us in a different culture, consciousness, time period, and situation. It can give us distance from and perspectives on our daily dilemmas"

" A good work can take us from our relatively narrow experiences and place us in a more exotic, thrilling, sublime, complex, or entertaining place"

Gillespie (1994)

Literature & Human Experience

"Literature deals with our most pressing concerns-family, death, religion, love, good and evil, destiny, will, justice, character, courage-issues not often covered in an Applied Communications or Business Writing unit"

"The calling of literature is to explore hu- man experience in all its dimensions and possibilities."

Technical Perfection vs Moral Insight

"Yet craft in writing must serve content; technique ought to be employed not for its own sake but in the service of some truth the writer is pursuing."

"More time was spent on writing techniques than on the human issues in students' stories. I realized that my students need more than just hints on technique when they are experimenting with fiction"

Connections to the Classroom

" I wished more of these young writers' imaginative and empathetic skills were as refined as their technical skills"

"What seemed missing from too many of the stories was that rare experience of getting inside the skin of another human being"

Imagination & Empathy

"One of its potential benefits is to enlarge a reader's sense about the many possible ways to live"

"Literature does offer--inexpensively--a vision of other lives and other vista"

Langer

So What?

"From our interactions with the students, we became convinced that literature, including scenario-building and storytelling, can play an important role in enriching students' understandings across subject areas, and the process of exploring horizons of possibilities can be helpful in content classes even when literature is not read and point of reference learning is the goal"

"Supporting students' development of literary understandings is often difficult for teachers to sustain for lack of instructional models (because the very reasoning processes they wish to support are often in conflict with some well-worked pedagogical routines). "

Literacy & Literature

"In another set of studies we investigated the role literature can play in literacy development in classes of culturally and linguistically diverse students"

"In one set of studies our emphasis has been on the ways literature can support the process of literacy development in English as a Second Language and bilingual classes for students who have been designated as having "limited English proficiency""

The Envisionment- Building Classroom

"a place where students have room to form and develop their own understandings, where they use interactions with each other to explore ideas of their own, and where mutual support is offered by students as well as teachers as part of the social network"

"If we are to change how students engage in literature, we must change the essential culture of the classroom."

Understanding Literature

"Uncertainty, openness, and imagination are a normal part of literary thinking, and new understandings provoke still other possibilities. People search for the "real"story-the "hidden" story-and they often create scenarios as a way to explore ideas."

"We describe the literary mode as "explor- ing horizons of possibilities," because from this orientation, people do a great deal of mental exploration. They explore emotions, relationships, motives, reactions."

Rosenblatt

Helping Students Reflect on Literature

"Given this view of literary communication, we can avoid the danger of putting one or another peripheral concern in place of refinement of the student's power to enter into and to interpret literary experiences"

"Recalling that the literary work is something lived-through by the reader, we can recognize that "teaching the library work"-- teaching a novel or teaching Rome and Juliet--- means helping the student primarily to reflect on what he has made of the text."

Avoiding Overemphasis on the Personal Factor

"Insistence on the capacity to arouse emotion as the test of art can lead to the notion that that work is greatest which produces a response in the greatest number of readers"

"If to be concerned mainly with books does not insure a sound curriculum, so also are there dangers in too narrow a concern with the personal factor"

Avoiding Overemphasis on the Work

"Our aim, after all, is to help students develop a lifetime habit of turning to good literature"

"We cannot afford merely to assume that the reader's contribution will be taken care of, or to imply that simple exposure to a sequence of works is sufficient"

Recognizing Factors in Literary Experience

"Without sufficient relevant experience, he can evoke nothing from the page."

"The quality of our literacy experience depend not only on the text... but also on the relevance of past experiences and present interests that the reader brings to it"