International Perspectives on the Teaching of Literature in Schools

Global Principles and Practices

Andrew Goodwyn, Cal Durrant, Louann Reid, Lisa Scherff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138227194
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315396446
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Literature teaching remains central to the teaching of English around the world. This edited text brings together expert global figures under the banner of the International Federation for the Teaching of English (IFTE). The book captures a state-of-the-art snapshot of leading trends in current literature teaching, as well as detailing predicted trends for the future.

The expert scholar and leading teacher contributors, coming from a wide range of countries with fascinatingly diverse approaches to literature teaching, cover a range of central and fundamental topics:

• literature and diversity;
• digital literatures;
• pedagogy and reader response;
• mother tongues;
• the business of reading;
• publishers, adolescent fiction and censorship;
• assessing responses to literature;
• the changing definitions of literature and multimodal texts.

The collection reviews the consistently important place of literature in the education of young people and provides international evidence of its enduring value and contribution to education, resisting the functionalist and narrowly nationalist perspectives of misguided government authorities.

International Perspectives on the Teaching of Literature in Schools will be of value to researchers, PhD students, literature scholars, practitioners, teacher educators, teachers and all those in the extensive academic community interested in English and literacy around the world.

PART I
Ways of seeing, ways of teaching

1
THE LITERATURE TEACHER AS RESTLESS CARTOGRAPHER

Pedagogies for cosmopolitan ethical explorations

Suzanne Choo and Ruth Vinz

The cosmopolitan impulse to migrate, and explore foreign lands, occurred as early as 60,000 years ago when humans ventured out of Africa leading to the emergence of new civilizations. Sometime around the fourth century, the term ‘cosmopolitanism,’ which, translated from the Greek, means citizen of the cosmos, came into popular use by Cynic philosophers in Ancient Greece during a period when citizenship was a symbol of status and guaranteed one the right to vote, hold public office, and own property. Yet, when Diogenes the Cynic philosopher was asked where he came from and replied, ‘I am a kosmopolites,’ he deliberately employed the term to critique the exclusivity of citizenship offered to a privileged few. In practice, Diogenes and his band of cynic cosmopolitans rejected material comfort and were skeptical about the way identity had become defined by the rules of the state rather than tied to a broader affiliation with humanity itself. More importantly, their skepticism served to politicize social inequality by highlighting forms of discrimination arising from the parochialism of state citizenship.

Today, renewed interest in cosmopolitanism, as observed in the growing body of scholarship in fields ranging from philosophy to anthropology, international relations, and literary studies, carries some of the spirit of ancient cynic cosmopolitanism. This involves first, the understanding that the call to a cosmopolitan mindset is essentially an ethical call to recognize one’s affiliation with one’s familiar community as well as multiple communities that make up our world. Antithetical terms such as ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ (Beck, 2006), ‘cosmopolitan patriot’ (Appiah, 1997), and ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’ (Bhabha, 1996) capture how global interconnections have resulted in the contemporary paradox of living at home and in the world. Such hybrid terms ultimately aim to disrupt notions of cultural purity and convey the myriad ways that identity can be conceived of as re-attachment, multiple attachments, or attachment at a distance (Robbins, 1998). It is in this space of multiplicity that a consciousness of ‘planetarity’ (Spivak, 2003) becomes possible as we become aware of our allegiances to communities worldwide. Second, contemporary proponents of cosmopolitanism share cynic cosmopolitanism’s strong commitment toward resisting injustice. As Peng Cheah (2006) observes, what is distinctive about the revival of cosmopolitan research in the 1990s is a shift away from articulating universal visions of a one-world utopia toward highlighting actually existing, on-the-ground cosmopolitan practices that seek to counter global injustices arising from corporate capitalism. In relation to literature education, various scholars have discussed contemporary cosmopolitanism’s applications to teaching which essentially entail the ways literature provokes critical engagement with an ethics of living in an interconnected, globalized age (see Choo, 2013; Donald, 2007; Jollimore & Barrios, 2006; Nussbaum, 1997).

In this chapter, we start from the premise that cosmopolitan pedagogies are determined first by an orientation that then directs praxis. This aligns with current scholarship that conceptualizes cosmopolitanism as a transnational orientation involving global seeing (Gaudelli, 2011) or ‘globality’ which is ‘an orientation to the world as a whole’ (O’Byrne, 2003, p. 86). Its starting point is an attitude characterized by a willingness to engage the other (Mehta, 2000), a disposition that opens oneself to learn from rather than merely tolerate the other (Hansen, 2011), and a sensitivity toward empathizing with others (Nussbaum, 1997). The terms ‘seeing,’ ‘attitude,’ ‘disposition,’ and ‘sensitivity’ capture the sense of a cosmopolitan orientation in which one is attuned toward a broader human fraternity transcending territorial boundaries (Lu, 2000). Thus, we argue for the importance of cosmopolitan literature pedagogies that involve a reorientation in three areas: approaching literature, not as a platform for enclosed readings, but as an invitational space for ethical encounters; nurturing the literature student, not as a reader with a tourist mindset, but one with an exilic imagination; and reorienting the literature teacher, not as cultural guardian, but as restless cartographer.

Approaching literature: from enclosed readings to ethical encounters

For many teachers of literature, a hybrid of textual practices grounded on reader response criticism, new criticism, and poststructuralist criticism are commonly employed that encourage students to actively respond to texts, perform critical close reading of the formal features of texts, and critique the politics of texts and textual production. The predominant strand in this tapestry is a panoply of Reception Theory approaches focusing on the reader’s interactions and transactions in co-‘creating’ the text. Popularized as Reader Response, classroom practices support readers’ transaction with the text (Rosenblatt, 1994), readers’ unconscious filling of gaps in the text based on prior experiences (Iser, 1972), and readers’ dialogic engagement with interpretive communities (Fish, 1980).

Practices associated with reader response approaches have been widely disseminated, creating the proverbial double-edged sword in literature pedagogies. On the one hand, these practices have liberated the classroom by encouraging multiple responses to texts, by developing students’ self-reflexivity as they become sensitized to their own assumptions within a community of learners, and by connecting texts to students’ experiences resulting in more student-centered teaching. On the other hand, the continued emphasis on aesthetic reading, in which the reader’s attention is centered directly on what he or she is living through, implies that the production of meaning typically occurs through the reader’s interactions with the lifeworld of text—its plot, character, setting, and style. In this sense, reader response approaches may overlook the cosmopolitan potential of literature to serve as invitational spaces for ethical explorations about values, beliefs, and systems within their own society and the world.

We argue that the centricity of the reader in a text-reader transaction should be disrupted to accommodate the perspective of the other, particularly the other who is marginalized, silenced, and discriminated against. A conscious desire to engage diverse others might serve as a starting point for literature discourse. By considering literature as an invitation to ethical exploration, an invitation to engage with another reality, including belief systems and values that are embedded in it, teachers can become sensitized to the kinds of issues, moral dilemmas, and tensions that can be part of classroom discussions. In selecting texts, teachers may ask questions such as: how can texts introduced in the classroom provide a hospitable space for alternative worldviews, realities, and beliefs? Which groups are currently stereotyped in students’ communities and how can their perspectives be included?

Literature, in providing insights into the lived experiences of others, inherently invites ethical contemplation. Take for example, the opening sentences of Ursula Le Guin’s short story, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’: ‘With a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags’ (p. 255). A question worthy of examination after only these opening sentences might be: what would cause anyone to walk away from Omelas as the title suggests? With such a question, we have put the reader on alert to what might be conflictual and ethical contexts within the landscapes of the fictional city Omelas. As we might anticipate, this idyllic world is shattered when the story’s narrator speaks directly to the reader: ‘Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, the city, the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing’ (p. 259). Then, the narrator reveals that under one of the beautiful public buildings, in a small room the size of a broom closet, a young child has been locked up for several years. The child is malnourished, naked, full of sores, and is isolated from everyone else. When the citizens of Omelas visit the child, they are told not to speak a word. In the end, they

all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.

(p. 260)

The story presents two responses—complacent people who turn away from the child to enjoy the grace of life in Omelas and those who choose to leave the city as an overt rejection of Omelas’ values. Does the latter response sufficiently do justice to the oppressed other? At this point, the title takes on new meaning: to act or to walk away? Such a question invites the reader to consider what it means to act justly as well as to consider the practical limits of justice.

Marshall Gregory (2010) highlights three ethical invitations literature extends to readers that, in relation to Le Guin’s story, may generate the following kinds of questions:

1 Invitations to shared feeling with others—Who is othered in this text and how is he or she othered? How does this process of othering compare with forms of othering in your own country and in the world?

2 Invitations to shared beliefs—In what ways does the story depend on our recognition of injustice? How does the implied author’s conception of social injustice compare or contrast with your society or community’s?

3 Invitations to ethical judgment—What ethical theories can we use to judge Omelas? How can these same theories to judging systems of governance be applied to your country as well as other countries?

Such questions push students to connect with real-world injustices in their world. The text is then no longer perceived as an enclosed artifact but an entry point to understanding ethical realities. Further, the invitation to make ethical judgments on characters and value systems in texts means that students should not only be equipped with the skills of aesthetic analysis but should also have some understanding of ethical philosophy. As George Hillocks Jr. (2014) observes, high school literature teachers focus on empowering students to appreciate the formal properties of the text but do not explicitly equip them to handle its ethical, philosophical concepts with the result that students cannot convincingly substantiate their judgments of characters or issues.

Like Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ and Suzanne Collins’ popular Hunger Games trilogy, the characters in Le Guin’s story cannot be sufficiently judged without serious discussions about ethical philosophy such as utilitarianism and its consequences. Starting from Jeremy Bentham’s greatest good for the greatest number maxim, students can consider how individual rights are compromised for the good of the majority in the story and how, in present-day contexts, such logic has been used to justify the use of torture on suspected terrorists (Sandel, 2009). Going further, students can discuss John Stuart Mill’s expansion of Bentham’s utilitarianism that draws attention to the quality of pleasures arising from the consequences of action. From this perspective, the quality of life citizens enjoy at the expense of one child validates their inaction which, whether they ignore or walk away, has the same consequence. A contemporary application of this logic is the justification of modern-day slavery in which the quality of life in economically advanced nations is dependent on sweatshop laborers. In short, when literature is recognized as an important space that invites ethical encounters with individuals whose capacity to live fully has been suppressed, literature discussions may expand beyond aesthetic features of the text or readers’ responses to it so that questions about living ethically in the world and our obligations of justice to others become central to literature discourse.

Nurturing the literature student: from reader with a tourist mindset to one with an exilic imagination

If our approach to literature begins from an ethical orientation, it raises the question about how teachers should envision the kind of literature student they wish to nurture. The ethical invitations we suggested previously are aimed at pushing students to see, think, and feel from the perspective of the other. Vijaydan Detha, a fiction writer from Rajasthan, India, challenges us to think of a story as more than an exploration of another person’s dilemmas and circumstances. In his story ‘A True Calling,’ the opening paragraph provides the reader with this provocation:

Nothing happens to a story if all you do is listen. Nothing happens if all you do is read, or memorize word for word. What matters is if you make the heart of the story part of your very life. This story is one of those.

(para. 1)

The story is an invitation to the reader to inhabit the story, to travel within and in the landscapes of the story. In Detha’s provocation, we see a call to blur or collapse the boundaries of many often-conceived binaries—between self and other, listener and teller, insider and outsider—and not only experience ‘the heart of the story’ temporarily but also to close the physical and ethical distances between self and others represented in the text and carry these into one’s own life.

Literature’s potential in cultivating ethical ways of inhabiting and seeing leads some to fear that it can become a tool for moral education and indoctrination. For example, see Posner’s (1997) essay ‘Against ethical criticism.’ Here, we parse a clear distinction between moral education and ethical education so as not to conflate them. The distinction between morality and ethics can be observed in the difference between the Latin term ‘moral’ which stresses expected social conduct that may be expressed in terms of rules, dos and don’ts, right and wrongs (Haydon, 2006) and the Greek term ‘ethics’ that focuses on reasoning about how to cultivate oneself fully and how to live in relation to others (Noddings, 2003; Williams, 1985). Literature’s essential power is not so much that it offers moral lessons, but that it invites ethical reflection that pushes us to move beyond the self, including the self’s desire for preservation, to enact power over others, and the self’s instinctive drive to read others from his or her own prior knowledge, experiences, and worldview. The kinds of other-centered, ethical questions that literature invites essentially revolve around what it means to live out the Socratic idea of the ‘good life’ which does not refer to a kind of self-centered, comfortable living but a life in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Biographies
• Introduction
• PART I Ways of seeing, ways of teaching
• PART II Readers, texts and contexts
• PART III Rationales for teaching literature
• Index