Objects to Learn about and Objects for Learning 1

Which Teaching Practices for Which Issues?

Joel Bisault, Roselyne Le Bourgeois, Jean-Francois Themines, Mickael Le Mentec, Celine Chauvet-Chanoine

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781786306715
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119902164
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Teaching Methods

Resulting from a conference that took place in Amiens, France, in June 2019, this book examines the place and role of objects centered in teaching practices from kindergarten to university, both in the context of France and elsewhere. These "objects for learning" are considered in their physicality as productions, work or signs that are used for learning. They become "objects to learn about" when the object itself is the learning objective.

This book offers a cross-disciplinary perspective, linking the different disciplinary fields studied and the many reference sources used by the authors. This two-volume work offers an overview of current research on the subject, with this first volume introducing the questions addressed and then going on to investigate the relationship between objects and languages, looking at objects at the heart of early learning.

PART 1
Objects and Language(s)

1
The Children’s Illustrated Literature Book in an Elementary School English Session: An Object Considered in its Materiality?

1.1. The origins of questioning and theoretical framing

The teaching and learning of English has, for a number of years, included authentic illustrated books from children’s literature as teaching materials. Unlike didactic illustrated books that are created to meet the needs of teaching and learning, authentic illustrated books exist outside school: they are written and published by English speakers for English-speaking children. To quote Tardieu’s definition (2014), what we have here is “original documents” (p. 34). Since the 2000s, there has been a proliferation in resources for use by school teachers planning to work from picture books in English. Some that come to mind include the pioneering book by Ellis and Brewster (2002), Tell it Again! The New Storytelling Handbook for Primary Teachers (translated and published in French in 2007), and the more recent methods of Choquet et al. (2012) and Hanot (2017).

Training and research are increasingly taking an interest in this children’s literature that is used for the purpose of language learning and discovering cultures, and also, more broadly, to raise awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity, as shown in the latest issue of Langues Modernes entitled “Littérature jeunesse et enseignement des langues” (Children’s Literature and Language Teaching; 2019/2). Illustrated books stemming from this children’s literature, whose complexity, behind an apparent accessibility, has been underlined by Nodelman (2008) and Deleuze (2014), are thus used as resources and their inclusion in teaching and learning sequences raises many questions. Here we focus on the way illustrated books are integrated as objects in the lesson plans created and put into practice by elementary school teachers.

Figure 1.1. Working from copies of the picture book The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Figure 1.2. Working from reading the picture book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

It was as a result of two real-life experiences of observing teaching practice that I began to think about taking the materiality of the book into consideration in the learning process. Below is a photograph of a second-grade lesson working on the lexical dimension of the picture book The Very Hungry Caterpillar by E. Carle, using photocopies of the book posted on the board¹ (Figure 1.1), and also a photograph of a Kindergarten lesson looking at the picture book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by the same author as part of an introduction to languages project² (Figure 1.2).

As Van der Linden explains:

An illustrated book associates two languages, text and image. […] However, reading an illustrated book does not consist solely of reading the text and images. That is part of it, but it is much more. Reading an illustrated book also involves appreciating the use of a format, frames, the relationship of the cover and front and end sheets to their content, linking the illustrations to each other, deciding the reading order within the space on the page, putting the poetry of the text into resonance with that of the image, savoring the silences of one vis-à-vis the other. (Van der Linden 2006, p. 8)

What is stressed by the literary critic who specializes in children’s illustrated books is the need to take into consideration the material aspect of the book. This aspect is also at the heart of the preoccupations of the issue of Français Aujourd’hui entitled “Les nouveaux livres-objets” (The New Book–Objects; 2014) that explores the fundamental question of the impact of the object orientation of the picture book on readers and their reading experiences.

Whilst the articles referred to here are concerned mainly with picture books in French, I wondered what work based around the book and also handling it could bring to the learning process in Modern Foreign Languages (MFLs) sessions and what its instrumentation could involve. This question echoes Delbrayelle’s work (2014) stemming from a French session, from which we pick up the theoretical framework based on the work of Rabardel (1995) and Bisault (2010). Is the appreciable experience, which can involve the different senses and also the reader’s affect, really at issue and does it assist with the process of learning English? Does the construction of a picture book by pupils make it possible, when put in place, to keep a record of the project and the emotions that may have accompanied it?

1.2. Constitution of the corpus

With regard to the methodological framework, it must first be explained that whilst the authentic picture book was introduced into the classroom several decades ago, its use remains very limited in the education authority where I was able to carry out research. Continuing education around English-language picture books in elementary school, which involved around a hundred teachers at schools in the Caen urban district and its surroundings in 2018–2019, showed that only one teacher had made use of this resource to teach English. At the training sessions that I ran for school teachers between 2010 and 2014, which were attended by 25 teachers on each occasion, less than 5% of the attendees whom I encountered were using authentic picture books. Academic advisors are initiating various projects centered around the use of English children’s literature and the initial training of school teachers is developing the work of didacticizing illustrated books, but practices do not yet reflect frequent usage of these materials. Our purpose here is not to go into the reasons for the low usage. We might simply state that it echoes a deep sense of a lack of expertise among teachers despite the institutional requirement for all school teachers to deliver MFL teaching since the introduction of modern foreign languages into the syllabuses in 2002. According to the IGEN’s report (2013), actual teaching timetables are still below regulatory timetables: they are “not complied with at all in 90% of elementary schools, and complied with a little better in junior schools”. The same report notes the following: “In spite of support from regional academic advisors (CPCs), teachers nevertheless continue to experience difficulties in implementing MFL syllabuses.”³ This sense of a lack of expertise is also underlined by Prat (2017), who moreover raises the issue of teacher training in this area. The levers found to overcome this feeling of incompetence are thus very often m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface From a Conference to a Book on the Role of Objects in the Practices of Teachers
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction In the Teaching Resources Store Cupboard: Investigating the Functions and Uses of Objects in the World of School
• Introduction to the Subject Didactics and Socialization Processes: Walking Between Objects, Things and Worlds
• PART 1 Objects and Language(s)
• PART 2 Objects and Early Learning
• List of Authors
• Index
• Summary of Volume 2
• End User License Agreement