Fresh air in the classroom
Teaching literature to young people
Corpus Christi College Oxford
7 – 13 April 2002
The Oxford conference uses lectures and workshops to explore current theoretical issues and teaching practice, and is aimed specifically at those teaching English literature overseas.
- How can we build on live literature events and encourage people to read books regularly?
- How do we reach wider and younger audiences, future decision-makers and opinion-formers through literature?
- How can we make literature relevant to young people today and can it compete with films and computer games?
Schools are where it should start. ‘Fresh Air in the Classroom’, the 2002 Oxford Conference on the teaching of literature addressed these issues and others. Younger readers need and want to be given ‘maps’ to direct their reading. Many schools are now hosting reading groups, meeting both physically and on-line. This conference looked at ways of developing further projects and networks to bring ‘fresh air’ to teaching materials and methods around the world and keep up-to-date with changing trends.
Format
Through practical workshops, plenaries and discussions, teachers of literature to young people around the world exchanged ideas and best practice and help literature achieve longer-term impact in the form of new materials development and curriculum design.
Editor's introduction
The naming of a conference, like the naming of cats, 'is a difficult matter', and at the planning stage, we toyed with a number of witty titles – but rather like prospective parents who have an equal right of veto on each other’s ideas for naming their unborn child, the organisers of the 17th Oxford Conference on the Teaching of Literature eventually settled for the conference equivalent of ‘Tom’ or ‘Jane’ – 'Fresh Air in the Classroom'! The subtitle – 'Teaching literature to young people' – was intentionally vague in not specifying how young these young people were supposed to be. We were aware that over the past few years the conference had focused on the needs and interests of teachers working at tertiary level, and we wanted to address the context of younger learners. Until the applications began to come in, we didn’t know quite how ‘younger’ would be interpreted, although what we had in mind was the whole range of secondary teaching, perhaps extending to university level. And this is very much the way it turned out, though we were also pleased to welcome some teachers working with really young learners, as well as a number of teacher trainers.
Plenary papers
In the opening paper, 'Literary texts and cultural contexts: Voices talking about everything in every possible way’, Alan Pulverness (Norwich Institute for Language Education) argues in favour of texts that bring a host of different voices into the classroom – voices belonging to young and old, to men and women, to black and white; speaking voices and SMS voices; voices that might be imaginary, idiosyncratic or prejudiced, but voices that can give students a sense of the texture of life in Britain today.
Claudia Ferradas Moi (University of Quilmes/I.E.S. en Lenguas Vivas, Buenos Aires) takes the conference 'down the paths of electronic literature' in her paper (which gives the 2003 conference its title), 'Reading Screens: down the paths of electronic literature.' The screens in this case belong to the PC (or perhaps to the palmtop), and taking the weaving of Tennyson’s 'Lady of Shalott' as her point of departure, Claudia explores the brief history of hyperfiction, before outlining the pedagogic potential of this new literary form, as well as addressing some of its possible drawbacks. The plenary paper was developed for the 18th Conference in 2003, and the expanded version of that paper is included in those proceedings.
Other plenary papers (not included here) were presented John McRae (University of Nottingham) on motivating students to read; Julia Eccelshare (The Guardian newspaper) on writing for young people. There were also workshops on creative writing (by novelist Leone Ross), and on teaching contemporary texts and introducing literary theory (by Robert Eaglestone, University of London and Barbara Bleiman English and Media Centre)
Participant's papers
Participants’ papers were loosely arranged in five strands: Classroom Approaches, Working with Texts, Focus on Young Learners, Cultural Issues and Alternatives, though for the purposes of this collection, the first two have been subsumed under the heading of Classroom Approaches.
Participants’ papers 1 – Classroom approaches
Milena Blazic's 'From reader-response to writer-response theory' (Assistant Professor for Literary Didactics and Creative Writing at the University of Ljubljana) advocates an approach that echoes some of the concerns of the 15th Oxford Conference ('From Critical Reading to Creative Writing', April 2000), in particular the work of Rob Pope, as she extends the notion of reader response to what she calls writer-response. To illustrate the potential richness of the approach in the classroom, she proposes a prodigious range of hypertextual and creative intertextual responses to a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale.
The other two papers in this section provide detailed examples of classroom procedures for dealing respectively with a short-story and a poem. Breda Arnejšek (a teacher at Poljane Grammar School in Ljubljana), writing 'In favour of short-stories', demonstrates her approach to a popular Roald Dahl story, with tasks to activate students’ content schemata before reading, to encourage them to predict while reading and to respond creatively after reading. Chris Rose (teacher/arts manager at the British Council in Naples) presents 'a simple practical activity' designed to introduce – and help students to interpret – a contemporary poem ('Suitcases' by Roger Robinson) that can also serve 'as a creative writing activity... as a language activity, or as an introduction to contemporary UK black writing'. Or, as Chris points out, 'as all of those things at the same time'.
Christian Holzmann (University of Vienna) presented a paper on teenage literature and ways of developing the habit of reading. 'More of the same or something completely different' is also included here is his PowerPoint presentation 'Books do Furnish a room: Reading Steps in ELT.'
Other presentations dealing with classroom approaches were by Seong Je Kim from Seoul ('Resistance in learning English plays through Dramaturgy: A case study of Korean University students'), Sudeshna Chatterjee from Mumbai ('A case study on the issues arising out of teaching English: Teaching Literature to a student body of fifty-one per class, essentially from a non-English speaking family background') and Gerry McIntosh from the British Council in Barcelona ('Many Problems. Any Solutions? TV, Tape and Text') in which Gerry looked at ways of using TV adaptations of an Iain Banks novel and an Irvine Welsh short story.
Participants’ papers 2 – Focus on young learners
Both Carmen Pérez Diez in 'The role of children’s and young adults’ fiction in the teaching of English as a second language: a personal view' (lecturer and research assistant at the University of León, Spain) and Cristina Thomson in ‘It’s not the kids, stupid’(lecturer and teacher educator at the Escuela Normal Superior en Lenguas Vivas 'J. F. Kennedy', Buenos Aires) confront the perennial problem of reluctant teenage readers and come to similar conclusions, arguing for the motivational quality of literature specially written for younger readers. Carmen finds that children’s and teenage literature can prove enjoyable and engaging even for those ESP students who characteristically assign a very low priority to the reading of literary texts. Cristina, likewise, is convinced of the pedagogic value of literature that is specially written – or specially selected – for younger learners. Her criteria of variety, interest and strategic presentation suggest a principled framework that could equally well be adopted by teachers of older learners.
A further presentation in this strand was given by Bohuslav Manek from the University of Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic, on 'Children’s Literature in the Czech classroom'.
Participants’ papers 3 – Cultural issues
Clarinda Choh's 'Selecting the right text in a multicultural setting: the challenges ahead' (teacher in the Gifted Education Programme at The Chinese High School in Singapore) analyses the specific needs of Singaporean education and examines the role that literature can play in developing what she calls 'the country’s heartware'. As a multicultural society, Singapore is a particularly fertile context for assigning a role to literature in promoting cross-cultural understanding, and Clarinda identifies a number of specific objectives for the literature-and-culture classroom that should strike a chord elsewhere in the world. Genoveva Vilumsone (a secondary and college teacher from Valmeira in Latvia) in 'Challenges using George Orwell’s Animal Farm in the ELT classroom expresses a more intra-cultural concern, as she looks at ways in which a specific text can be taught in the secondary classroom. A further presentation in this strand was given by Sabitha Thekke Prakkottuthody (a lecturer in the Department of English at Kiori Mal College, Delhi). Echoing Stanley Fish, Sabitha posed the question 'Is there an India in this Classroom?' and interrogated the 'Identity of the Nation in the Postcolonial Classroom'.
Participants’ papers 4 – Alternatives
Manjula Duraiswamy's 'Literature and Emotional Intelligence' (a teacher and trainer from Chennai, India) relates the concept Emotional Intelligence, popularised by Daniel Goleman, to Stevick’s emphasis on the social dimension of language learning, with some indications of how these ideas might apply to the reading of Alfred Noyes’ poem 'The Highwayman'. In 'Visualising imagery: using visual response to enhance literary understanding and appreciation', Claire Mkinsi (Head of English at Rabat American School in Morocco) explores ways in which readers can 'become as little children' in expressing an aesthetic response to literary texts through a wide variety of visual channels. Festus Fru Ndeh's 'Orature, a facilitating tool for a literature-based English language learning: the case of Cameroon' adopts the term ‘orature’ (i.e. oral literature) from the Kenyan writer, Micere Mugo, to discuss the role of folklore and the oral tradition in the teaching of literature.
We hope this collection of papers from diverse contexts will prove as inspiring as the presentations were for us all at the conference, and that they will encourage teachers in many corners of the world to let the winds of change enter their classrooms.
Alan Pulverness
Claudia Ferradas Moi
Speakers
The conference was chaired by Alan Pulverness (author, consultant and trainer with Norwich Institute for Language Education) and Claudia Ferradas Moi (T S Eliot Bilingual Studies Centre, Banfield, Buenos Aires). There were a range of writers and professionals speaking at the event: Anne Fine, the Children’s Laureate, Matthew Sweeney, Leone Ross, Bernard MacLaverty, John McRae, Bob Eaglestone, Jeff Wood, Paul Munden and Barbara Bleiman.
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