The paper investigates the ways in which schools can contribute to the prevention of bullying, by gaining insight into a multi-layered structure of school activities that contributes to the positive ...effects of educational work on the development of students' personality and by pointing to the three levels of preventive action that can be carried out on an individual basis (universal, selective, and indicated prevention). Special emphasis is placed on universal prevention, given that science has proved that some school subjects (mother tongue and/or foreign language and literature, history, civic education, religious instruction, art and music lessons) and the extra-curricular activities related to them provide opportunities for this kind of bullying prevention. Focusing on literature instruction, we first look at its pedagogical role, linking the issue of bullying to humanistic and moral education. Literary texts that thematise this issue are very convenient for developing students' socio-emotional competencies, the competencies that are (also) directly linked to attitudes towards bullying and other forms of violence. "Deca" (Children), a short story by Ivo Andrić, stands out among such works represented in the literature curriculum for primary school. By applaying the emphatic-ethical model of reading, we investigate the pedagogical potential of this literary text, trying to point out the key "action" segments in the text which are activated only by a teacher's adequate methodological guidance of students during its collective interpretation.
This study examines literary discussions from Scandinavian lower secondary school classrooms, specifically the different ways in which teachers provide opportunities for students’ development of ...literary competence. Moreover, it discloses what kinds of literary competence these teachers elicit and encourage. Three extended video-recorded discussions, in which a large number of students actively shared their understanding of literary texts, were selected and analysed qualitatively with regard to the interaction between teachers and students and the content of the discussions. It was found that teachers used both open-ended and closed questions to introduce new themes, and that their frequent use of follow-up questions promoted dialogicity. The teachers generally favoured one particular aspect of literary competence, yet several aspects of students’ literary competence were visible in the discussions. For example, students were encouraged to pay attention to content, formal characteristics and contextual issues. Implications for teachers’ literature instruction and for students’ development of literary competence are discussed.
Literary narrative is a highly privileged genre in subject English classrooms in school and university contexts. This article investigates how an explicit instructional focus on the language in this ...literary genre supported language minority students in developing advanced academic literacy. Through a systemic functional linguistics and ethnographic analytic framework, the study explores how an urban school teacher's genre-based pedagogy in literature, implemented with the support of a professional development initiative, afforded her 5th grade students with a meta linguistic awareness of how to use an expanded repertoire of linguistic choices in their genre writing. An SFL analysis of students’ texts over the course of five months reveals how the teacher's explicit focus on intertextuality encouraged her language minority students to borrow and play with lexical patterns, such as repetition, taxonomic categorization, and synonymy from children's literature, to build the genre sequences in their narratives and other academic writing. The concluding section of the paper discusses possible implications, including the importance of an explicit instructional focus on literature as an intertextual resource in teaching writing.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
This article explores the potential of narrative interest for secondary literature education. Narrative is a purposeful construction which is organised with the intent of having effects on readers. ...For rhetorical narratologists, narrative is driven by the production of narrative gaps - suspense, curiosity, and surprise - which in turn drive reader interest in their potential fulfilment. Drawing from rhetorical-functionalist approaches to literature, I rethink contemporary perspectives on reader response to focus on the pedagogical implications of narrative interest, suggesting how English teachers might use narrative interest to explore narrative openings, the power of narrator perspective, and the ethics of storytelling. This reorientation of instruction balances specific reader responses with the textual production of narrative interest through genre forms, narrator voice, and narrative organisation.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Unreliable narration is a fascinating phenomenon. When it is uncertain whether the narrated events can be trusted, opportunities for interpretation arise. This applies not only to classical ...literature but also to children's literature and picture books, as well as various media such as radio plays, films, and even video games. Instances of deceptive narration repeatedly occur, or it becomes clear only gradually that the described events could not have happened as presented. Even exhibitions can address or stage deception, illusion, and unreliability. Pedagogically, this opens up opportunities to stimulate literary learning, introduce aesthetic experiences, and promote critical media literacy. This volume examines the phenomenon of unreliable narration for the first time from a transmedia and didactic perspective. It explores various media and their characteristics, offers systematic extensions of the possibilities for describing reliability and unreliability, and develops concrete didactic models and positions of this phenomenon in the digital age.
In this study, the concept cognitive activation is used to assess and discuss teaching quality in Swedish and Norwegian lower secondary literature instruction. Drawing on video data from 54 ...classrooms, it investigates the cognitive activation potential (CAP) of tasks and reading activities. It also investigates how and to what extent teachers, through their instructional support, increase or decrease the CAP of these tasks. The objective CAP of 280 tasks was estimated, ranging from low to high on a four-point scale. As tasks are not always carried out in the way teachers initially intended, the realised CAP of all the tasks was also estimated. In one third of all the sampled tasks, literary texts were read. During more active work with texts, the objective CAP was mostly of a medium-high level. However, students were seldom required to analyse, compare, and interpret literary texts. The realised CAP often remained unchanged by teachers’ instructional support. This suggests that there is room for teachers to improve and increase their interaction with students in ways that may enhance the latter’s literary competence. Implications for students’ learning and development of literary understanding are discussed.
To identify expert poets' cognitive processes as they compose poetry, we asked 10 expert poets and 10 novice writers of poetry to think aloud as they composed a poem. Compared to the novices, expert ...poets revealed an associative playfulness and surrendering of consciousness, similar to that shown in research on general creativity in domains such as art, music, and science. Experts also demonstrated significantly more evidence of deliberate procedures and active revision. Novices rarely revised their poems. With regard to meaning, experts made significantly more comments about how the text was meaningful, in particular how textual elements evoke and amplify meaning, than about what the text merely meant. The novices commented more on what the text meant than how the text was meaningful. In discussing the results, we propose a model of the cognitive processes involved in poetic composition, and explore implications for instruction in school and post-secondary educational settings.
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BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
This study investigates the use of literary texts in 178 video-recorded LA lessons across 47 lower-secondary Norwegian classrooms. It offers a systematic overview of how literary texts are read, ...used, and discussed across classrooms and investigates instructional practices related to literary texts and functions of texts in instruction. The results reveal a strong genre discourse across classrooms; reading literary texts is strongly connected to students’ own writing, focusing on generic text features that are relevant for text across the same genre. With one exception, shared instruction did not include novels except as individual pleasure reading. Findings herein align with concerns raised by scholars about literature’s role in language arts. They surface a rather reductionist use of literature across classrooms. Despite strong arguments and empirical support for students reading literature in school, such practices are poorly reflected in classrooms in this study. Our main contribution lies in the exploration of the practices by which adolescents are socialized into literary reading. We provide an exhaustive look into the everyday practices related to literary texts in language arts lessons and the ways these texts are framed, read, and discussed in education.
Purpose
This study aims to explore the perceived barriers that a secondary English teacher faced when attempting to discuss racial injustice through young adult literature in Mississippi.
...Design/methodology/approach
The authors rely on Critical Whiteness Studies and qualitative methods to explore the following research question: What are the barriers that a White ELA teacher perceives when teaching about racial injustice through The Hate U Give?
Findings
The authors found that there were several perceived barriers to discussing modern racial injustice in the Mississippi ELA classroom. The participating teacher indicated the following barriers: a lack of racial literacy, fears of discomfort and an urge to avoid politics.
Originality/value
Much has been written about the urgent need for antiracist teaching practices in secondary English classes. This article explores the barriers a white ELA teacher perceived when attempting to discuss modern racial injustice through literature instruction in a white context of the “four pandemics” (Ladson-Billings, 2021).
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