Teaching on Solid Ground: Knowledge Foundations for the Teacher of English
226
Teaching on Solid Ground: Knowledge Foundations for the Teacher of English
226eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781462537679 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Guilford Publications, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 12/03/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 226 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 11 - 17 Years |
About the Author
John V. Knapp, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of English at Northern Illinois University. He is the author or editor of several books and over 50 articles and reviews on literature, family systems psychology, literary criticism, and literature instruction. Since 2007, he has been editor of the literary journal Style. As an English teacher and later a professor, Dr. Knapp has educated students at every level, from middle school to doctoral seminars.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Knowing the Territory of Literature
At the university where we teach, posted on the bulletin board for students in the teacher licensure program is a "Strongly Recommended Reading List." An introduction emphasizes the teacher candidate's need to build substantial knowledge of significant literary texts before entering into the methods courses, and exhorts the candidates to read the recommended texts and track progress toward completing the list. The list includes the following titles: The Odyssey, The Iliad, the Old Testament, The Aeneid, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, selected plays by Aristophanes and Sophocles, Plato's Republic and Meno, Aristotle's Poetics, and translations of The Divine Comedy and Beowulf. A major implication of the list is that teaching literature requires a developing level of expertise, one that begins at minimum with a basic understanding of the building blocks, the texts of the discipline, constituting such expert knowledge and practice. Consequently, the authors of "the list" assumed that novice teachers of English in middle schools and high schools should be familiar with classic literature, even if they never engage their own students with these texts.
As two professors in the same teacher preparation program, we have disagreed about the list — both the specific titles and the idea of a list of "strongly recommended" texts. In fact, we disagree about several issues about preparing candidates, although we converge about some core principles. As we share our disagreements and convergences on these pages, we invite readers to reflect on their own positions, perhaps taking the opportunity to refine thinking about what English teachers need to know in order to teach English in a principled way in middle school and high school.
According to John, the thinking behind the recommended reading is consistent for those who consider the teaching of literature as an acquired expertise, one that begins early in life with the pleasures of reading stories and then, over time, also includes noticing that story patterns develop in the ways tales are both told and received. Some readers appear naturally to gravitate toward stories that reflect their own time, situations in life, and familiar people, while others prefer literary experiences that take them out of their own world and into domains and lives very different from their own. The central issue confronting all teachers of literature is to achieve a balance between these two tendencies: encourage those students looking primarily for confirmation about the already familiar to explore other times, cultures, and varieties of characters, human or otherwise. David Lowenthal insists, "The past remains integral to us all, individually and collectively. We must concede the ancients their place. ... But their place is not simply back there, in a separate and foreign country; it is assimilated in ourselves and resurrected into an ever-changing present" (p. 412; quoted in Santirocco, 2016, p. 5). Conversely, some teachers urge those who want primarily imaginative versions of unknown people and places to look more closely at what they believe to be seemingly familiar. In a diverse classroom, selecting texts that convince some reluctant readers to expand their reading is a real challenge for many teachers.
One way to attack the problems just mentioned is prescriptive, and a well-known example may be seen with Hirsch's argument for cultural literacy. In his influential text, Hirsch (1988) reviews research literature about reading and accurately notes that a reader's prior reading experience will influence, and perhaps facilitate, the current reading experience. As a general precept, the more one has read, the easier it is to read other texts for understanding and appreciation: prior learning influences current learning. Few educators disagree with this part of Hirsch's argument, but he has had his critics for other reasons. Part of the controversy focuses on Hirsch's prescription for what constitutes appropriate background knowledge in a diverse cultural context; critics claim that his text choices come from a literary tradition that is primarily white and Western, and that they are too narrow to represent a "shared" cultural experience. Those refuting Hirsch's lists argue that every student brings a fund of knowledge to the variety of literacy experiences required in schools, although that knowledge base may not align with the texts that Hirsch values. And what was arguable in 1988 — the presumption of a monolithic and stable social culture — has been settled in the face of an undeniably diverse population in the 21st century. If our culture were stable — à la British literature of the later 19th century — it would be considerably easier to catalog what one should have read as a teacher prepared to introduce other learners to the world of quality literature. John argues, however, that cultural diversity is only one part of the problem even though some have made it the central issue in literary education.
Over the years we have heard preservice teachers complain about the expectations that they should be familiar with the works appearing on the "Strongly Recommended" list. In some instances, the teacher candidates recall that their early enthusiasm for reading, especially for reading popular fiction and various series targeting adolescent readers, influenced their decision to pursue a license to teach English. These reading enthusiasts rarely recall having read anything on the "Strongly Recommended" list, making it difficult for them to see the necessity for an English teacher to be familiar with these texts from a traditional literature canon: they had never met these texts along their path to the university and saw no imperative to introduce younger readers to them. Other skeptics among the prospective teachers are those who have experienced clinical placements in middle schools where they have encountered some readers reading at a third- or fourth-grade level. The preservice teachers question how their familiarity with Dante, Homer, Aeschylus, or even Shakespeare will help them as they work with reluctant and struggling readers.
While we appreciate that our university students are sometimes skeptical of the course of study that requires them to read some difficult texts, and we understand that many of the preservice teachers will never have an opportunity to teach The Aeneid, The Republic, or even Romeo and Juliet, we do see a need for emerging English teachers to have a strong background in literature. We recognize with Shulman (1987) that teachers need to have substantial pedagogical content knowledge. Such knowledge marks a major difference between one's own growth as an adolescent or early adult reader — for whom the pleasures of the text are paramount — versus an expert teacher who must know how and why some texts are effortlessly able to pull in the reader into its story world. Coplan (2004), a well-known literary critic, mentions that research in narrative study "all points in one direction, namely, that people — or stand-ins for people — are the primary vehicles by which we make sense of stories. Readers typically adapt their point of view to one or another of the story's characters, usually the protagonist, and make their way through the narrative by tracking that character's actions" (p. 142; quoted in Vermeule, 2010, p. 41). Hence, the expert literature teacher also understands why others require the help of someone more knowledgeable to guide the emerging reader in understanding characters they may not automatically like, especially those from an unknown and relatively alien universe. Even the teacher working with the struggling sixth-grade reader needs to know much about the way literary texts work and should be able to help students distinguish between quality literature that challenges their minds and emotions from predictable and gratuitous pulp.
The tension for us, as university faculty charged with preparing new teachers, comes in defining what would consist of adequate pedagogical content knowledge in the territory of literature. What do middle school and high school teachers of English need to know about imaginative literature? We are resolute in arguing that literature teaching, just as any of the STEM disciplines, requires a level of domain expertise for the instructor to teach effectively in any of the grades or ability levels, from middle through high school and beyond. Such expertise includes some ordinary technical knowledge, for example, of poetic enjambment and line integrity, fictional narrative differences, and dramatic scenic contrasts in tragedies. Expertise also requires the teacher to have experienced a broad and diverse range of literary reading: readings from multiple genres, time periods, and even languages (in translation); and knowledge of the political, cultural, and scientific history into which many of such works are set; as the novice teacher grows in his or her knowledge of the primary works, we also believe it will be useful to develop some understanding of the previous conversations (criticism) about the literature being taught.
TEACHING LITERATURE THEN AND NOW
As we explain in our Introduction, our approach to thinking about what an English teacher needs to know about literature (and writing and language in other chapters) is dialogic, taking the form of a conversation — between author and reader certainly, but also among readers, both in the classroom and across printed reactions and assessments and online responses. Applebee (1996), in his influential Curriculum as Conversation, says,
A considerable part of teachers' tacit knowledge of the academic tradition and of pedagogy is expressed in the conventions they establish for discourse within their classrooms. In my studies of the ways curriculum emerges over time in individual classrooms, the presence of such a set of tacit conventions of discourse has been one of the most consistent features of accomplished teaching and learning. These conventions provide the essential backdrop against which everything else takes place. (p. 105)
These conventions include, of course, the "form and content of discussion and interaction." They also include "what topics and issues are considered appropriate as part of the English language arts in general and literature in particular (ranging from textual analysis to issues in contemporary life)" (Applebee, 1996, p. 105). So, in thinking about the pedagogical content knowledge for the teaching of literature, it is impossible to separate the text selections (and who gets to select them) from the mode of discourse that distinguishes the class that encounters the texts. How a group of learners and their teacher talk about a text and what they talk about sets the priorities and reveals a teacher's conception of how students learn about literature. We will say more about modes of discourse in Chapters 2 and 5.
Long ago, Tom was a student in John's literature and methods classes at the university. We both recall the perspective about what was important to know then, some of which remains important, and more that has evolved or changed. We also appreciate recent demands to reform or at least expand that perspective now in a contemporary teaching world. We re-create our ongoing dialogue with a certain tongue-in-cheek style, and do so because we believe that one can better describe and more clearly evaluate what one believes in (or used to) with some emotion rather than merely mentioning philosophical stances in a relatively intellectual and detached way. We acknowledge areas of disagreement, but, at the end of each chapter, we emphasize what we still have in common and analyze what we can agree needs change or reconsideration. Although many changes in contemporary education have been for the better, not everything in the contemporary classroom is necessarily an improvement over past practices and attitudes. We judge that many changes have been merely cosmetic, with the core practices remaining essentially the same as they were 50 years ago. As with cultural and academic changes generally, there are trade-offs, past and present, and we think those are worth exploring.
John had much to do with the "Strongly Recommended List," and he ruffled some feathers in the department when he posted the document to guide the preservice teachers. His insistence on the necessity of being familiar with the works on the list centers on the idea of "expertise." Although it seems obvious that one cannot study, much less teach, advanced chemistry or physics without some attention to calculus and the languages of mathematics generally, some teacher-trainees, nonliterary humanists, and even a few English teachers do not typically consider their subject domain as a craft requiring expert knowledge — among other things, via mastery of classical literature. Many writers, past and present, do, however, and one only need consider one of Toni Morrison's novels to become struck by how much of the Bible she employs, both thematically and imagistically, in her novels and how much such "background knowledge" of it the reader must acquire to comprehend her writing even at a basic level. Other examples of needed background knowledge abound as one considers the influence, for example, of Thomas More's Utopia in comprehending more recent attempts at creating ideal societies in such diverse story worlds as Francis Harper's Iola Leroy, Orwell's 1984, or the film series The Matrix.
Whether the reader learns about older ideal societies, or biblical stories, sayings, and images through lectures, TED Talks, or book reading, the reader who has developed some expertise in biblical lore will very likely find Morrison's novels deeper and richer than those who have not. The narrative voice of Morpheus in The Matrix would then not appear quite so unworldly to those who are familiar with Winston Smith's tormentor O'Brien in 1984, or Raphael Hythloday's in More's Utopia. The inside jokes would be funnier as well, if Neo doesn't know that the lecturer, Morpheus, is the god both of dreams but also sleep; that Smith, the quintessential Englishman, has an inquisitor with an Irish name; and More's Hythloday means "talker of nonsense" in Greek. So "appropriate" background knowledge means paying some attention to the originator of a given book's conversation, the author, and investigating what he or she expects or at least hopes that the reader will bring to the conversation. Rabinowitz and Smith (1997) call those who fulfill such expectations as joining or becoming members of the "authorial audience" (p. 5), the audiences of his or her time a given author assumes would understand the cultural context of his work. In the literature written in the English language, that audience contains an evolving group of members for over a thousand years. John poses these questions: Who are we to dismiss hundreds of other minds who have lived over tens of centuries and who have considered many, if not most, of the same reading problems we now face? Do we not owe it to them to at least think about the issues they have raised many times in the past? Do we really want our students and offspring to live only in an eternal present?
Hence, much that is involved in the act of reading literary texts requires a familiarity with the bodies of literature to which authors refer. Such allusions are powerful symbols that call up whole narratives and histories. Conventions of modes of literature and specific genres become conventions because there is a tradition that a contemporary writer might repeat or reject; but an understanding and respect for the tradition or the significance of its violation will depend on knowing what the tradition has been. The poetry theorist Reuven Tsur (2010) refers to several of these older traditions as cognitive fossils, saying that many "cultural and poetic conventions are verbal constructs that reflect active cognitive ... processes and constraints that become fossilized in time. ... The use of such verbal devices may remain sporadic ... [but, with] the sporadic, sometimes ingenious inventions of creative individuals may become generally accepted conventions — sometimes even in unrelated cultures" (pp. 496–497). As has been mentioned many times before, familiarity with earlier literatures and/or allusions to them requires a joint responsibility of both author and reader. Allusiveness only works for readers if they notice both the allusion and the reason why it has been employed. Authors refer ideally to works they can assume the average reader in their authorial audience knows or should know, and readers, ideally, have consumed enough cultural material to comprehend those references that go beyond the relative provinciality of everyday adolescent life.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Teaching on Solid Ground"
by .
Copyright © 2019 The Guilford Press.
Excerpted by permission of The Guilford Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword, Carol D. LeeIntroduction: The Importance of Pedagogical Content for the Teaching of English
1. Knowing the Territory of Literature
2. Teaching in the Territory of Literature
3. The Territory of Writing: What Makes for Good Writing?
4. The Territory of Writing: How Can We Facilitate Growth?
5. The Territory of Oral Discourse
6. The Territory of Language: What Do We Teach When We Teach Language?
7. What English Teachers Should Know
Appendix A. What is the “Business” of Teaching English?: Profiles of English Teachers in Action
Appendix B. Knowledge about Mode and Form: What Is a Tragedy?
Appendix C. Practice with Rules of Notice and Rules of Significance
Appendix D. Applying Rules of Notice and Signification
Appendix E. Discovering Rules of Configuration
Appendix F. A Case for Discussion and Written Response
Appendix G. Drawing on Knowledge about Drama: Reading a Shakespeare Play as Performance
Appendix H. Using Language Analysis to “Open” a Novel
References
Interviews
Teachers of English, language arts, literature, and composition in grades 6–12; staff developers; teacher educators and graduate students. Will serve as a supplemental text in middle/secondary teacher education courses.