Traditional schemes of work intend to ‘foster a love of reading’, and attempt this through prescriptivist reading dogma. This fails to teach the decoding strategies needed to understand literary texts, and you cannot love what you do not understand.
Over 20 years of teaching in the capacity as a supply teacher, permanent FT teacher and HOD, I’ve noticed a recurring structure to Literature schemes of work. That is, the scheme of work focuses on reading the full text, engaging with the story as an item of fiction, prioritising ‘enjoyment’ of literature and the recall of story elements. But I’m not convinced that the story is the be-all-and-end-all for Literature. Revering the story as the keystone of the subject might just be missing the point.
I think the argument for a Literature curriculum which focuses on fully-engaged whole-text consumption has traditionally gone thus;
- students must learn to love literature, which can only be achieved through reading whole texts,
- that disengagement with reading is really a deficiency from a ‘normal’ which needs to be ‘fixed’ by the curriculum;
- reading is a life-long skill that must be cultivated into the child through modelling,
- literacy is at worryingly low levels and the solution is to deploy more deep reading;
- students cannot analyse what they have not read, nor understood,
- reading is enjoyable and students will read until they have learnt this plain and simple truth,
- an inability to analyse literary texts is an outcome of limited reading and engagement with the text.
All of these are valid in some way, but I am not convinced that the best intentions of a reading centered approach to literature is making ‘readers’ out of our students, nor is it making them ‘critical thinkers’.
The difficulty of accomodation
There are successes obtained through these curriculum – students who come to love the texts we read and go on to perform admirably well when being certified. Often those successes are found in students whose love of reading was nurtured through their initial upbringing and not as an outcome of the curriculum. Students who do not love to read often go on to despise the prescriptive nature of reading in Literature. They don’t enjoy the texts, they don’t enjoy the sounds of their own voices, they don’t enjoy being challenged by literature.
And why should one text impact reading engagement in a mixed ability setting? In a year group of 120 students, with reading ages spanning 8years to 16+years, one text cannot hope to meet the needs of all. 120 different personalities and interests, from football to dance, chess to doom-scrolling; no single text impacts such a wide audience. Arguably, prescribing the reading of one text is likely to alienate the majority because reading is no innately or a priori an inclusive activity. Texts each require some literacy level, some cultural capital, some intertextual reading – this is what we call the decoding strategies that lead to the ideal reader. The ideal reader is able to connect with the message of the writer, and those who lack the decoding strategies of a shared reading culture will stand outside of the authorised readings – excluded. Hence we rely upon the dominant strategy for increasing reading inclusion; more reading increases access to the decoding strategies used by engaged readers.
The paradox of reading
Paradoxically, the more this structure of material-centric reading fails students, the more it seems to reinforce the need for being material-centric, as if the poison is actually the cure; the reading that puts students off, if forced down with a spoon full of sugar, will become the cultivate a love of reading.
There is an alternative structure, to deprioritize the text entirely and instead focus on the disciplinary field of enquiry – the substantive knowledge that forms the basis of the disciplinary field. Benjamin Bloom seemed to refer to this as the methodological element. He presents methodological knowledge as a higher taxonomical level of knowledge than the material itself. Bloom’s taxonomy suggests that the material must be understood before the methodological can be applied to it, and that the taxonomy containing material and methodological is not co-linear; material precedes methods. They do not grow together. It is taxonomical in the same way that humans are taxonomically after primates.
But I’m not sure that a taxonomy is actually the right way to think about Literature studies (or maybe any cognitive form of knowledge). I argue that in any analytical setting, one needs knowledge of the material being studied and at the same time some methodological knowledge to make computational observations. I cannot look at a bicycle that doesn’t work and know that it doesn’t work, if I don’t have some cognitive model, some tools, some knowledge of working bicycles from which to draw conclusion. Any analytical process requires, even at the very first steps of observation, some methodological knowledge. For Bloom, knowledge of the material comes first, to this is applied the tools of disciplinary analysis – you cannot analyse what you do not have. For me, methodological and material knowledge are co-linear, growing together at roughly equal rates – you cannot understand enough about either in isolation.
Resolving the material or methodology problem
An alternative structure to delivering Literature would be to elevate the methodological knowledge as sequentially preceding the material knowledge. It would prioritise how to read, not what to read. Inversing the logic means that we talk to students about what authors are doing and why, before we begin reading. We give students the way to decode the meaning of texts before we go into the text itself, gradually increasing the range of tools alongside the range of textual detail. The tools become the ways and means of reading that enables access to texts. When the methodological knowledge is seen as the decoding strategy, it would make sense that students struggle with a material centric curriculum – we are essentially asking them to interpret without having given them the Rosetta stone first.
Being methodologically focused is the same as reading through the flat-pack furniture instructions before you start nailing bits of shelf together. The instructions make explicit how to interpret and use the material, which is done in the first instance before the first parts of the material are examined, and then always co-linear. We locate the names of the parts; length A-B, screw M4, allen key. These are the tools. We use them upon the material and either construct or deconstruct in this manner. But no construction, no change to the material can happen until the nomenclature of tools and procedures to follow are known.
Literature schemes often provide the text before we provide the decoding strategies, and this is the problem with ‘fostering a love of reading’ as a mission statement – you cannot love what you do not understand. You cannot understand if you have none of the nomenclature or procedures. A love of cognitive domains comes through skill in synthesising the methodologies and material, and never a love of the material in isolation.
Resourcing a new curriculum
The pedagogy of the resources here are all about inverting the traditional structure of Literature; to teach the analytical language of the field of enquiry before we teach the text. It isn’t as firm as Bloom’s sequential presentation of material learning followed by methodological learning, because of course a text is read to accompany the lessons. The reality is that the two domains of knowledge should be co-linear, we are not trying to teach all of the discipline before we tread into a story, but relevant tools connected to relevant passages. The cognition being measured is not progress in knowledge of the text, but progress in the skill of handling the disciplinary knowledge.
The lessons here are built around the idea that disciplinary knowledge is discrete, modular, transferable. It can be taught in a way that is material-agnostic. The lessons are designed to be applied over and over to different texts until the disciplinary knowledge is strengethened into long term memory, through repetition. The tools should become well handled, and skillfully wielded, which can only be done when the very same tool is used over and over. But when curriculum treats tools as secondary to texts, they are not well used, and the disciplinary knowledge is not well transferred into LTM.
This is why these lessons have little impart in the material knowledge – the text being read. The material is only some arbitrary text selected because it evidences the methodological procedure, those theories, the concepts of the discipline. English disciplines are not a text-in-hand, they are each a field of perspectives and of terms that are used to unlock meaning – and actually are so powerful, they can unlock the way we view the world around us.
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