The role of the teacher in the Literature class

Samuel Johnson (in J. Boswell, 1791): ‘It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing. People in general do not willingly read, if they can have any thing else to amuse them. There must be an external impulse’.

 You have a class tomorrow, and on the schedule it says that it’s a literature class – it’s part of the curriculum, and those lessons were decided upon within the English department (or whichever language you teach, of course). The thing is, you’re not quite sure what your role is going to be: guide? Explorer? Facilitator? Explainer? All-knowing, tentative, free-wheeling, directive?

Impulse-giver, as Johnson says?

And should you have additional activities, say, written expression, or speaking, perhaps a bit of grammar thrown into the mix? Some history, too, and a bit of culture? Or is it just about the act of reading, whatever the outcome?

Well, and what about the set-up of the learners? In groups (of 3, of 4), individually, in pairs? Read-think-pair-share? Read-discuss? Read-think-discuss? Read-write? Read-report?

And what to do with all that terminology that is so attractive, partly because in the end it’s like grammar or vocab: it can be taught without attending to the text too much (in fact, it can be taught without a text at all), and it sounds good to say ‘we dealt with alliterations today’, or ‘I taught them metaphors’.

I know I’m running the risk of repeating myself here (I’m not running that risk at all, in fact: I am repeating myself), but all those decisions about your role during those classes can only be made once you have identified:

Ø  what your learning aims are
Ø  which approach to the text you want to take
Ø  what in the text lends itself to what activity, approach and therefore teacher’s role
Ø  what exactly you want to use literature for.

In other words, your role as a teacher, just like in any other type of lesson, must be tailored to the outcomes you expect (or dream of).

Now, this is simple, even simplistic, and no answer at all: ‘everything is possible, just choose the best option’ – this doesn’t help much, does it?

So let us consider a couple of problems to start with:

           ·    Your learners are likely to find reading demanding, hard, time-consuming, and obscure

·       Your learners are likely to find it difficult to interpret texts, assign meaning to bits of it or the whole of it
·       Your learners may not have read what you gave them to read before class
·       Your learners may not want to spend time analysing texts, or learning a long list of jargon useful in only one area (the one they’re not necessarily very interested in: literature)
·       Your learners may also expect something while you expect something else: they might think the literature classes are especially good for their English while you think they’re good for learning, or thinking, or feeling, or discovering, or all of the above at once.
·       Your expectations (in general) might be wildly different from your learners’ expectations
·       Your evaluation of what your learners can see in a text might be way off what they can actually see.

It’s good here to quote one of the greatest classical pianists, Josef Lhevinne, talking about teaching the piano: ‘The teacher often makes the mistake of living up in the clouds with Beethoven, Bach, Chopin and Brahms, never realising that the pupil is very much upon the earth, and that no matter how grandly the teacher may play, the pupil must have practical assistance within his grasp’.

Within my approach to using literature in class, the role of the teacher becomes defined by my end-goal: bringing discussion points to the fore in relation to ‘being in the world’- citizenship, critical thinking, empathy, curiosity towards others to name but a few. And so there is no need to start with (the writing equivalent of) Bach of Chopin – any tune will do as long as it provides us with some ideas. Bach is great for working on one’s technique, but there are many études and exercises which, while less musical, still provide more than enough material to work with, to practice, to improve.

Bach might be an end-point rather than a starting one.

Our learners are mostly ‘upon the earth’: while they know plenty about the world to contribute to the music, they just don’t know how to contribute, nor how to use what they know to contribute.

And while we’re at it: an orchestra is made up of many people playing different instruments, all with a contribution to make and wonderful notes to play. Yet they need a conductor, someone who will organise the potential chaos, someone to indicate a new section, a change in tempo, a crescendo or, as the case may be, the end of a movement and the beginning of another.

You, of course, can be that conductor. Remember: a conductor doesn’t write the music, doesn’t add notes to the score, and crucially, the conductor does not play the instruments. And yet, someone has got to help the musicians, by suggesting, prodding, pushing on. You, the teacher, can provide that ‘practical assistance’ Lhevinne mentions above.

When the conversation dies out about one theme in the text, conduct the group out of it and on to the next theme; when learners find it difficult to generate ideas, conduct them towards some possibilities by pointing bits out, asking questions, re-formulating; when a learner plays a note and then pipes down, conduct them towards alternatives by asking follow-up questions.

The choices you will make as to what your role is are not just about whether you go for a writing assignment at the end, or whether you want to organise your group in sub-groups. Those choices derive from your vision about what a text is for in your class, and how much you want to get out of the learners when it comes to ideas about the world, about themselves and others.

In my approach, the teacher guides learners towards questions, not answers.

A teacher helps find ideas but tries not to impose their own.

A teacher knows there will not be any definitive answer but on the contrary: there will be a plurality of answers, and these can be elicited.

A teacher knows their role is not to provide a meaning to texts, but instead to provide ways into interpreting those texts.

A teacher knows readers must take ownership of texts, and not just be led to the teacher’s interpretation of those texts.

Because the teacher knows more about the text and the ideas in it, their role must be to help learners come to (some of) those ideas, guide them towards asking new questions; towards gaining new insights by pointing out what they have missed; towards making connections between the text and the world we live in.

The teacher provides the impulse Johnson talked about; the spark, the thrill, the way-in, the way-out. Reading doesn’t need to be thrilling to be exciting, and it doesn’t need to be exciting to be nourishing. It just needs a conductor to make the whole sing in unison, and create wonderful sounds.

• Boswell, J. Life of Johnson
• Cook J.F.    Great pianists on piano playing.