Burgerschap/Citizenship and Critical Thinking Skills: beyond the texts are...images!

 There sometimes seems to be a misconception around the use of literature (= fiction) in class as regards the time needed, the nature of the texts used, the activities organised around it, and the way we teachers can work on citizenship-related issues. Very broadly speaking (as I know for a fact that many teachers devote hours and hours of their own time to devise a curriculum), we could say that many schools:

·       See fiction as an example of a time-period or a context, where a text becomes a fact (who, when, what about), an exemplar – the text is not discussed because essentially it is a label and a cultural-historical object (for example: Byron was a romantic, we’re having a project on Romanticism, so Byron’s name is mentioned as one of the romantic poets; nothing further is done with his texts than showing one of them).

·       See literature classes as isolated from the rest of the world, and therefore the curriculum (this week, we’re having a literature project! After that, we’ll go back to language proficiency…) – often, that is linked to seeing Literature as a body of classics, of big names, of ‘you-should-know-that-name’ approaches…without actually reading the stuff itself.

·       See literature classes as full units of time: ‘My class is 45 minutes long, we’re doing literature today so that will be 45 minutes of it’. Why?

·       Confuse the text with its adaptations, for example by reading an easier version of Shakespeare, or an abridged (and often re-written) version of Jane Austen, or the film of a book. But really: any adaptation is by definition an interpretation, so what you’re working on with learners is not the text from which you can think for yourself, but from what someone thought the text was about. If I go to the restaurant, order a steak tartare and then ask someone else to eat it for me, how can I judge whether it was a good steak tartare or not? How can I judge whether the taste was ok, the seasoning adequate etc.?

·       See critical thinking skills as a separate set of skills: reasoning, referring, logical thinking, that can be developed without context, or worse: that have nothing to do with regular classes.

·       Forget that the same skills (among others: close-reading, asking questions, reflecting, assessing one’s ow thinking) can be developed whatever the medium: there can be just as much to be had from analysing and discussing an advert in the paper, a photo, a poster than in discussing a whole novel. Let’s not confuse the essential skills with what they apply to, and how we can use them.

 

Now you’ll say: well, ok, this might all be true but then what? What else can we do?

 A first step is probably to approach literature/fiction as an exchange between text and reader. As Ursula LeGuin puts it: ‘A story is a collaboration between teller and audience, writer and reader. Fiction is not only illusion, but collusion. Without a reader there’s no story. No matter how well written, if it isn’t read it doesn’t exist as a story’. The reader makes it happen just as much as the writer does. In other words, just mentioning the existence of texts and authors will not do anything except, perhaps, lodge those names in a learner’s head for a few hours (or months?). A text doesn’t exist without a reader, and all you can do if you don’t read the text is reduce it to some broad, de-personalised and general statements – as the Grand Old Dame of American literature Joyce Carol Oates once said: ‘I am often annoyed by critics’ attempts to reduce complex works of art to simple ‘thematic’ statements’. Indeed: that’s bound to happen if we don’t actually engage with the texts by reading them.

So another problem is time, and learners’ engagement. We all know the situation: we give our learners a text to read for next week (or next month) and when class-time comes, half the group (if not more) has not read the text. How then could you avoid, as a teacher, reducing that text to ‘simple thematic statements’?

Two alternatives: short texts, and developing essential skills elsewhere

I would first suggest using a lot more short-stories, and better yet: short short-stories, 400, 500 words, something that can be read in class, that doesn’t need preparation (except that of the teacher), and where you can be sure everyone has the same information. Granted, short-stories do not give you much room for character development, say, but if well-chosen, they can give you ideas, issues, situations, conflicts, oppositions and nuances that you can then work with – the text as instrument, not as goal.

Another aspect of time is: how much time to devote to this fiction business? After all, there are a million other things to do and time is limited. Here again, a quote might help: ‘I look upon the ordinary human mind like a narrow neck’d bottle, if you throw a bucket full of water upon it all at once very little will go into it. But if you pour in a little at a time you may fill it’. Repetition legitimizes, as they say; einmal ist keinmal – do it once and it’s as if you’ve never done it at all. Devoting one week to a Literature project and then never read any fiction again is very questionable in that sense. After all, if I want to run a marathon, is it better to train a bit each week, or to train a lot just once?

(I’ll come back to that problem in another blog).

A great alternative is therefore to work on essential skills that will serve you well for reading, through the use of visual material: an example I often use is here, and some more images you could use (but there are so many) are here. It doesn’t need to take more than, say, 10 or 15 minutes; it requires attention, and close-reading (or close-looking) skills; interpretive skills, and leads to evaluative ones too; it can be used to ask bigger questions, and to confront some social themes. An image can be an instrument just as much as a text can be – an instrument to develop critical thinking, to encourage curiosity and the asking of questions. Repetition of this type of small exercises is crucial as critical thinking is a state of mind, not just a mechanical activity – einmal ist keinmal again, so do it once, and then again and again. Getting your learners to ask questions and to suspend judgment is essential, be it with images or texts – all types of images, and all types of texts.

Critical thinking skills are at the heart of citizenship (the ‘Skills’ I mentioned in a previous blog), and if we remember that those skills are not tied to just one format (texts), we will have made a great leap forward towards developing them as second-nature in our learners so that they can apply them in their everyday life, and certainly when it comes to reading texts together.

•     Margaret Atwood in E.G. Ingersoll: Margaret Atwood Conversations (1992)
•     Ursula LeGuin: The wave in the mind (2012)
•    The quote about the mind being like a bottle is in James Hopkinson: Memoirs of a Victorian cabinet- maker (published 1968, written 1888)
•    'Einmal ist keinmal' is of course used by Milan Kundera in his The art of the novel (1986)