How do we make literature relevant in the classroom?

 

Yet another study on reading was published in France last week , and it’s yet another study showing the same results as observed in England a few months ago  or in the Netherlands in 2021 and again in 2022. Briefly, young people read less than they used to (which, to be fair, has been very little for a while now), and the ratio reading-a-book vs staring-at-a-screen is inversely growing. For example, the French study found that on average, adolescents spend ’19 minutes a day reading, and 3h11 on their telephone’. When focusing on the 16-19 year-olds, that ratio increased: ‘12 minutes of reading vs 5h10 on their phone’. And perhaps even more problematic in some way, ‘48% of readers do something else while reading’, like visit websites, watch videos or send messages (this goes up to 69% among the 16-19 year-olds). This had already been observed in the Netherlands, where most young readers especially (but not only) would have at least one screen on while reading.

At the same time, we know (for example https://ics.uci.edu/~gmark/chi08-mark.pdf) that someone performing a specific task requiring attention will find it difficult to re-engage with that task if interrupted. In other words, imagine you’re reading a book (which requires full attention); your phone pings, so you stop reading the book to read the phone. This interruption of your attention will have serious costs, as it can take minutes to re-engage your attention to the interrupted task. Said another way: if you’re reading fiction while checking your phone or using it for other tasks, you’re very likely to keep reading the exact same page many times over. And every time you will be like: ‘Oh yeah, what was that bit about again?’. And that not once, not twice, but potentially thrice or more.

So ok: young people (but not only by far) read less, divide their attention more, and are less able to focus for long stretches of time (and before you say ‘multi-tasking!’, I urge you to read the scientific literature on that subject, which shows such a notion is mostly a fallacy, e.g. https://erichorvitz.com/taskdiary.pdf).

That’s a problem when it comes to reading fiction, short or long. They’re also spending a lot more time watching very short videos on their phone, each of them requiring little focus and being low on cognitive load: watching a dog perform tricks in 15 seconds, or someone making dance moves in half a minute, does not require much use of your higher cognitive abilities; it is mostly a passive activity that needs no real thinking. I’m not saying that in a negative way here: it’s a consequence of the format, and the goal: the format imposes a very short duration, and the goal is entertainment (‘passing the time’). Compare that to reading a text where there are many characters, different events, a timeline or two, a plot over many pages and a structure running throughout. Surely nobody in their right mind would argue that those two processes are similar, wherever they stand on the issue of reading or phone use.

Which brings us to the main issue today: FUN, and ‘making literature fun’.

It seems to me a very simple question really: how does one measure fun and decide to go for this or that activity in relation to ‘having fun’? And the reality, here again, is that the simplest, most immediately accessible fun is always going to win out – or at least, in the great majority of cases. Yes, some people will get up at 5 in the morning, trek for an hour and sit in the dew for the ‘fun’ of fishing, say, or golfing, or jogging. But those are few and far between when considered against the whole population, and just like there’s almost always a kid or two in the class who likes to read (I was one, and I didn’t need any encouragement to do so), there’s always a fisherman, a jogger or a golfer. But the majority is none of those things, and they (most learners) will therefore evaluate that notion of ‘fun’ against what they routinely consider ‘fun’.

And the book will lose out, everyday of the week, against Tiktok (I’m using Tiktok as a generic term here; I’m well aware of the BookTok phenomenon, for example).

And that should be a lesson for teachers of literature: if your angle is ‘Reading is fun’, you will not win, you cannot win – for the simple reason that reading is hard, it takes time, effort, sustained attention, dedication, and the rewards are often delayed, or not immediately apparent (especially if you’re reading-for-plot, as most do). The exact opposite of the type of fun youngsters (and many, many others who're not so young) now mostly have.

It’s easy (and perhaps too easy in a way) to find equivalents: have a look at your kitchen, at your laundry, and you’ll find that you settled for the least effort – that’s why you have a dishwasher, a washing machine or a blender. There is a notion of ‘least difficult’, or ‘requiring the least effort’, that guides many of our decisions and buys. We may couch that in terms of ‘efficiency’, or ‘living with the times’, or ‘gaining time’, but ease does come into it more than we sometimes want to admit. And I struggle to see how that could be different when it comes to such a demanding activity as reading (or as writing, as I argue here when it comes to Chatgpt, and here as well).

Don’t get me wrong: I love reading more than anything in the world, I read dozens of books each year and have done so for decades – my parents used to chide me because I’d stay in my room reading instead of going out in the sun. But I’m also able to see how long reading a book takes me, with all my experience and knowledge (by virtue of age and repetition); I’m able to see how much focused attention it requires of me not to let my eyes wander off the page, not to let a thought intrude and distract me. You get to reach a ‘flow state’ of course, but not immediately on opening the first page – and how many people actually want that? And how many can, seeing what we said above about attention and interruptions?

Books do not compete with cinema, or tv, because ultimately these are very different activities which require very different things from an individual. They compete only in the sense that they are alternative activities, other ‘things-to-do’. And people now have a much wider array of ‘things to do’, mostly through their phone. And so if before you had the choice between, say, four activities, you now have the choice between an infinity of them: small games of all kinds for all moods, videos, chats, news, socials and many more. And these things are ‘fun’. And easier than reading. And more immediately accessible. And full of attractive features (sounds, colours, movement, brevity).

Do not attempt to compete against this by trying to ‘make literature fun’: you should instead ask what literature can do for those learners when you use it. If there’s something in it for them, they might pay attention; if they can use it – even if only with you in the beginning – to make sense of things, of themselves, of others, they might get on-board. If literature is used as an instrument, not a goal in itself, it will go beyond being ‘fun’ and might appeal to more non-readers (readers need advice and guidance of a very different kind, of course).

Fun doesn’t have to mean ‘mindless’, and it’s up to us to find an angle that goes beyond immediate rewards and the path of least resistance – that’s why linking literature, critical thinking and citizenship has real value.

www.litinclass.com

https://www.litinclass.com/why-use-literature-for-citizenship 

https://litandteach.blogspot.com/2024/04/burgerschapsonderwijs-citizenship-1.html

https://litandteach.blogspot.com/2024/05/burgerschapsonderwijs-fiction-for.html