On Literature and Teaching

  What’s your reason for 'doing' literature in your class? What’s your reason for handing out this or that text? For doing this or that project around literature? For example, you have this great project in the bovenbouw, centred around the First World War – a staple of English classes in this country. WW1 saw a school of poetry emerge (the Great War poets, unsurprisingly) that other countries didn’t, or certainly not on the same scale. So out come Wilfried Owens, and Sassoon, and the Poppy Fields, and the sadness of it all. Out come the chronologies, and facts about that war, and tales of battles lost and won, and tales of death. But what, exactly, precisely, are your reasons for this project? Are these reasons to do with Literature-reading, literature-interpreting, literature-as-instrument? Or are the reasons to do with ideas about what learners should know historically and culturally? Is it to say 'War is bad, death is terrible', or do you want to explore the