Archive | May 2021

Reflection on views, knowledge and understanding of the concept and application of literary learning

May17

From a young age, children learn language and concepts through literary response. Teachers can deploy picture books as whole class prompts to stimulate the imagination, narrative understanding of topics, and the comprehension of simple accompanying texts to the pictures, that contain important early markers for spelling, grammar, and vocabulary learning. Picture books and their responses are typically used throughout primary education and early secondary as a basis for learning, and can provide stimulating, story based lesson content to accompany other curriculum learning areas, such as the humanities (e.g., Kiefer, 1988).  As the children progress in their reading, print only literary texts can be introduced into the curriculum to expand the knowledge, language, and communicative bases of the children.

Print only texts can be sourced in many different genres such as novels, short stories, newspapers, magazines, poetry, instruction booklets, pamphlets, brochures, etc. Children can henceforth learn through a variety of literary responses to these texts, that can challenge and expand their thinking with respect to what constitutes a text. It is vital that children are exposed to a diversity of text types in their curriculum learning, so that they gain competency in understanding the genres of these texts, and can respond effectively to information delivered in different manners through texts (Christie, 2013). At this stage, pedagogy will have changed from whole class ‘show and tell’ style lessons, through and in which, teachers typically use resources such as picture books, to evoke a literary response and accompanying skills such as phonemic awareness, to children reading on their own in a variety of genres, and being asked to produce literary responses themselves, or in groups. At this stage, extra skills can be introduced to literary responses, and alongside basic reading competencies, such as critical literacy. Critical literacy requires children to think critically about the text in addition to understanding and responding to it coherently.

Since the 1990s, the need for teaching critical literacy skills through literary response has increased and expanded, due to the exponential multiplication of texts mediated electronically. The introduction of the internet into the way in which children learn has brought a whole new dimension to literary learning (Evans & Po, 2007), that demands, for example, that the children ask new questions about the text, such as: Is it authentic/real? Has it been copied /reproduced from elsewhere? Does the text have hidden messages (e.g., commercial)? What is the text trying to get me to think/buy? New means for understanding online texts have developed, such as multiliteracies (Mills, 2009) multiple literacies, and the new literacies studies (NLS). In combination, these approaches recognise and help to explore the new environments that children are exposed to through their digital devices. As a whole, the curriculum can now be supported and inter-linked through the deployment of online texts, that require students to demonstrate research and critical abilities, to, for example show whether or not the sources for their arguments are valid (Peters & Lankshear, 1996). Students now gain much of their information and language skills online, and digital literary responses must henceforth be analysed in terms of what these skills amount to, how they can be evaluated, and what other skills they complement and enhance, e.g., technology and coding.  In the future, these digitally mediated literacies will only intensify, hence teaching has to adjust and take into account these expanding and authentic practices (Beach et al., 2011).

 

References 

Beach, R., Appleman, D., Hynds, S., & Wilhelm, J. (2011). Teaching literature to adolescents. Taylor and Francis.

Christie, F. (2013). Genres and genre theory: A response to Michael Rosen. Changing English, 20(1), 11-22.

Evans, E., & Po, J. (2007). A break in the transaction: Examining students’ responses to digital texts. Computers and Composition, 24(1), 56-73.

Kiefer, B. (1988). Picture books as contexts for literary, aesthetic, and real world understandings. Language Arts, 65(3), 260-271.

Mills, K. A. (2009). Multiliteracies: Interrogating competing discourses. Language and Education, 23(2), 103-116.

Peters, M., & Lankshear, C. (1996). Critical literacy and digital texts. Educational theory, 46(1), 51-70.

Picture Books for Older Readers- The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan

May16

Share on the Picture Books for Older Readers thread: briefly outline your favourite title with one strategy about how you could promote the book in the library or classroom.

The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan

Shaun Tan describes a story in very visual, artistic and interesting terms, about essentially things that we forget, things that are thrown away… things that are lost. This invites readers to think about their every-day lives, and the objects that are present in them. For example, it invites consideration of things that we put in the garage and forget; things that we throw away without a second thought; things that we use once and we never use again. Above all, The Lost Thing motivates us to think about what is important in our lives, and what objects actually serve some purpose, objects that we may buy or want in a fit of desire or interest, but which last a very short amount of time. Therefore, it encourages children and young adults to think about their habits in relation to consumerist practices, what they want, what things they want and why they want them, and what is superficial and what is actually important about wanting material things.

In terms of promotion of this book, a great teaching strategy would be to link it to a campaign to clean up the school or to recycle more, or to think about how general waste influences our throw-away society. It would serve the purpose of discouraging students from buying lots of plastic items for example, or for every special occasion in their lives, such as birthday parties, buying new things, and never using them again. It would be great to have campaigns through the school library, through posters, to recycle, to fix things, not just throw them away, and to be more interested and engaged with the material objects around us, and not just always be looking for the next new thing, to then dispose of perfunctorily. The school library can promote awareness of waste or recycling week, and this would link back to the main themes in this picture book.