ETL402 Assessment 2 Part B

My Approach to Literary Learning: A Critical Reflection

 

Having studied the subject outline at the beginning of this course, I was both perplexed and mortified by this assessment; not only by the multiple parts it contained, but also by the complete lack of knowledge and awareness I had of the concept of ‘literary learning’.

 

After some initial readings it became clear that ‘literary learning’, although a concept strongly linked to the learning of literacy, was not the same as ‘literacy learning’ (Lehman, 2007). Although there is a strong connection between the two, literary learning relies on an entirely different set of skills to employ higher order thinking and can be suited to any subject or curriculum area – provided that there is quality literature concerning the area of study! A growing awareness of multiliteracies further highlighted the significance of this connection, as ‘literacy’ does not just encompass an ability to read or write but a wide range of abilities and skills across all areas of life, such as digital literacy, critical literacy (Antsey & Bull, 2006) or even ‘virtue’ or character literacy (Hart et al., 2020).

 

Once I had achieved an understanding of the concept of literary learning, I attempted to visualise it in the classroom and library space. In doing so, a distant memory of my primary school casual teaching days came back to me in which I remember teaching several library lessons to a Year 4 class. I cannot remember the exact book, but I strongly remember teaching the concept of places and belonging through a picture book reading and teacher-led discussion, what I now know to be a simple literary learning strategy. Since then, I have used more sophisticated strategies to teach literary learning in secondary classrooms. The most significant example of this was a combined Geography and English novel study looking at how the themes in dystopian texts are reflected in our own world and global attitudes towards sustainability and the environment. I found this to be a highly effective unit with students for two reasons; students had choice of the literature they were reading, a method I had used before on this group of students (Johnson, 2020), and discussions were conducted in a modified version of Socratic Circles (Styslinger et al., 2010) that allowed students to vocalise their thoughts and opinions about the texts they were reading to make connections with other students and their choices of literature. However, a lack of teacher cohesion on the content to be assessed did lead to some difficulties with the culminating project created by the students. As a result of this and my increased understanding, in future I aim to make literary learning units more cohesive and clearer by collaborating closely with classroom teachers to establish a common purpose and goals for student development of multiliteracies across the unit (Merga, 2019). By deciding on a common purpose at the beginning of the unit, students will have a better idea of where the unit is going, and how the content being studied in their chosen literature relates to the overarching concepts and content from the relevant subject.

 

 

 

References

Antsey, M., & Bull, G. (2006). Defining multiliteracies. In M. Antsey & G. Bull (Eds.), Teaching and learning multiliteracies: Changing times, changing literacies (pp.19-55). International Reading Association.

Hart, P., Oliveira, G., & Pike, M. (2020). Teaching virtues through literature: Learning from the ‘Narnian Values’ character education research. Journal of Beliefs & Values, 41(4), 474-488. https://doi.org/10.1080/13617672.2019.1689544

Lehman, B. (2007). Skills instruction and children’s literature. In B. Lehman (Ed.) Children’s literature and learning: Literary study across the curriculum (pp. 43-56). Teachers College Press.

Merga, M. (2019). Collaborating with teacher librarians to support adolescents’ literacy and literature learning. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 63(1). https://doi-org.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/10.1002/jaal.958

Johnson, T. (2020). The ‘too cool to read’ group: A success story. CSU Thinkspace. https://thinkspace.csu.edu.au/tomthetl/2021/01/12/the-too-cool-to-read-group-a-success-story/

Styslinger, M., Pollock, T., Lowery, R., & Fink, L. (2010). The chicken and the egg: inviting response and talk through Socratic Circles. Voices from the Middle, 18(2), 36-45.