The literature classroom: Spaces for dialogue

Abstract

The following article constructs an account of the pedagogy of a teacher of literature in an Australian secondary school. It provides a small window on her professional practice, and draws on a range of data, including notes made by a ‘critical friend' as she observed the teacher giving lessons over several days. The participating teacher shared her lesson plans and engaged in conversations with her critical friend, as well as writing reflections about her teaching. In addition to recording classroom observations, the critical friend wrote extended reflections about what she had observed, sometimes in response to the teacher's ensuing reflections about the success of the lessons. The study thus arises out of a professional dialogue between the teacher and her critical friend, and it attempts to convey a sense of their continuing conversation, as they reflect on what they have learnt from their collaboration. The article captures not only the professional learning which the teacher and her critical friend experienced through their ongoing dialogue, but the exchanges that occurred in this teacher's classroom, as her students engaged in interpretive discussions in response to the text they were studying. The very best literature classrooms—so this article maintains—enable students to engage in exploratory talk (Barnes, 1978), where the very notion of ‘literature', as an esteemed body of texts, is open to interrogation. The students in this classroom appropriate the language of literary analysis in a dialogical way (Bakhtin, 1981), making this language their own through their discussions of the work of a distinguished Australian writer. The protocols for classroom observation that were followed derive from the International Mother Tongue Education Network (IMEN), which positions teachers and academics as collaborators in research on the teaching of L-1, with the aim of facilitating comparative research on mother tongue education in various national settings. Rather than judging the work of individual teachers, the aim is to create opportunities for them to reflect on their teaching and to articulate their views and values in dialogue with educators in other countries. The goal of the following article is not simply to present the results of a research project, but to prompt readers to enact the interpretive activities at the heart of this inquiry into the teaching of literature. This article is itself a vehicle for others to join in a wider conversation about the teaching of literature across national boundaries.