Talking About Literary Texts and their Meanings in ClassroomsThe metaphor of personal response to story currently dominates thought about the
function of children’s literature in education. Under this metaphor children are involved
in a wide range of activities which amount either to forms of retelling the constructs of
the text, for example by mapping the plot, or by recreating elements of a scene (draw a
picture of Terabithia), or to acting imaginatively within the constructs of the text (write
to Gilly Hopkins to encourage her in her new life with her grandmother). What is
specifically encouraged is an individual response which effectively takes the fictive world
as given.
At its best this work can be interesting for children, particularly by creating
opportunities to explore the internal coherence of a fictive world. But, in so far as these
approaches to ‘using’ children’s literature dominate classroom work, they actually create
significant problems for many children. (‘Using’ literature is by far the most common
verb representing these processes in literacy pedagogy.) Activities of the imagination are
refracted through the metaphor of personal response as though they were universal
features of childhood rather than specific forms of interpretive activity which are learned
through specific social practices. Consequently, because textual meaning and modes of
interpretation are taken as given under this metaphor, the longer-term significances of
classroom work based on it remain opaque for many learners. They may appear to
participate willingly, and certainly to enjoy themselves, but their understandings of why
they are engaging in such work are likely to be another matter.
A rather different approach is taken by teachers who include explorations of the
nature of literary text itself in classroom work, even with emergent readers. In this
approach teachers position children as apprentice collaborators in the investigation of
meanings and how they are made, rather than as reactors to given meanings. Such
teachers find in the textual play of books like Browne’s Bear Hunt and Piggybook,
Burningham’s Granpa and Scieszka’s and Smith’s The Stinky Cheese Man and other
Fairly Stupid Tales resources which enable them to encourage children to investigate
literary meaning-making as textual practice.
Experienced readers sometimes fear that such explorations of how meanings are made
will destroy embryonic reading pleasure through disturbing the ‘magic of narrative’, no
doubt with memories of their own experiences of interminable and arbitrary classroom
readings of texts still vivid. However, children do appear to be able to learn to read
variably. Much in the way that Barthes describes in his introductory discussions in S/Z
(1974) children can learn to read, on the one hand, as though for the moment a
character were a real psychological entity and there were such places as midnight
gardens and, on the other hand, as though there was nothing but the patterning of
language which was the source of their pleasure. It is the integration of these two forms
of pleasure which makes pedagogies which include investigation of how meanings are
made so distinct: different ways of reading, each with its own satisfactions. What is
importantly changed is the level of abstraction at which children learn to think about
the nature of literature, and language.
In such approaches the search is always for the patterning of meaning, and never for
the isolated textual instance of a felicitously used adjective or some other ‘good word’. It
is, after all, the patterning of relations which gives a literary text the kind of distinctive
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