Older students have been invited to create their own picture books, usually with a
readership of younger children in mind. This has been a widely successful activity since
the 1960s and it usually begins with lengthy browsing among a pile of picture books for
models and inspiration. These sessions are especially interesting for teachers in allowing
insights into their students’ early, and often formative, experiences as readers. Young
adolescents recognise favourites from their childhood with glee, or meet classic picture
books for the first time, often expressing surprise at the sophistication they find. Students
who are familiar with a book insist on sharing it with others; while others become
censorious about its suitability for younger children. This stage is usually followed by
the creation of a draft version of students’ own books, a visit to read them to a captive
audience at a nearby primary school, and a return to their own classroom drawing
boards for subsequent modification and completion.
Finding a vocabulary to describe picture books is a difficulty which still needs to be
overcome to facilitate better teaching in this field. However, because critical work about
picture books is still uncertain, the field has particular excitements for teachers who
enjoy genuine exploration and discovery with their students. Many young readers carry
fewer assumptions about books than adults and this can be illuminating. Six-year-old
Michael, when asked by a student-teacher if he enjoyed sharing picture books with
grown ups, confounded the received wisdom of the educational establishment about the
value of young children reading with ‘a trusted adult’: ‘Not really,’ he said, ‘they don’t
know how to read the pictures.’
Teaching FictionCurrent teaching of fiction—and poetry—in schools has been much influenced by reader
response or reception theory. This is not surprising, since teachers are interested in the
education of readers and the effects of reading upon them, as well as the texts they
introduce to them.
Opposition to work which values children’s responses focuses on two areas. First,
there has been criticism that teachers influenced by reception theory praise almost any
response, no matter how naïve or distant it seems from the words on the page; students’
personal responses have been dismissed as ‘mere emoting’. Arguments over this issue
were central in the evolution of the national curriculum in England and Wales in the early
1990s. The second group of opponents has been more concerned with older students,
fearing that teaching stemming from reader response theory tends to concentrate on the
individual reader, leaving aside consideration of the cultural context of the reader and
the circumstances of the text’s production. Elsewhere, especially in Australia, genre
theorists have also exerted some influence upon the teaching of fiction, though their
major interest has been in the area of information books.
In practice, teachers who are successful in developing a strong commitment to reading
in their students tend to be eclectic rather than rigid in their theoretical thinking; they
have a keen awareness of how texts shape readings and of how readers shape texts by
their own reading styles.
Much teaching of novels, especially in the lower age ranges, concentrates on drawing
young readers and listeners into stories with strong narrative lines. Few classroom
594 TEACHING FICTION AND POETRY