audiences such as homes for the elderly. First encounters with other poems which
demand reflection might be followed by individual jotting around the poem on the page
noting patterns of words within the poem, similarities with personal experience,
questions perhaps. This particularly useful approach precludes a dominant reading from
another student or the teacher coming between the reader and the poem; each student
has the basis for something to say. It also defers the expression of judgements upon a
poem; ‘I like it’ or ‘I hate it’ are equally effective at closing down sustained reflection on
poems, at best setting up defensive or hostile debate (often with the teacher cast as
interrogator—‘Why don’t you like it, then?’) rather than a circumstance where ideas can
be played with and alternatives considered.
Various ways of re-exploring poems, once two or three readings are experienced, have
been developed. Writing remains the most frequent means of response. Teachers use
essays alongside more exploratory approaches; pastiche, for example, can take older
students inside the techniques of a poet more revealingly than evaluative comment.
Thoughts about poems might be translated into visual form—collages to represent the
interplay of images, or an episodic series of illustrations to narrative poems. Usually
students introduce such work to the rest of the class alongside a reading of the original
poem as a way of organising their thinking about a poem so far; it is the quality of that
thinking, not the quality of the art work, which needs to be emphasised.
The future of the teaching of children’s literature in schools is uncertain. Teaching
methods such as those outlined in this section acknowledging, as they do, the part a
reader plays in the process of reading, might seem to offer the hope that students would
leave school to become lifelong readers. Yet the future of the book itself as the means of
bringing stories and poems to their audience may not be at all secure—and the
implications of changes in the media have not yet been thought through by literature
teachers who, hardly surprisingly, tend to cherish books as physical objects and to
resent any suggestions of change in their field. Enthusiastic literature teachers have
not, in the main, moved readily into media studies.
A more sinister threat has become evident, in different forms, to those teachers who
would assert the old values of stories and poems and their essential function as bearers
of knowledge of self and community. As long ago as 1970, Ted Hughes warned of the
dangers of the reflective inner life becoming separated from, or suppressed by, the outer
world of action. He spoke of his own The Iron Man as one myth which might help to arm
children against such dangers. In recent years, the literature curriculum in schools has
been invaded by governments driven by a utilitarianism which has seemed philistine in
its intensity. This may have been most evident in Britain, but delegates to international
conferences report similar pressures in their own contexts. The struggle against these
forces has hardly begun.
ReferencesBarton, B. (1986) Tell Me Another, Markham: Pembroke.
Doonan, J. (1993) Looking at Pictures in Picture Books, South Woodchester: Thimble Press.
Howe, A. and Johnson, J. (1992) Common Bonds: Storytelling in the Classroom, London: Hodder
and Stoughton.
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