QCR52B
Aims and Approaches to Teaching Literature
Semester 1
Tutor: A/P Suzanne Choo
Banner image: Victor Ehikhamenor's (b. 1970) Wealth of Nations (2015)
Click here to access the poetry package
This poetry package was completed as part of QCR52B: Aims and Approaches to Teaching Literature.
The module aims to
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familiarise students with the aims and objectives of Literature education in Singapore schools
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provide students with the pedagogical knowledge and skills to teach poetry, prose, drama, and multimodal texts;
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ground students in theories underlying different critical, creative, and ethical approaches to teaching Literature; and
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provide practical strategies to design well-structured, purposeful, and effective lesson plans
In a group of four student teachers, I designed a poetry unit plan with a total of seven lessons, aimed at Secondary Three Express students. I planned two lessons on the theme of environmental justice, focusing on the uneven distribution of environmental impact through exploring the poetry of environmental disasters situated in the global south.
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Ethical themes
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One of the module's through-lines, taught by A/P Suzanne Choo, was the need for an ethical dimension in Literature education. Hence, both my lesson plans focused on illustrating ecological inequality for students. This links to the first Desired Student Outcomes of Literature: Empathetic and Global Thinkers, who are able to "consider the impact of their beliefs and actions on society" by reading "texts from different parts of the world".
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One key learning point was to draw upon students' lived experience, echoing the Reader Response Approach, even for themes which I think may be unfamiliar to them. For example, in lesson four on Jayanta Mahapatra's poem "24" (1986) about the Bhopal Gas Disaster, I activate students' prior understanding of environmental justice by asking them to complete an opinionaire, before showing them a video further explaining the concept.
In lesson five, I deepen students' understanding of environmental justice by introducing non-state actors such as Royal Dutch Shell, in the context of Ogaga Ifowodo's "XLV" -- a poem about the international pollution of the Niger Delta by Shell's oil extraction activities.
Returning to the banner image (above), it depicts part of Nigerian artist Victor Ehikhamenor's (b. 1970) Wealth of Nations (2015) installation. The piece features an abstract motif derived from nearly-forgotten ancient writing systems inscribed upon oil drums. This evocatively symbolising ethical concerns including the gradual experience of loss and the raw experience of unequal profit.
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Writers' Craft
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There is also a clear focus on literary devices in each of the lesson plans. Lesson four focuses on symbolism, while lesson five focuses on juxtaposition. One of my pedagogical takeaways is that as experienced readers, Literature teachers often scramble to cover all the aspects of the text. Instead, it is more prudent to identify one or two specific literary devices that each poem can illustrate in order to focus the lesson, and provide space for students to respond to the poem.
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I learned important strategies to scaffold students' understanding of literary devices. For instance, A/P Choo taught the ABE strategy of analysing juxtaposition: "A is contrasted/juxtaposed with B, which has the E(ffect) of..." I also learned to first model these strategies before inviting students to practise in groups. I often use Google Documents to do so as it enables me to give real time, trackable and easily-accessed feedback.
Text-World Connections
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Lastly, there was also a consistent emphasis on text-world connections. This echoes the Literary Response Framework, which emphasises that when reading texts, students should make connections, including those between text and the world.
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Building on the emphasis on symbolism in lesson four, Photo Prompts (the main activity of the lesson) seeks to create these text-to-world connections. Students are tasked to analyse the connotations and denotations of lexical chains related to concepts of vision/sight, family/local, global/world, etc. Students use real-world photographs (taken from an Atlantic article which documents the Bhopal Gas Disaster) to help inform and illustrate their arguments when identifying the connotations/denotations.
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Another activity which helps students make text-to-world connections and become convincing communicators (Desired Student Outcome 4; Learning Outcome 4: Responding through Dialogue and Writing) is the use of literary evidence within a debate.
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In lesson five, to mirror the real-life power dynamics of the Niger Delta pollution, the teacher takes on the role of Shell and invites the students to respond using the material in the poem.
The given arguments are:
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Shell helps to fulfil the potential of the “land’s promise” by bringing development to Nigeria.
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Shell helps local people by bringing employment and benefiting the local economy.
Students will use the evidence in the poem to illustrate their arguments, while linking the language used to the real-world incident. They will focus on the literary devices of juxtaposition and figurative language. Students organise their arguments using the table below:
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Overall Reflections
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This poetry package inspired me to think about how the unseen poems we show to students should cover a range of cohesive themes as well as a range of literary devices. These themes and devices must be clearly communicated to students so that they feel more equipped to handle a range of unseen poetry (whether by theme or by literary devices). My team also created an in-house approach to analysing poems, humorously titled 'The Connect Plan': I See - I Feel - I Analyse. This usefully informed and linked all our poetry lessons within the package and reminds me to check if my future school has a preferred method to approach poetry.
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Finally, the lesson package is a timely reminder that Literature is always relevant, and provides the imaginative capacity required to creatively address the most pressing issues of our day.
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"While all narrative genres are capable of complexity, some struggle to represent environmental problems that challenge human imaginations and include vast and complex temporal and geographical scales far beyond the immediate experience or lifetime of a single individual ... Poems depend on unique formal qualities, and are perhaps even more than other literary genres animated by and able to contain open-ended, multiple and even contradictory levels of meaning."
Susana Lidstrom and Greg Garrard,
“Images Adequate to Our Predicament”: Ecology, Environment and Ecopoetics, 2014