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Other educational aspects related to literature teachingPage 1 of 2
Although literature schoolbooks are the major tool for teaching the subject, and hence the primary candidate for close scrutiny, they alone cannot reveal entire picture of the role that literature is invited to play within the educational system under study. Related historical evidence such as school regulations and curricula as well as contemporary theoretical discussions around the subject and, wherever possible, students’ workbooks, help qualify the findings that come from the examination of schoolbooks.
Regulations and curricula These kinds of documents provide important information on how is literature to be taught, explicating (or allowing us to infer) the ideological aims as well as the pedagogical methods at work. Some questions that one may consider are the following: - What are the stated aims that literature teaching is supposed to achieve? What is the literary-theoretical paradigm within which they operate?
This kind of information can be found in educational laws and normative acts such as ministry decisions, which are increasingly offered online through the national ministries of education or other archives. The clear statement of aims and pedagogical methods is naturally of great importance to our research, but if these kinds of statements are non-existent, factual information such as whether literature is taught in isolation or in conjunction with other courses may also help us infer them. For instance, the teaching of literary texts alongside other subjects is an indication of its subsidiary role to the fulfillment of purposes that do not make aesthetic education a priority (see, for instance, the relevant discussion in L. Varelas’s paper “Dictatorship and Literature teaching…”). |
