Helping students become competent and confident readers of literature constitutes a primary aspect and satisfaction of the English/Language Arts teacher.  To be successful in this endeavor an ELA teacher shoulders some critical responsibilities.  It is clear that just what texts and artifacts are to be included in what we call literature has profound implications for just whom among our students gain access to the world of personal and social meaning-making in reading.

    Those who proclaim what texts are to be taught as literature are cognizant of how the existing canon, is in fact a dynamic category system, one where works are constantly entering and exiting.  Yet just how these judgments are rendered, and by whom, remains mostly mysterious in our educational system.  Unless, however, each and every ELA teacher actively participates in this conversation of how we go about defining literature, commitment to the reading process itself will continue to elude many potential readers.

     ELA teachers constantly struggle with making literature choices that are inclusive so that works are not denied students because they don’t immediately conform to the teacher’s definition.   Once this process of definition and choice is open for inspection, teachers will begin to understand just how arguments for including everything from blogs to films, from song lyrics to advertisements might be fair game even if otherwise the ELA teacher might not view such artifacts as literature.  Further, an ELA teacher will understand just how the particular works chosen and the way students are encouraged to transact with them can be very disturbing both to students and community.  This is because authority is often questioned and multiple interpretations arise, both of which can be unsettling to students and parents who demand the certainty of the correct answer that can be spoon fed and regurgitated for the latest high stakes test.  Yet once the public stops to consider the matter, it must recognize how every citizen in any number of informal ways performs the literary act on a daily basis by making personal aesthetic meaning of the texts we are all bombarded with.  Who can not be convinced of society’s need for citizens who have learned and are comfortable with the active uses of the imagination?

     As educators and socializers of future ELA teachers, we are presented with two primary challenges besides helping them to read widely and promiscuously.  First, how can we promote their active participation in the ongoing conversation about what to include in the literature circle?  How can we help them to see the consequences of their choices so they take responsibility for including texts that best connect with the readers they are growing?  Second, aware of just how our own reading behaviors exhibit such great diversity depending upon text and context, what will promote similar consciousness in beginning ELA teachers? Indeed, auditing their own reading behaviors and sharing the results with others might dramatically reaffirm that they will continually have to accommodate such reading diversity of preference and interpretation among their own students.

Working toward a dynamic definition of literature.  Literature is that collection of texts that best help us develop higher levels of literacy.  Less rich texts—those that simply present information or give directions, for instance—may allow us to learn word decoding on the route to extracting simple meanings, but literature enables us to learn to complex reading behaviors that involve responding, reflecting, valuing, choosing, and take a stand on life’s complex issues.  At the same time, literature is more than just texts; it evokes experiences that transport readers into imaginary realms that foster connections to the actual worlds around them.  Taught as experience, literature invites students to take perspectives—symbolic, critical, playful, comparative, reflective—as part of the active engagement that all thinkers and writers must assume.

    Given it’s capacity to foster articulation of and reflection about the complexities of life as mediated through language, the teaching and learning of literature, broadly conceived as delight in language itself (as opposed to more instrumental models and uses of language), should lie at the heart of the English curriculum.  To use Freire’s terms, literature represents the interface, imaginatively expressed and received, between worlds and words.  In an important sense, literature seen as play with words prefigures and forms the basis of literacy—it provides the creative motivation to become literate. We perceive this process occurring with each child as he or she encounters and develops language arts through sound, symbol and the magic of meaning.  As teacher educators, therefore, it behooves us to present such a view of literature (and literacy) to our student teachers, and to work with them in the forging of practically realizable contents and strategies for this sort of teaching.

    Such a notion of literature runs counter to the prevalent, apparently common-sense version of literacy and literature which envisages literacy purely as decoding and unambiguous comprehension reading skills and literature as merely the icing on the cake for those who’ve made enough progress in basic literacy, a distinction evident in current “reading” tests and “basic skills” curriculum.

     While in the end there will be wide agreement about just what to include in the category of literature, debates at the margins significantly add to our understanding of the English/language arts teacher’s role in moving students beyond simple decoding skills.  The work of literature in fact can only exist in the light of particular kinds of reading activity.  In the end readers enact intellectual and emotional evocations of the work that are much greater than any drawing out of the “factual” constituents on the page.  In this sense of literature, which traditionally has been defined by genre membership and particular aesthetic or literary characteristics, only comes into full being in the presence of reader activity.  It is this activity that English/language arts teachers provoke and scaffold as they bring readers into the world of literature.  Still, without a text that connects to the experiential and interest world of the reader, the teachers’ hands are tied.  Thus it is important to stress that we are not simply talking about literature itself in isolation, but literature within the context of instruction and the social context of the classrooms.   Based on theories that acknowledge the transactional nature of the reader’s act of reading response, the meaning of the text is constituted by not only readers in contexts, but also the cultural and social discourses constituting these contexts. 

    Literature in schools has also been defined in terms of a coverage model of texts established by the high school literature canon related to the traditional required texts identified by Applebee.  This canon reifies American and British classic texts as central to the curriculum with multicultural literature remaining at best marginal, although this continues to evolve.  Focusing on the canon certainly includes important, significant works of literature, but given a coverage model, these texts are often taught in terms of acquiring information rather than as a means of fostering responses to the worlds and tensions these texts evoke.  And, because these texts are considered the gold standard of literature, multicultural texts that have not been included in the canon are often perceived as add-ons or as “different,” rather than treated as serious works of literature.

Defining Literature in Terms of Affordances

    In defining literature, rather than simply focusing on the characteristics of literature, we define it in terms of the affordances it offers to students.

An aesthetic stance.  Literature invites students to adopt an aesthetic stance as opposed to a utilitarian, efferent stance in the literary experience (Rosenblatt, 1978; 1995; 2005).   A s James Britton argues, literature invites students to adopt an interpretative/reflective stance associated with the subjective, non-pragmatic ways of experiencing life through experiencing the “language of the spectator” that fosters reflexive perspectives on the subjective meanings of experiences. Engaging in literature allows students to employ the language of the emotions—anger, fear, love, envy, hope, jealously, hate, greed, desire—emotions that are essential to learning to recognizing the humanity of people.  In a world in which the humanity of others is often ignored, it is essential to attend to the language of emotions permeating literature.

Empathy. Literature provides empathetic insights into the imagined experiences of others across time, space, gender and culture. In fiction and poetry, life holds still for a moment, and we can take the time to stare at it, deciding what we value and what we reject, what matters and what can be dispensed with or ignored.  Without that disposition to reflect and decide, our choices are uninformed, impulsive, reactionary.  Given the importance of empathizing with the plights of people throughout the world, students need to acquire ways of reading literature as essential for reading accounts of events in the troubled parts of the world.

    More than this, perhaps paradoxically, literature also gives us the opportunity to de-familiarize the familiar in ways that may be either celebratory, as a sense of awe and wonder at the nature of life and death, or critical, in the Brechtian sense of alienation from habitual, conventional modes of thought and feeling, as reflected in our experiences with poetry that challenges clichéd perceptions of the world.  Accounts of the suffering and dying in Darfur and elsewhere, for instance, are exercises in adding and subtracting unless we have the imagination to place ourselves there and feel something of the pain and loss.

Conversations about purpose, values, and self.  invites us into conversations about purpose, values, and selves in ways that enable us to collaborate with others in shaping our understanding of ourselves and the world.  If we read our lives with the habit of thoughtful attention that we develop in reading, discussing, and writing about the lives we encounter in our literature, we have a better chance of becoming thoughtful, rational, humane citizens.  Through talk about literature, students learn to test their ideas against those of others—writers, their characters, other readers, critics—and come to understand that their solitary thinking can be sharpened and enriched by the exchanges.  Lacking that literary experience, we are in danger of growing arrogant by whatever ideology has captured us.

Reflection.  Literature also affords adopting a reflective stance, inviting students to formulate moral and philosophical understanding about the meaning and value of life (Broudy, 1988; Dewey; 1916; Greene, 1973) associate with what Mark Johnson (1993) described as the moral imagination (Bullough, 2006).  By grappling with the ethical dimensions of characters’ actions, they may then reflect on the ethical dimensions of their own experiences as well as recognize that there is a common human condition experienced through literature as a way of knowing that condition. 

Multimodal experiences.  Literature also needs to be defined to include a range of multimodal and digital texts associated with popular culture: manga novels, comic books, digital poetry/storytelling, mixed media drama productions, etc.   As has always been the case with children’s literature, these texts combine print and visual images in ways that serve to engage young audiences accustomed to multimodal media texts (Kress, 2003). 

    And, young people increasingly experience texts not simply as autonomous entities but as linked together within what Henry Jenkins (2006) described as a “convergence culture” based on links between different media texts.  As Gee (2004) has noted, children often learn more literacy outside school than inside school. That is, children bring to the classroom knowledge about a variety of texts, whether music, art, technology, language, or movement. 

    Through acquiring these literacies in the arts, students learn to to feel about the world, or engage the affective, but they also teach students to see, notice, and critically interrogate the world, or engage the cognitive (Eisner, 1992, 2002,2003). Students learn to pay attention to the relationships that exist within any text, whether it be a story, poem, artwork, or musical composition. The arts help learners notice what is subtle in text, from a simple and single statement made by a character to the shades of a single color used in a landscape to a subtle introduction of horns or strings in a musical piece. The arts teach that paying attention to such subtleties matters when interpreting and creating texts (Eisner, 2002a).

    Second, the arts, by nature, invite problem-solving and complex thinking. Although schools would argue that they want learning to be divergent, imaginative, or creative, standardized testing promotes convergent or single-track thinking (Arts Education Partnership, 2005; Eisner, 2002b). Finding the one theme in a play or story, or coming up with a single answer to a math problem, is valued in such testing. The arts, however, promote thinking beyond rules and regulations. Complex thinking revolves around searching out many possible solutions or interpretations rather than looking solely for a right answer.

    Third, the arts promote paying attention to the way a text is configured. Focusing on how a story is written, how the words in a poem are chosen, how an artwork is presented, or how an argument is expressed through speech encourages learners to pay attention not only to what someone is expressing, but how what is being expressed is constructed (Albers, 1996, 1997, 2001; Arts Education Partnership, 2005; Cowan, 2001; da Silva, 2001; DuCharme, 1991; Ernst, 1994, 1997; Flynn, 2002; Graves, 1975, 1983; Greenway, 1996; Igoa, 1995; Katzive, 1997; Noden & Moss, 1995; Rabkin and Redmond, 2005; Siegel, 1984, 1995).

        While digital texts share certain features with print texts, they also differ from print texts in fostering interactive audience participation as well as hypertextual links between texts as is the case with blogs, wikis, podcasts, or social networking sites (Swenson, Rozema, Young, McGrail, & Whitin, 2005).  Learning to navigate these interactive, linked texts requires readers to adopt an active stance as not only interpreting, but also producing texts.  Readers must also employ a range of digital literacies associated with perceiving relationships between visual/video images and print, as well as different modes of social participation through sharing tagged material, promoting and subscribing to feeds, commenting on blog posts, or engaging in online chat.  PTs therefore need to understand their students’ use of digital literacies associated with the use of digital tools, for example, their ability to combine images, music, sounds, and texts to create texts in ways that engage audiences.

ROBERT, PLEASE ELABORATE ON THIS

     At the same time, PTs need to examine how digital media is influencing the reading of print literature, as well as the limitations in the kinds of literary experiences afforded by digital media.  A survey conducted by the National Endowment For The Arts (2004) identified a decline in the amount of reading of literature, particularly for younger people, although the survey did not take into account reading of online texts.  It is also the case that young people are less likely to read print news.   It may be the case that print and online reading do not compete with each other, but rather compliment each other.  Rather then bemoan the decline of reading print literature, PTs need to consider ways to build on adolescents’ strong interests in digital media to foster reading of print literature.

    It is also the case that teachers believe that students, particularly students considered to be “struggling readers,” must first acquire these “basic reading skills” prior to reading literature, failing to recognize that students are most likely to be motivated to want to learn to read through reading engaging literary texts.  It is also the case that teachers should not assume that because students lack “basic reading skills,” that they cannot read difficult literary texts.  We believe that it is possible to teach any Shakespearean play to any group of learners, whatever age or “ability” range.