Beyond the Essay? Assessment and English Literature

Literary reading as a web of relationships: Implications for pedagogy at a South African university

“…To decolonise our teaching, we must allow students to actively bring English literary texts into confrontation with the students’ diverse funds of knowledge drawing from Indigenous, settler and popular cultures. While teachers in HE, including in South Africa, have historically tended to teach fixed meanings, specifically in relation to ‘the canon’, this kind of pedagogy has been increasingly dismantled by practitioners who opt to teach in a way that develops in students a flexibility and range of reading across genres and cultural traditions, critical acumen, tolerance for complex and ambiguous meanings, and openness to new ideas and experiences (Gibson, 2017; Miller, 2002). Since our students are prospective teachers of reading themselves, we also want them to develop sensitive metacognitive awareness of both immersive and critical reading as they are happening, without destroying the bloom of the moment-by-moment pleasure of literature or rendering the students’ varied funds of linguistic and cultural knowledge invisible and devalued.…”

“…The portfolio design must decentre “answers to questions” to allow “readers” to appear, rather than “students”, and class discussions must include explicit discussion, modelling and scaffolding of different kinds of reading: immersive reading for pleasure as well as slow “close reading”, reading across genres such as poetry and novels, reading across literary traditions. Writing tasks could explicitly require “response statements” that ask students to record their immediate, unstructured responses (Gibson, 2017), and employ creative writing or multimodal avenues for such tasks, so as to draw on the students’ multiple literacies. Another avenue would be to instruct students to first paraphrase and then analyse a passage, and then reflect on the differences between these “narrative” and “paradigmatic” kinds of writing.…”