Literature Education

Literature and media education; education

Coaching for learners

When students stop unfolding their potential, because they cannot concentrate or suffer from deep anxieties or are unable to organize their day or their working environment, the usual remedy for this is tutoring. We have instead developed a project which aims at the modification of the individual learning process. As this modification has to be achieved by the learner her/himself we link her/his acquisition of learning skills to the practise of coaching which is meant to generate the motivation and the techniques the learner needs in order to achieve a turnaround in her/himself.

This project was devised by Birgitta Jaecks and Ulrich Kinzel at Leibniz–Gymnasium Bad Schwartau (D); it is being implemented at King Edward VI Grammar School, Chelmsford (GB) in 2012. Both schools and this department cooperate on this project. In autumn 2012 an article due to appear in schulmanagement will give an outline of the project. A paper in English provides some information beforehand, if you click here.

Discourse oriented hermeneutics for the literature classroom

This project aims to investigate the fundamental question of how students in the classroom understand literary texts. In the way literature has been taught up to now an isolated subject confronts a text (or the other way round); the principles of interpretation are assured by hermeneutics, its skills are modelled on the universal claims of literacy. This project now tries to understand the interpreting subject – a child or an adolescent – as an effect of discourses in the same way as literary texts are understood as part of discourses. On the theoretical level of didactic analysis the aim is to investigate in how far discourses form an intermediate layer in the process of literary understanding either separating the reader from the text or bringing him/her closer to it; on the practical level of a methodology of interpretation the aim is to edit material for and work out a model of a context or discourse based understanding of literary texts.

Comparative studies in literature education

In this project models and paradigms of literature education are to be compared with those from other countries.

Literary theory, hypertext, and literature education

This project aims at three things: By editing texts from modern media theory and history I would like to brush up a theme for the German literature classroom which still goes under the traditional heading of ‚mass media’. Apart from that, studies into the practise of hypertext are conceived for students as a detour to access complex models of contemporary literary theory which decentralise notions of traditional (school) hermeneutics. In this context, finally, the fundamental question will be raised and discussed what the significance of traditional testing might be in a culture more and more dominated by hypertext. – This project has been taught at a German and an English school and is designed to be presented to teachers at inservice training.