Hello and thank you for posting your reading biographies online as an act of reflective practice (Schon, 1991). In Hicks’ (2002) research on two working-class children, entitled Reading Lives, she reminds us that teachers draw on their own reading histories as teachers to teach, and reminds us of the importance of “seeing”, particularly when the class backgrounds of the children we teach may be different from our own. Trawling across the reading biographies, it is interesting to note how similar many childhood readings were, and at the same time, note how varied reading paths and patterns became. (I, of course, noted that many of you majored in literature at the university, which put you in another class of readers compared to say, the geography or economics major.)
The art of “seeing” is a tough call but an important call in teaching. I don’t think one ever ceases to learn. I started out teaching the Gifted Educated Programme (GEP) kids at RGS for three years and then at ACS(I) for another two plus years before moving on to Yishun Town Secondary School for eight months, after which I left for further studies in the States. In RGS, I was inspired by my students to read more and read more deeply (literature was not my major, law was) and at ACS(I), I had the chance to develop my understanding of curriculum and deepen the lessons and units I had started in RGS. I brought W. H. Auden to class, discussed intertextuality and guided students as they voluntarily put up reworked stage versions of Shakespeare’s plays. I was convinced that every student was able to appreciate literature and that literature was a means to helping students love books and understand life.
I brought this same attitude to YTSS, a relatively good neighbourhood school, and was vaguely aware that I needed to adjust my reading expectations for my students. I drew up modified reading lists, reworked the poems selected for studying in class, and tried to make sure that the stories chosen would resonate with the students. I was trying to make sure that the texts were culturally relevant to the students so they would be drawn into the texts and engaged enough to read on and participate while trying to stretch them to expand their cultural imagination by getting them to read texts they would not normally read. It was gratifying when my Secondary Three Express class chose to study Macbeth rather than The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time because, as one boy put it, “we can read The Curious Incident by ourselves but may not have the chance to read Shakespeare.”
But it was not so much success I learnt from as failure. I had decided that I was going to introduce my Secondary One Normal Technical students to reading. Reading was not part of what I felt was a purely functional and almost demeaning English curriculum, and I was certain that some of the NT students I taught would read if they found suitable books. I brought the first chapter of Sing to the Dawn to class, read it to them, pointed out the nuances of the descriptive language and told them about the plot and success! About one-third of the class picked up the book and read it. Next, I decided, in line with my principle of cultural expansion to read an abridged version of one of the Sherlock Holmes’ mysteries. I had been intrigued as a child by the mysteries and thought that the genre would attract some interest. It was an abysmal failure – students were either inattentive or could not catch what was going on. Only after the lesson did I realize that the British culture that was embedded in the language of the text was at that point too wide for my students to cross. I had thought about culture in terms of content and language but had forgotten that culture could be embedded in language. For someone like me who had grown up in a convent school, reading Enid Blytons and Nancy Drews, it was easy to move on to Sherlock Holmes but less so for these students. I had been blind to the reading histories of my own students and was thus unable in that lesson to bridge the gap. Teaching the GEP in RGS and ACS(I), there had been little necessity to understand that gap since they more or less started from the same point as I did. In a survey in one Secondary Three GEP at ACS(I) in 2008, even the boys who did not see themselves as readers were able to list between three to six books read in the last six months.
The reading biographies were meant as a precursor to the discussion of the texts you were asked to read - Coraline, Sing to the Dawn, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, and The Giver – and we were to discuss their suitability for a lower secondary classroom. If I can at a later stage, I’ll get back to these texts but for now, when it comes to text choice, do think about the principle of cultural relevancy/ accessibility and expansion and how to resolve the tension given the school you might be posted to and the reading histories of the students you will be teaching.
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