Pixel International Conferences

Trapped in a contemporary instructional twirl, generated by a public management inspired definition of educational quality as something measurable and assessable, the teaching of literature in school faces major difficulties in terms of both performance and justification. At the same time reading and talking about literature reveal some profound shortcomings in the current tendency to make education secure and predictable. These are apparent against the backdrop of a long history of treating literature reading as a main aspect of education, of becoming educated. In this tradition, established long before curricula were ever formulated, there is an element of regarding the study of and reflection on human poetry and storytelling as a kind of educational metacognitive practice in its own and immeasurable right.  

In our paper we focus on the core competence of reflection as central to all education regarded as an essential practice in the forming and upholding of a democratic society. Using Bloom’s classical taxonomy, we define reflection as an educationally desirable higher-order of thinking, which takes place on the basis of lower-order thinking skills. To experience and immerse in the depicted universe and characters of a literary text are thus fundamental to the reading of fiction, but the pedagogical activation of reflection requires complementary approaches, where the text as aesthetic expression and performance is highlighted.

To reflect is to critically-ethically engage yourself with the notion of something and someone Other. Reflection, then, is fundamentally dialogical and of an indefinite nature, i.e. a process of reciprocal estrangement – seeing yourself in the other, and the other in yourself – making space for the becoming of liable subjects. We suggest that reading and talking about literature in school by necessity must open up for this.

Reflection as a pedagogical activity must be defined as using thought processes to produce answers of a non-definite nature. As opposed to many other school tasks reflection means that the student may ponder and reason over several possible outcomes and not expect a given. Both teacher and student must be able to communicate around issues without succumbing to matching questions with given answers. To reflect is synonymous with considering, contemplating, deliberating, etc. It means brooding in between answer and question and by using patient thinking taking the time to consider many perspectives. There is an element of time here which brings slow education to mind.

If reflection systematically could be taught, modelled and given time and centrality in teaching, and thereby be a counter-discourse to the speed and quantity in contemporary schools much would be gained. The questions we ask, the amount of questions we ask and the qualitative level of the questions asked define what education is to a student, a teacher in a society.

key words: literary studies, reflection, teaching generic competences