Tidskrift för lärarutbildning och forskning 4/2005

Literature as Exploration
was that everybody was being subjected to the
kind of thing that was needed for that perspective.
English major as we call it: students who
were going on and specializing in English and
in literature. But actually, most of the students
were not going to be specialists. They should be
given a different kind of training from the sort
of emphasis that was made for them to create
prospective English teachers. The problem that
emerges from that is that literature was looked
upon as a body of knowledge rather than as a
kind of a collection of text that gave opportunity
for a certain kind of experience. And, it
is that a lack in the traditional method that
I think we have first of all to face. It is more
important, particularly as I see it, in the early
years when children are just developing their
linguistic habits and their habits of thinking to
help them to develop what I have been talking
about as these different ways of handling what
their relationship with the text brings to mind,
when they should be concerned with it, analytically,
and when they should be concerned with
it affectively and experience-wise.
So it is that kind of thing we want particularly
to emphasize for the prospective teacher. To
know what kind of habits the teacher is going to
help the young people to develop. So it is more
important that the prospective teachers of very
young people have a particularly good knowledge
of children’s literature. And, although
their knowledge of adult literature that may not
be as extensive as it would have been under the
old emphasize, nevertheless, if they have this
particular way of approaching literature, they
can share with the youngsters the fact that every
piece of reading is a kind of puzzle. You do not
have to make it appear that you do not know
everything. You can be a fellow reader. So what
I feel is important to develop in the early years
in the prospective teacher is their willingness
to be able to join with the youngsters. This is
what I think I see! What do you see in it But
that does not mean that this way necessarily
fits better. So you develop habits of reading in
this way that are producing greater and greater
competence.
If you see that kind of habit is developed early
in the youngster, then as they go on, obviously,
you want to have people teaching them who
themselves have had enough training in how to
analyze their experience. You start to understand
what the effect of their kinds of technical strategies
do for their experiencing literary work.
And so we start again as regards to what is the
traditional way of looking at literature, what
are the conventions of literature that maybe we
understand literary conventions better so we
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