Part of a 2013 article

Critical education and embodied learning.

Stories are part of a broader nurture and education process that has itself to be examined for its assumptions and objectives. The tradition that the west pays lip-service to is that education should enable children to think intellectually, to express their feelings creatively, and to develop their character morally. The aim is autonomy, that is, developing the ability to draw inner guidance from within based on evidence. This message underlies government reports and inspection regimes, and has been the basic assumption of several generations of educational thinkers. I refer to ‘lip-service’ because policy and practice do not always match. Neither SAT tests nor examinations actually promote autonomous learning but reward memory and conformity. Schools are authoritarian institutions that demand compliance. Stories and literature are certainly part of the curriculum, but this does not necessarily bring about embodied learning.

I here explore two ideas, one old and the other new. The old is that of critical education, or education critical of society and the status quo. Early ideas in Frankfurt, Germany, were driven out by the Nazi party to America where critical studies were further developed. When applied to the reading of story, a critical reading would emphasise equal opportunities, discrimination and prejudice, status and class, justice, dominant voices and unheard voices, and so on. We could survey the whole published body of children’s literature to see whether these themes are covered or marginalised; and we could critique a particular book through these headings. This critical strategy has strengthened considerably over the past fifty years. Books written in the light of this agenda are increased gradually. There is not a chapter on critical theory in Hunt’s International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature (1996 or 2004) although some aspects are addressed to some extent under ideology. Meek opens the encyclopedia emphasising that child readers should “interrogate texts” and become “critical and not conformist” (Hunt, 2004: 10). Nor is there a treatment of children’s literature in The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education (Apple, Au and Gandin, 2009). Two starting points would be ‘Critical Media Education and Radical Democracy’ (chapter 21 by Kellner and Share) and Teilelbaum’s ‘Educating Children for “Good Rebellion”’, chapter 23, pp. 318-325. How to respond to television, film, comics and the internet has as its aim morally aware and (politically) active students. “Good rebellion” means not accepting unjust and unacceptable government and power structures. Its origins have socialist ambitions, of which groups like Leslie Paul’s Woodcraft Folk, with outdoor pursuits and fireside stories, are the best known example (Paul, 1951). This has links also to the work of Paulo Freire (1970) in turning literacy education into a politicizing act. The implications for children’s fiction is that stories can generate deep thinking on self and relationships if the readers are socially aware and engage with social justice. The child reader in turn learns to interrogate the relational and social implications of the story both in private and through group (including class) discussion. Teachers need to be tuned into this in order to facilitate the discussion. In practice, published stories are varied in quality and children will be in a position to critique stories for content, characterisation and assumptions of privilege. The selection of stories for publication favours the bizarre over the ordinary. The discussion of the book is thus crucially important to prevent readers simply accepting its hidden assumptions and messages.

The newer idea of embodied learning I take from studies of theatre and performance. Here, ideas are performed to audiences, and the actors embody the ideas, points of view and feelings. The aim of a performance is to be as authentic and convincing as possible, the actors living the ambiguities, dilemmas and contradictions that they depict (Riley and Hunter, 2009). This book emphasises that performance can become research into human feelings, attitudes and relations and moreover can reach its audience more powerfully and rapidly than a wordy research monograph would allow. I am applying this to children’s stories in two ways.

First, the writing of stories for children is a performance (ideas and values being displayed for public audiences) bearing the same demands for honesty, sincerity and authenticity as applies in drama and the theatre. Quality writing is thus a craft requiring talent and dedication. Writings for children potentially affects their development and ideas, and needs therefore to be of the highest quality and integrity. Although authors need freedom in their writing, stories should be defensible as promoting healthy personal and social development, and not promoting prejudice, hatred, disrespect and other such negative attitudes. However, stories need to be thought-provoking rather than bland homilies, and are likely to stimulate thinking about these negative themes.

Secondly, the child reader as audience can be emotionally moved by the book, and led to consider issues that might be potentially world-view changing, even life-changing. In a story in written form, this demands vividness in description and honesty in characterisation, characters who impress as real, engaged in dilemmas which are true to life. This will not be the case where characters are cardboard and adventure plots banal. A serious issue emerges on what is suitable for children to read. In adventure stories, children have routinely been placed in danger, and excitement linked to this. The limits are constantly tested, stories for example engaging with death, war and atrocities (such as Elli: Coming of Age in the Holocaust by Livia E. Bitton Jackson. Where a story is sensitive and does not indulge in gratuitous and sadistic violence, it should be capable of promoting personal development. If the story gives the impression that human life has little value, then it is potentially harmful.


Imagining Reality.

Both writing stories and reading stories involve acts of imagination, but they are different. The child does both by telling, acting out or writing stories as well as reading them. The writer’s imagination needs more research, since there is a subtle combination of research, observation (ethnography, in fact) and make-believe in the production of a work. An event described in fiction may have happened in real life; characters may be combinations of people encountered; personal characteristics may have been observed in real people. Yet the combination is a new act of creation. The population of a story with characters requires the integration of these background factors, and their visualisation into a new character. Some, like Harry Potter, will have positive qualities, but others, like Pullman’s Mrs Coulter will be anti-heroes, threats to the main characters, enemies in real life. Children of course need to deal with friends and enemies, so each has a literary purpose. And evil characters have the potential for redemption. For the child reader, the story provides a new world to enter, with new people to meet and deal with. They may resemble people they know, or be larger than life. The reader becomes part of the virtual community created in the book, an onlooker who likes or dislikes the various characters. The reader shares the emotions encountered in the group, the tensions as danger comes, the anger at acts of selfishness or betrayal. Even where the characters are creatures of fantasy, with talking animals, or wizards, or evil 5 spirits, the story provides an adventure which has to be engaged with intellectually, emotionally and morally. Since real life is full of ambiguity and uncertainty, a story can develop a high level of complexity.

In conclusion.

There is a place for both stories as entertainment and stories with a serious message. However, many story writers for children create their stories within uncritical comfort zones, and the exceptions to this surprise and delight. I agree with Meek (in Hunt, 2004:1-12) that criticality should begin in the kindergarten, with infants. Children tend to be bombarded by media materials and skills to distinguish the good from the bad can prove useful. Of course, good and bad are to be problematised – it is the discussion about what is good and bad that is important. The same applies to books: stories bear messages which should not be blindly accepted but rather challenged in an attempt to understand them more deeply. Children will not be able to do this unless they are guided and taught.


References

Apple, Michael W., Wayne Au and Luis Armando Gandin, 2009, The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Education,

Bitton Jackson, Livia E. 1980, Elli: Coming of Age in the Holocaust

Briggs, Raymond 1983 When the Wind Blows

Foreman, Michael 1972 Dinosaurs and All that Rubbish

Freire, Paulo 1972 Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“Hope, Laura Lee” (pseudonym) The Bobbsey Twins, available at Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/737

Hunt, Peter (editor) 2004 International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature,

Paul, Leslie 1951. Angry Young Man.

Pullman, Philip 1999. The Subtle Knife.

Riley, Shannon Rose and Hunter, Lynette (editors) 2009 Mapping Landscapes o Performance Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies