Is there anything left to say about…

Planning for conceptual progression in an English Literature Curriculum?

Curriculum planning is one of the joys of teaching English. It is a privilege to be in position where one can lead on curriculum planning and provision. But, this also brings great responsibility and it is the topic of much educational writing.

What can be added to this debate? My contribution is the consideration of conceptual development over the five years of the KS3 and the KS4 curriculum. The curriculum is made of many layers: the top layer are the texts and topics we choose and the order in which we sequence them. In English Literature, the breadth of choice can be overwhelming, but we cannot include everything.  Christine Counsell talks of the curriculum as narrative. Our joy as English teachers is that not only can our curriculum be a narrative, that of story of literature, our curriculum teaches narrative. My focus on conceptual development has come from considering the different purposes of the curriculum and how we support our students to develop as critical readers and as critical writers, and to support them in examination success.

Therefore, what concepts and constructs should underpin an English Literature curriculum? Firstly, what is a concept? What is a construct?

Concept: an idea or mental image which corresponds to some distinct entity or class or entities

Construct: an idea or theory containing various conceptual elements

The National Curriculum does not explicitly refer to the terms concepts and constructs, but it does outline what the curriculum should cover. Therefore, I want to consider some of the concepts which could underpin a curriculum, help to structure the curriculum and support our text and topic choices.

Reading narrative

• Narrative voice and perspective
• Reliability and unreliability
• Plot: seven basic plots
• Story structure
• Propp, Vonnegut et al
• Motif and trope
• Literary allusion and intertextuality
• Inference, implication and ambiguity

Narrative voice and perspective

In order for students to understand how stories are told, what do we teach them about narrative voice and perspective? For example: first, second and third person; omniscient narrator, how do we teach students to distinguish between the author and the narrator? What understanding of grammar, syntax and sentence structures support students in understanding the construction of a narrative voice? These are the questions I would pose as part of revising/constructing a curriculum. How strong is our understanding as teachers of narrative voice and do we have a common understanding of this is taught across as department? What aspects of literary theory do we need to discuss and explore as teachers as part of our ongoing subject-specific CPD? How do the texts we want to teach help our students to understand narrative voice? How we look at increasingly complex narrative perspectives?

Plot

The work of Christopher Booker has been very influential  in my approach teaching plot and structure. Alongside John Yorke’s ‘Into the Woods’. What do students need to understand about plot and structure (the fabula and sjuzet of Russian Formalism for example)? Exploring the seven basic plots explicitly with students as part of a storytelling unit, will support their own creative writing, because it then they are working with a literary framework of universal stories in the European tradition at least. When students explore the seven basic plots, we can then move on to discussing structure of the narrative and narrative voice. Whilst we have to isolate elements for a theoretical understanding, our exploration should be always rooted in concrete examples of story, for example, linked to Greek Myths, fairy tales, the chosen novel; referring to their prior experiences. Vonnegut’s story structures, from his rejected Master’s thesis in anthropology, can support student understanding further. His lecture can be accessed here.

Motif and trope

Once we have considered narrative voice, plot and structure as part of curriculum planning, we could then consider how and where we develop our student’s understanding of motif and trope. These act as shorthand within texts and carry considerable interpretive weight within a narrative. If students cannot read motifs and tropes, their analytical understanding is hampered. We need to consider how we teach these both explicitly and in context. Once again, this is part of our subject knowledge development. As part of the curriculum planning process, common motifs can be identified and discussed, supported by critical reading. By planning deliberate encounters through the entire curriculum, we are preparing our students to become confident critical and analytical writers, which they then can demonstrate in an exam context.

Literary allusion and intertextuality

This is the same with literary allusion and intertextuality. How do we plan our students’ experience with story and narrative to develop their understanding of the common allusions? As teachers, are we confident of our own understanding of allusions and their origins? For example Pandora’s box, circles of hell? Therefore the sequence of texts in our curriculum and exploration of anthologies is key to developing knowledge and understanding of allusion. However, this is not reducing the curriculum to a reductive list of allusions, more that we consider how our text choices develop our students’ specific and wider understanding of literary allusions and why they are used as narrative devices. As experienced and sophisticated readers, we connect earlier texts with newer texts and see the influences of past literature on succeeding writers. We see where a text includes references to or echoes a previous text. How does our text choice and sequencing of texts support this?

Inference, implication and ambiguity

I have included these at the end of my list because as teacher we need to be very clear about the conceptual difference between inference (the action of the reader) and implication (the action of the writer) and how these work in the acts of reading and writing. How do our text choices and the sequence of our texts build an increasingly sophisticated interpretation of text through the act of inference, at key points in a text and across the narrative of a text?  How do our text choices support an increasingly sophisticated understanding of implication and the ways writer construct implication?  This will then support our students’ understanding of deliberate ambiguity and why writers employ this technique as part of their relationship with their reader.

The list of concepts outlined above is not comprehensive, it does not include constructs such as the hero or the tragic hero for example which are also part of our consideration when curriculum planning. Also, you will see that I have not outlined a solely linear sense of progression. In terms of progression, conceptual understanding should not be atomised into a series of assessment statements, but rather written into the choices of texts over the time of the students’ curricular experience so that we support students on their journey as confident, competent and critical readers.

References

Booker, Christopher, (2004) The Seven Basic Plots: why we tell stories  Bloomsbury: London

Counsell, Christine Senior Curriculum Leadership 1: The indirect manifestation of knowledge: (A) curriculum as narrative https://thedignityofthethingblog.wordpress.com/

DfE The National Curriculum (2014) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-framework-for-key-stages-1-to-4

Myatt, Mary (2019) presentation for Teach Meet English Icons/TES

Open Culture (2014) http://www.openculture.com/2014/02/kurt-vonnegut-masters-thesis-rejected-by-u-chicago.html

Yorke, John (2013) Into the Woods: how stories work and why we tell them Penguin: UK