"In a turbulent age..."

In honor of Rosenblatt, my first response to Literature as Exploration draws on my aesthetic experience with this text, my (almost) private meaning-making as I draw on "personal associations, feelings, and ideas being lived through during the reading" (p. 292). It took me back to a "turbulent age" - high school American History class...

I was 16. I thought about my new driver's license. I thought about my teacher - who I thought was pretty attractive for being a social studies teacher (oops). I read from the glossy 500 page textbook, I took notes on lecture after lecture after lecture after lecture, I bubbled on Scantron tests, I dozed off a little, I held tiny scraps of notebook paper over the air conditioner to watch them take flight. I came out of that class with an A but not one interesting or creative thought about America or democracy. Despite getting my education from one of the most highly ranked high schools in the country, situated right outside of the nation's capitol, it would take a lot more living, more experience and exposure to important ideas and conversations, before democracy was important to me personally - before they were translated into my actions as a teacher and so into the lives of my students...

Coming back around, here, to Rosenblatt: This idea of meeting real social needs in a democracy by translating the literary experience into actual life is so important that she begins with it:

In a turbulent age, our schools and colleges must prepare the student to meet unprecedented and unpredictable problems... And knowledge about humankind and society that schools can give him should be assimilated into the stream of his actual life" (p. 3)

And she ends with it, too: the "broader purpose, of nurturing men and women capable of building a fully democratic society" (p. 297).

I think this gets to the heart of how the transmission or decoding/analytic mode fails, how it failed me as a young citizen in social studies class and how it continues to fail today. I didn't connect as a human being to the experiences described in my textbook, which precluded any possible translation of my understanding in to behavior, into the "stream of actual life."

Preparation for another "turbulent age" - Where do we do from here?

"How can the student come to assimilate the scientific approach to humankind and society so thoroughly that it will translate itself into the very attitudes, decisions, and actions that constitute his own life?" (p. 229)

I hear Rosenblatt saying:

* to use literary experience to build students emotional response, understanding of self and others, reflective thinking, emotional and intellectual capacity, etc. so that they may "later be assimilated into actual behavior" (p. 217)

* to help students recognize the how abstract ideas can be applied to "specific concrete situations" (p. 169)

* to draw from literature and the social sciences to "arouse in the student a desire for social understanding" and move "toward a framework of ideas that will make possible constructive social action" (p. 126)

I've always been a practical sort of girl. Perhaps this explains in some part why I am so attracted to these ideas, of transaction with literature as having a broader social purpose that can meet the needs of citizens in a democracy to think flexibly, critically, deeply, broadly, about the self, about the other.

As a teacher, I want to build students' capacities by not only shaping the way that think, but by making that leap to changing what their behavior, their actions in the world. I'm thinking here about social action projects that draw from conversations in the classroom around literary experiences, but then make the next step into translating that into the world whenever possible. I think all of this is very beautiful and practical preparation for young people facing yet another "turbulent age."