1. Teaching Pre-20 th Century Prose and Poetry

2. Aims Explore issues related to teaching pre-20 th century prose and poetry across the secondary age range Objectives Know some approaches to develop ideas about historical, social, cultural contexts

3. Raising the Issues Read these three openings to classic texts to stimulate your thinking about the challenges posed by pre 20th century prose. What would you say are these key challenges? What ways can you suggest to deal with them?

4. Challenges Linguistic demands Whole texts Prescribed authors Social, historical and cultural contexts

5. Pre 20 th Century in the NC Key Stage 3 – English literature, both pre-1914 and contemporary, including prose, poetry and drama; Shakespeare (two plays) – knowing the purpose, audience for and context of the writing and drawing on this knowledge to support comprehension Key Stage 4 – at least one play by Shakespeare; works from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries; poetry since 1789, including representative Romantic poetry – drawing on knowledge of the purpose, audience for and context of the writing, including its social, historical and cultural context and the literary tradition to which it belongs, to inform evaluation

6. ‘Responsive Teaching’ of Pre-20th Century Poetry Pike’s PhD research (see, for example, Pike (2000) ‘Keen Readers: adolescents and pre 20 th century poetry’ Educational Review 52:1) tackled the ‘problem’ of pre-20 th century poetry Concerned with the temptation of be didactic and ‘frontload’ context, biography, etc….Pike started with student responses Using talk partners, whole class discussion, journal writing he sought to develop critical understanding from the starting point of students’ own personal response Typically this involved looking at a poem in Year 10 with students talking and writing personal response, then returning to the poem on further occasions in Year 11 and ‘feeding in’ relevant contextual information

7. ‘Responsive Teaching’ of Pre-20th Century Poetry In this extracts, Pike compares students’ initial personal responses to a poem and their final examination writing How do you respond to these extracts? How far do you feel they support Pike’s claims that his approach allows genuine engagement and personal yet critical response to pre-20 th century poetry?

10. Timeline Activity Before starting a text, put together a list of events occurring during that time period Cut up the statements and shuffle in an envelope Students in groups, using library/web put events in correct order Pairs given 1 or 2 events to research and collect brief information on On classroom wall construct an annotated time line During reading of text use timeline as a ‘backdrop’ to refer to and annotate further when it sheds light on text

16. Activities to engage students with social, historical and cultural contexts  Timeline activity – students look at a range of statements on cards relating to events before/during/after writing of text to be studies. Students (pairs/groups) research a few events each and then as a class pool findings to create a timeline. Before reading discuss which events might play a part in the writing. During reading, annotate timeline with key contextual links to text (can be an individual timeline in books or a class timeline on a wall).  Examine cultural artefacts of the period – e.g. paintings, photographs, newspaper pages, architecture, film. Facsimiles of newspapers dating back to early 1800s can be downloaded from websites; ITN/Pathe archive website can give access to downloadable newsreel dating back to WW1  Individual/pair/group seminars on specific historical/cultural/social contexts around texts -e.g. on King Lear, different groups present on Elizabethan notions of Kingship, sources of the play. Or different groups present on different aspects of Romantic Age – political events, philosophy, religion, revolutions, etc… Presentations done to brief.  Pairs given a single year before/during writing of the text under consideration. Research and present key events of the year (in a ‘I Love 1843’ style)  Author ‘This is Your Life’