Creating Interpretive Possibilities with Literature in the Teacher Education Classroom

Abstract

I begin class by reading Mem Fox's (1985) children's book entitled Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge to the class. The main character in this book is a little boy named Wilfrid who learns from his parents that his good friend, ninety-six year old Miss Nancy, has her memory. Because Wilfrid does not understand what this means, he asks his parents and a few of the residents at the senior citizen 's home where Miss Nancy resides the question: What's a memory? They tell him that memory is somethi ng that you remember, that is warm, that is from long ago, that makes you cry, that makes you laugh, and tha t is as precious as gold. Once Wilfrid learns that memory is important he becomes concerned that Miss Nancy ha s lost hers. He decides to help by collecting things that are meaningful to him: a box of sea shells, a puppet, a medal given to him by his grandfather, a football, a fresh warm egg. He carries these specially s elected objects to Miss Nancy and, one by one, hands them to her. As she and Wilfrid examine the objects, she begins to remember : the blue speckled eggs she had found in a bird's nest in her Aunt's garden; going to the beach as a c hild; a big brother who had gone to war and never returned; a puppet she had shown to her sister. And, as she remembers, she tells Wilfrid the stories connected to these memories. Like Patricia Polacco's (1988) The Keeping Quilt and Phoebe Gilman's (1992) Something From Nothing , this children's picture book shows the way in which certain cultural objects mediate int erpersonal, intertextual, and intergenerational memories. The objects that Wilfrid brings t o Miss Nancy create a location for the retrieval of memory, for the evocation of stories announced by these memories, and for the interpretation of these. For me, the book itself began to function as such a cultural object. A s I continued to pass it around to friends and enter into discussions with them about it, the book continued to provide a foca l point, a collecting place for my and others' interpretations. These interpretations w ere not just of the book; like the conversations between Miss Nancy and Wilfrid Gordon, these conversations came t o include many memories and events that were announced by our shared reading of the book. I call these events commonplace locations.