Abstract
This essay, co-written by adult and child researchers, marks an important shift in the field of children’s literature studies because it promotes an academic practice in which children are actively involved in decision-making. In our polyphonic account of the collaboration, we draw on the ideas of productive remembering, re-memorying, and child-led research to advance a new pedagogical approach to the current, adult-centered literary school canon in Poland, which was compiled in 2017 by a panel of politically appointed experts. We exemplify our proposal by discussing “Staś and Nel in the 21st Century”: Do Long-established School Readings Connect Generations?”, a participatory research project conducted at a primary school in Wrocław, Poland, in spring 2018. As we argue, selected texts from the canon may catalyze memories of childhood from older readers that can be shared with younger readers to develop their own connections with these texts. Such an exchange may open new individual and collective remembering spaces linking intragenerational perspectives with intergenerational meanings and resulting in a school canon that promotes both national cohesion and openness to other cultures. Seen thus, our approach can be adopted in school and other settings to engage children and adults as co-creators of particular memory-work methods. In broader terms, it can promote a critical and action-oriented understanding of the heritage of childhood in Poland and elsewhere.
Highlights
JUSTYNA AND MATEUSZA survey of policies adopted across Europe to organize literature lessons in primary schools reveals two major approaches to canon formation
As we have argued elsewhere (Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Marecki 2018), the new school canon for primary schools, introduced in 2017, is intended to promote nation-shaping practices
As we mention earlier (Chawar et al 2018), the most recent publications on both international and Polish canon (e.g., Kümmerling-Meibauer and Müller 2017; Czernow and Michułka 2017) argue for its plural nature, they do not take into account the possibility of children’s intervention in school reading lists. We can break this pattern by encouraging the programmatic participation of children in the process of canon formation
Summary
A survey of policies adopted across Europe to organize literature lessons in primary schools reveals two major approaches to canon formation. As we propose, selected texts may become objects catalyzing memories of childhood from adult readers that can be shared with school-age readers to develop their own connections with these texts, inevitably shaped by children’s immersion in present culture and by the needs of their realities, including the challenge of transnationalism and globalization. Such “kinship readings,” as Clémentine Beauvais points out It provides a sense of order to the messiness of our endeavor (e.g., the struggle with deadlines, the fear of overburdening the children or fluctuating power differentials), including the very process of writing a coherent polyphonic account of our activities.
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