Secondary School Literature Curriculum Design: A Multifunctional Approach

Abstract

I n clamor to return to basics and to prepare students to demonstrate their test-taking competence, teaching of literature must not be relegated to position of proverbial stepchild. As Michael Shugrue so aptly states, the development of curriculum for English classroom must, by its very nature, be a continuous, open-ended process.'1 Yet ferment of curriculum innovation of 1960's has given way-due largely, it seems, to a lack of funding-to a decided retrenchment in 1970's. As in other areas of society, recent English curriculum design has been marked by a trend which denominates itself as conservative, but which often appears to represent a dearth of new ideas. While welcoming a return to an emphasis on teaching of sound writing skills, English teachers must also remain receptive to new concepts in literature curriculum and sensitive to shortcomings of present methods. The innovations of 1960's did produce one lasting and salutary effect: abandonment of old, unlamented literature anthology. Whether as students or teachers, we remember our encounters with this ponderous volume. In its most common form, it was a survey of English or American literature whose organizing principle, if it had one, was simple chronology. It was usually divided into periods-the Puritans, Romantics, Age of Realism, Modernism-and it contained parts of essays, bits of novels, snippets of poems that were considered to be representative of age being studied. Today's immensely improved texts which have replaced survey are often based on principles of Brunerian structuralism and have greater intellectual coherence. Chronology as sole organizing principle has been replaced by texts that emphasize genre, theme, New Critical analyses, or students' aesthetic experience of a work. Such anthologies have their inception in Bruner's definition of what meant by structure of a subject. Grasping structure of a subject, he explains, is understanding it in a way that permits many other things to be related to it meaningfully .... To learn structure, in short, to learn how things are related.2 It this concept of relatedness of elements of a discipline which underlies his view, and subsequently others', of nature of ideal curriculum.