In DI and SDC primary school, children learn to interpret texts, but they start with different assumptions about what it means to understand a text and how to learn to do so. To see the differences between the methodology proposed by Kudina and Novlianskaia, on the one hand, and by Kurganov, who designed the reading course used in SDC primary school, on the other, we compare the way Pushkin’s Tale of Tsar Saltan is read in the DI and SDC classrooms.
According to Kudina and Novlianskaia, interpreting (or, as they put it, “extracting”)** from a text involves first and foremost “consistent movement ‘tracking’ the development of the author’s thoughts, feelings, and position, the recreation of an integrated conditional model, a “picture of the world,” an interpretation of artistic form as substantial at all levels.”39 To teach children to “extract” from books, the authors of the course propose a special learning method—“accented extraction, extracting specific aspects from the text to solve particular reader problems. During this work, the teacher assigns the reading problem in advance, but never has exhaustive knowledge of its solution.”40
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** “Extracting” is a rough translation of 'vychityvat’—to read something “out of” a text.— Trans.
Kudina and Novlianskaia’s Methodological Solutions for second grade gives us an idea of how “accented extraction” of The Tale of Tsar Saltan works. At the beginning of the cycle (four lessons are devoted to the tale), the teacher formulates the task: to prepare for expressive reading of the tale. According to the course design, a dialogue should take place approximately as follows:
Teacher: Expressive reading is a difficult matter and demands serious preparation. What do we need to understand and extract from the work for this?
Children: The picture of life, the attitude of the narrator.
Children: If it’s in verse, then we also have to remember how to read verse, that verse has rhythm and rhyme.
Teacher: All the same, we won’t be able to extract everything from the tale together—there’s no way we’ll have the time. So let’s separate out what’s most important, the main things that help us read expressively. . . . What should we start with?
Children: Genre, the task of the genre. . . .
Teacher: So from the title it’s already clear that what we have here is a fairy tale, a wonder tale, with fairy-tale heroes. It’s not just names of protagonists we have in the title, but what else is the poet telling us about them?
Children: King Gvidon is glorious and mighty, and the Tsarevna Swan is beautiful.
Teacher: So in the title we already have a picture of life, the narrator’s evaluation: he likes both protagonists—the Tsarevna and Gvidon, he gives them an immediate evaluation. In other words, in the title there is a hint at the task of the genre of this fairy tale. What is it?
Children: To reveal the protagonists’ characters, to assess them.41
This is how children in the DI school “discover on their own” that the objective of Pushkin’s tale turns out to be to uncover and assess the protagonists’ characters. Here is an example of how this is supposed to happen:
Teacher: What do we learn about the protagonists’ characters and their moods from this scene? About Saltan?
Children: Saltan is sitting “with sad meditation on his face.”
Teacher: Although he is sitting “resplendent in gold.” And the women?
Children: “While the one-eyed cook, and weaver, And their mother, sly deceiver, Sit around the Tsar and stare, At him with a toad-like glare.”***
Teacher: And is the attitude of the narrator clear to us?
Children: Yes, he feels sorry for Saltan—he lost his wife and child. But he doesn’t like the women, he says they “Stare at him with a toad-like glare.”
Teacher: And what else do we find out about Gvidon’s aunts?
Children: “But the cook, and royal weaver, With their mother, sly deceiver, Did not wish to let the tsar See this wondrous isle so far.”
Children: And you can see the attitude of the narrative: “addressed the tsar most slyly.” The narrator doesn’t like the weaver.
Teacher: And what is their attitude toward wonders? The same or different?
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*** Translation by Louis Zellikoff, http://home.freeuk.com/russica4/books/salt/saltan.html.—Trans.
The children should be led to the conclusion that when they need to keep Saltan from going, they belittle the significance of the wonder (“Wherein lies the wonder, pray?”), but the new wonder, one that Gvidon does not have, is described as the most extraordinary.”42
At the conclusion of class the teacher sums up:
Teacher: We have done a lot of work trying to prepare for expressive reading. We weren’t able to extract the entire text, of course. But I hope that it’s clear to you now what else you need to work on some more on your own. Together, we figured out the most important thing—the picture of life, with its various moods, various protagonists, and various narrator attitudes toward them. There is a struggle between good and evil taking place within the tale, and evil, AS IS USUALLY, BUT NOT ALWAYS, THE CASE (e.g., Kolobok is eaten by the fox, and the Snow Maiden melts!), succumbs to the power of good. But the forces of good in tales remain good to the end, and they even give evil the opportunity to repent, reform, and they try not to exact revenge.
We have tried to figure out how different levels of the tale “work” on this complex picture of life. It is important to understand that the tale is written in verse, and that in the reading process you have to be able to convey the beauty of the poetic form as well.43
This is followed by expressive reading of fragments from the tale. It is interesting that Pushkin’s tale is never read in its entirety.
We see that same algorithm of understanding, movement from the general to the particular. The tale is an epic text, so—like it or not—you have to seek in it the “picture of life” and the “author position.” The teacher clearly spells out to the children exactly what they should understand in the tale and how they must achieve this understanding. Explaining the concept behind their course, Kudina and Novlianskaia describe the reader’s job as a creative one and state that “creative reading of a text (whether by the teacher or the pupils) can never have a single result, programmed in advance,” and that every reader reads a text in his or her own way.44 But how do lessons of this sort teach children creative reading?
Another point is just as important. When children arrive in first grade, they already have experience with literary texts [cf. the notion of “prior knowledge”]: fairy tales, motion pictures, cartoons. This experience is linked to children’s “play consciousness,”45 with the ability developed in preschoolers to submit to the artistic world of the work and become absolutely immersed in it, on the one hand, and to add to its structure, to further develop this world through fantasy and imagination, on the other. However, DI ignores this experience, and the artistic education of the first-grader is thought to begin with a fresh start. There is a disconnect between children’s own experience and the skills that the teacher offers them. Children who like the teacher and enjoy learning can take pleasure in doing such classroom assignments. But we suspect that the reading they do “for themselves” will bear little resemblance to what they are taught in school.
Kurganov’s course is built on an entirely different foundation.46 In his course, there is no pressure of a single aesthetic theory strictly dictating to the students what it means to understand a book. Two ideas stand out as central to literary education in SDS primary school: the idea that in order to understand a work it is important to pay attention to its literary form (this seems to be the only thing that the adherents of different aesthetic theories agree on) and the idea that in the learning activity of young schoolchildren it is essential that the ability to understand the artwork that preschoolers have already developed in advance must not be ignored or “sublated,” but rather retained and developed.47
A foundational process in the SDC course is the “formation of expressive reading of literature supported by discussion among the children of how a work is ‘made’ and how it can be read.”48 Like Kudina and Novlianskaia, Kurganov incorporates tales by Pushkin into the syllabus, but not because they lend themselves to the formulation of some particular theoretical concept. The fairy-tale genre is familiar to and beloved by preschoolers. Slow and attentive reading of the tales in class— with particular attention to their text, to whatever constructions, words or phrases, and behaviors of the characters might seem “strange”—provides an opportunity to “estrange”**** the tale for the first-graders, to “explode” the illusion that they fully understand it, and to awaken in the pupils a sense of wonder about something to which they have long since grown accustomed, to stimulate an awareness in them of something puzzling that demands effort to comprehend. This achieves the main goal of the course—to teach children to see literary form and interpret it.
Kurganov’s method (i.e., learning dialogue) is fundamentally different from “accented extraction” proposed by Kudina and Novlianskaia. The syllabus includes a smaller number of works. This allows each text to be studied at length and in depth. The teacher and children read the tale out loud in class (in its entirety, of course), and they stop every time a child (or the teacher) notices something in the text that seems strange or interesting. They discuss these points and either “dialogue-argument” ensues, when the children and teacher propose and argue principally different ways of understanding a particular point in the text, or “dialogue-agreement” ensures, when dialogue participants work together on a particular interpretation and develop it [cf. the concept of “building on each other’s ideas”]. Unlike DI, the SDC teacher does not assign a sequence of learning tasks designed to allow the pupils to “discover” something in the text “on their own.” The children “extract” the tale whole and discover in it what they find interesting and do not “dig out” aspects that the teacher has noted in advance [i.e., “preset curricular endpoints”].
In Kurganov’s first-grade classroom, tales are explored outside their cultural-historical and social context, without regard to the author’s intention. The teacher does not teach the children to penetrate the text’s design or ask themselves what
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**** Viktor Skhlovsky’s term; literally, “to make strange” [ostranit’], used to describe the artistic device that slows our perception, permitting us to see a familiar thing as if for the first time. In his “Translator’s Introduction” to Shklovsky’s book, Benjamin Sher discusses the difficulty of translating Shklovsky’s neologism and justifying his final decision to resort to an English neologism, “estrangement” (Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose, trans. B. Sher [Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998]), p. XIX.—Trans.
the text’s author really wanted to say (if we presume that Pushkin had any such design). At this age, an attempt to understand “the author’s viewpoint” would boil down to extracting unambiguous and simplistic morals, a completely senseless and impersonal undertaking. To put it in the words of Roland Barthes, first-graders work with tales not as if they were working with a given meaning that is hidden and must be deciphered, but as a sort of “special semantic system.”49 The tale turns out to be a work that “offers itself to endless decipherment” and “as if is pregnant with meaning”—and children help realize this meaning.50 The meaning of the tale is born here and now, as an answer to children’s questions. The tale’s meaning becomes what it conveys to the children.
In a sense, children learn to read the way poets read: intensely experiencing a book, breaking it down in their perception, building on it, transforming reading into writing. Poets are subjective and do not strive toward objectivity (recall poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s essay, “My Pushkin”), their reading of a book is always individual and unrepeatable. They do not seek proof of the validity of their own reading; rather, the beauty, unexpectedness, and emotional persuasiveness of the interpretation take the place of this truth. The poet’s tools are a keen sense of words, intuition, and imagination. Understanding of a book takes the form of co-creation, and a new work is its result.
The ability to read books in this way seems to us a very precious thing. We will support and develop it and the forms of group learning associated with it (debate, discussion of the children’s interpretations) in literature class throughout the grades. However, it is obvious that this way of understanding a book on its own can suffer from the reader’s arbitrariness when an artwork can be assigned any meaning whatsoever. The reader’s thinking must feature an inner interlocutor, an opponent, who resists allowing understanding to give way to faulty and fruitless fantasizing “inspired” by the book. The most important job of this opponent is to demand proof that the text does not resist a given interpretation, that the text confirms the possibility of this reading. As we see it, literary scholars can serve as such opponents, as we juxtapose subjective understanding of a book with objective knowledge of the poetics of its genre, author, and historical culture.
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39 Kudina and Novlianskaia, Literatura kak predmet esteticheskogo tsikla: metodicheskie razrabotki: 1 klass, p. 9.
40 Ibid.
41 G.N. Kudina and Z.N. Novlianskaia, Literatura kak predmet esteticheskogo tsikla: metodicheskie razrabotki: 2 klass, Kniga 2 (Moscow: Its GARANT, 1992), pp. 120–21.
42 Ibid., p. 127.
43 Ibid., p. 129.
44 Kudina and Novlianskaia, Literatura kak predmet esteticheskogo tsikla: metodicheskie razrabotki: 1 klass, p. 6.
45 See R.R. Kondratov, “Kanun-perekhod-nachalo Shkoly dialoga kul’tur,” in Shkola dialoga kul’tur, pp. 191–244; I.E. Berliand [Berlyand], Igra kak fenomen soznaniia (Kemerovo: Alef, 1992); V.S. Bibler, I.E. Berliand, and R.R. Kondratov, “Soznanie-dominanta psikhicheskoi zhizni doshkol’nika,” in Filosofsko-psikhologicheskie predpolozheniia Shkoly dialoga kul’tur (Moscow: RPE, 1998), pp. 88–93.
46 Among the publications describing the course are S. Kurganov, “Pervoklassniki i uchitel’ v uchebnom dialoge,” in Shkola dialoga kul’tur; “Chtenie, ‘zariazhennoe’ literaturovedeniem,” in Arkhe. Trudy kul’turo- logicheskogo seminara, ed. V.S. Bibler, 1998, no. 3.
47 See Berliand, “Uchebnaia deiatel’nost’ v shkole razvivaiushchego obucheniia."
48 Kurganov, “Chtenie, ‘zariazhennoe’ literaturovedeniem,” p. 340.
49 Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000), p. 259.
50 Ibid.
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