Our objective (the objective of the authors of the World Literature SDC course that begins in sixth grade) was to design a program and organize learning activities in such a way that children would retain and develop the reader position and those forms of learning interaction that they acquired in primary school, while at the same time mastering the position of the “theoretician” and an epistemological attitude toward literature. It was important to us to emphasize the continuity between this academic subject and primary school reading class, but at the same time make it clear that this was something fundamentally new: the sixth-graders had to be able to see the possibility of an entirely new way of working with books. We decided to begin studying the subject by returning to the fairy tale and marking the children’s transition from primary school to middle school with their first encounter with a literary theorist. In primary school, as they contemplated specific fairy tales, the children conducted dialogues with one another and with the teacher; in sixth grade the famous scholar of the fairy tale, Vladimir Propp, became the children’s conversation partner. As is well known, Propp’s research on the morphology and historical roots of the fairy tale formed the groundwork for the structural semiotic study of literature.51 Structural analysis became the new language and the new way of understanding texts that children began to assimilate in sixth grade.
Ideally, the children’s encounter with the scholar’s method should have taken the form of reading and making sense of a work of literary theory in which the scholar explains it. It seemed to us, however, that the task of reading Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale and comprehending it as an integrated whole was too complex for children age ten to eleven. We found a methodological approach that helped achieve our objective and acquire a new form of learning on the one hand, and provided an opportunity to turn this into a game, on the other: the teacher played the role of Propp. Upon arriving in class, the famous scholar proposed that the pupils investigate the question—what is a fairy tale as a genre and how is it structured? This way of framing the problem led the pupils into the new territory of literary science as it developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. At first the children sought answers to questions posed by the scholar through the familiar form of learning dialogue. However in this new territory the ways of working that the children had already acquired (a group debate with discussion of interpretations based on guesses, intuition, and imagination) turned out to be ineffective. No interesting ideas emerged. “poetic” interpretations were no longer good enough for the sixth-graders: they realized that now they had to think and speak in a new way. The children themselves asked the scholar to tell them about his discoveries. The dialogue-lesson had found its limits, and it became clear that a new form of learning and a new way of thinking were needed.
Propp agreed to read the children a series of “lectures” about his method for investigating folktales and his theory about the structure and origin of the folktale. Then the children, in the course of acquiring this new method, analyzed specific tales. In terms of method, Propp’s literary scholarship bears similarities to mathematics and linguistics; it strives toward precise, objective, verifiable knowledge. Propp firmly refused to work with the children’s “fantasies,” and absolutely would not talk about something that could be subjectively interpreted—the meaning of the tale. He directed the children’s attention to something that exists objectively and can be validated—the structure of the genre. In the process, he introduced the children not only to his conclusions but also to his method, which is rational, strictly scientific, demonstrable.
The pupils had no intention of accepting this new theory on faith. They often argued with the scholar’s assertions and tried to find flaws in the theory. At first, they called on their previous “poetic” ideas in arguing with him, but the meticulous literary scholar would not settle for fancy interpretations—he demanded proof. Trying to argue with Propp, the children came to understand and master his way of working. In seeking arguments and counterarguments they recalled all the tales they knew and read new ones. Gradually, appropriation of Propp’s method turned to creative mastery, and many children made attempts to develop and perfect Propp’s theory of the structure of folktales. During these classes, a number of small discoveries were made. In particular, the children saw that the plots of genre films were constructed based on the same laws as the plots of fairy tales. Propp’s theory turned out to be applicable not only to understanding already existing works, but it was a “generative grammar” for new texts. Making use of the scholar’s discoveries, the children wrote their own tales and “Hollywood screenplays.”
Such was the sixth-graders’ new encounter with the fairy tale. The content of this stage of work was the children’s discovery of a new subject area, and the assimilation of a new position and new forms of work, and all of this was presented by a scholar, who became the schoolchildren’s interlocutor. At this stage, group discussion was replaced by a scholar’s lectures, and learning dialogue was replaced by the organization of learning tasks that led to the acquisition of concepts of literary theory. This cycle of lessons concluded with classes devoted to reflection and contemplation of the foundations of two comprehension strategies: that of the reader and that of the theoretician. During these classes we returned to the dialogue-lesson format, but the subject of dialogue was now the question—what does it mean to comprehend a tale and how does the way a “reader” comprehends a tale differ from the way a “theoretician” studies a tale? In the thinking of these adolescents the position of the poet entered into dialogue with the position of the scholar.
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51 See V. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale (Austin: University of Texas, 2003) and Istoricheskie korni volshebnoi skazki (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1986) [excerpts available in English in Vladimir Propp, Theory and History of Folklore (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)].
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