Vad innebär höjd kvalitet i skolans litteratursamtal?

Resumé

Laila Aase (2005) has likened literature discussion to a game. In this game, the text is not a puzzle to be solved, but a misty landscape whose contours readers collaboratively try to explore. There are no guarantees of a correct solution. Rather, the solution is highly uncertain. Hesitation and imagination are just as important qualities as interpretative strategies and analytical frameworks. At the same time, classroom literature discussion is a subject-specific task in which students are expected to learn something. This places demands on the teacher’s ability to facilitate the discussion and leads us, whether as researchers or as teachers, to ask for markers of high quality discussions, i.e., the kind of discussion that both dispels some of the mist over the textual landscape and, at the same time, allows students to experience the delight of getting lost all over again.

Many L1 teachers regard literature discussions as an important, yet demanding, form of teaching (Fodstad & Gagnat, 2019). Research also indicates that interpretative discussions about literary texts are not particularly common in Nordic lower secondary classrooms (Gabrielsen et al., 2019; Nissen, 2024). Thus, it is vital to identify both quality dimensions of literature discussions and methods for supporting teachers’ development of facilitating those discussions.

In this paper, I discuss how high quality in teacher-led literature discussions can be defined and developed. The argument is based on findings from an intervention study in which 19 teachers collaborated with a research team to improve the quality of their literature discussions, for example by supporting students’ initiative in the discussions, encouraging them to dwell on the openness of the texts, and helping them to connect and compare their thoughts with one another. The quality criteria discussed in this paper are based on previous research in literature didactics and should be regarded as a research-based hypothesis on how to create conditions for dialogic, or inquiry-based, interaction in the classroom.

In the paper, I also consider some of the expectations raised by Aase regarding the teacher’s role in the discussion. I also turn to Martin Blok Johansen (2022), who has formulated a ‘didactics of undecidability’ in which a particular type of complex narratives takes centre stage in literature instruction. I sympathize with this approach, but in contrast to Johansen, I argue that the pedagogical potential of complex texts is not necessarily realized on its own. On the contrary, to explore complex literature in the classroom is an art form, or a skill, that teachers can develop and train their students to master.