Alan Purves " Telling Our Story About Teaching Literature"

In reading Alan Purves essay, Telling Our Story about Teaching Literature, I could not help finding myself agreeing greatly with his views. In his essay he discusses his theory on teaching literature to students and the proper way to go about it. He begins by asserting that many educators find themselves assigning reading with the intent that students will truly love the text and find they are completely engrossed in it. He states that becoming absorbed in a text is not something that can be taught, but rather a miracle that happens by chance. We need to educate in a way that looks at all aspects of literature and only then we can only hope that students take in the text.

He explains “ The kind of readers and viewers we hope to create are those who will work at the text or film and take pleasure in the intellectual play of working with it, and then will take this experience with them and play with other texts or images, getting pleasure not simply from the experiences of reading and viewing but from the thinking and talking that go with school” (212).

The idea of literature is portrayed in this essay as a game where students are reared to look at it in a specific way. He claims that many educators feel that learning literature should not be fun, but disciplined. He finds this to be the exact opposite. He knows that students all learn differently and need to be exposed to numerous types of literature. Whether it is a film, comic strip, or a book, students need to be taught to look at it from all angles to make it truly worth while.

Purves says, “ We strive to help students toward that larger and older perspective, to come to a particular understanding of themselves and their past, to enter that broader world that is defined as literate” (215).

I know that I want to be an educator and through practice I have found that I want my students to use different lenses to look at the world. Sometimes the most effective ways of teaching are unconventional and you need to teach your students to look past the lines on a page. They need to see what the literature is worth, and what it can do for them.