Opening up the world of the text: teaching ‘thick analysis’ at secondary school

Louise D’ArcensEnglish Teachers’ Association NSW

Annual ConferenceNovember 28, 2014

Context for today’s discussion

• Secondary-tertiary nexus• “The First Year Experience in Australian

Universities: Findings from 1994 to 2009”, [www.cshe.unimelb.edu.au/research/FYE_Report_1994_to_20

09.pdf]• Learning pathways from secondary to

tertiary• First year students’ expectations• 1 in 2 students felt prepared by school• Advocated robust relationships between

universities, schools, and communities

Australian University Heads of English (AUHE): http://auhe.org/

AUHE Secondary and Tertiary English Working Group: 2014 discussion paper

• Identify students’ specific disciplinary expectations on entering tertiary ENGL

• Disseminate “aims, approaches and outcomes of secondary English” to tertiary teachers

• Amplify relationships between secondary and tertiary teachers of English

• Objective: to identify base from which to develop first year curriculum

Secondary-tertiary nexus: an educational ecology

Secondary

student

Tertiary student

Secondary

teacher

Modelling the nexus

• Lisa Fletcher: UTas / TATE collaboration

• Community of practice model: shared passion, dedication to discipline’s future

• “Cross-sector collegiality”• Opening a dialogue on how the

learning pathway can be smoother

• Interviews with secondary ENGL teachers

• Findings now being drafted

Points of difference and overlap

• Tertiary reading practices and positions more reflexively highlighted, not self-evident

• Emphasis on historical and theoretical rather than broad humanistic reading practices

• Increased move toward research-led learning to encourage originality

• Tertiary teachers’ concerns about students echo those in HSC markers’ comments

‘Thick analysis’ of literary texts

• Adapted as ‘thick analysis’ by numerous fields of research

• Texts embedded in worlds rather than simply the product of an author

• Analysis should recognise that “[textual] artefacts draw their meaning from the role they play in an ongoing pattern of life”

Geertz: The Interpretation of Cultures.(1973)

Thick analysis cont’d• Complexity: texts must not be “purified of the

material complexity in which they were located, and then attribute[d] to autogenous principles of order, universal properties of the human mind, or vast a priori Weltanschauungen (worldviews)”.

• Detail→context: “the aim is to draw large conclusions from small but very densely structured facts”

• Open-endedness: “coherence cannot be the major test of validity for a cultural description ... cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete”

Thick description as hermeneutic practice

• “the art of clarifying and mediating by our own effort of interpretation what is said by persons we encounter in traditions. Hermeneutics operates whenever what is said is not immediately intelligible”

• aims to “clarify the conditions in which understanding takes place”

• Interpretation as “fusion of horizons” (the text’s and the interpreter’s)

Gadamer: Truth and Method(1960)

Benefits of teaching thick analysis

• Text brought into complex relationships with numerous related cultural texts

• Leads to more sophisticated and textured close / formal readings

• Offers multiple entry-points into texts rather than aiming for textual closure

• Essays are more differentiated and original

• Students become researchers

Case study: teaching troubadour lyric to undergrads

Mediaeval music sheet, images of loves, map of Occitania, castles and contemporary singer removed.

• Teacher: initial world-building: social structure (feudalism), social practices (marriage etc), discourses (love) ideologies (gender, rank), textual conditions

• Students (individual/small group): differentiated reading tasks in relation to the above, to understand lyrics’ ‘cultural work’. A range of related texts used. Presented to class. Class builds collaborative archive

• Class: close readings of lyrics, moving back out from textual detail to context

• Students: examine afterlife of courtly lyric: comparative reading of lyric and modern pop song

HSC case study 1 (Area of Study): The Tempest

Maps and images relating to• The Tempest• Prospero’s books• Of cannibals• Pre-Raphaelite Mirandas

removed

The Tempest and ‘Discovery’

• Context: Age of Discovery (travel writing, maps, Donne’s Elegy XIX)

• Context: theatre/theatricality (theatre research)

• Creativity (19thC interpretation)• Gender and power (esp. recent

interpretations)• Close work on dramaturgical structure,

scenes, lexis, dialogue, character arcs• Textual afterlife: 19thC ‘sensation’ and

upholstered drama, cinema in the Space Age

Building a research archive: open access encyclopedia projects

http://www.luminarium.org/

• Screen shot of home page removed

Performance resources

http://www.rsc.org.uk/education/resources/bank/the-tempest/images/

• Screenshot of home page removed

HSC Case Study 2: Tennyson/Anderson

• Jessica Anderson• The Lady of Shallott• Idylls of the King• Le Morte D’Arthur• Trigg: Medievalism and the Gothic in

Australian Culture• Pollock: Vision and Difference

Thick analysis: Tennyson and Anderson

• Medievalism (British and Australian)

• King Arthur legend, esp. Thomas Malory

• Imperialism/colonialism• Second-wave feminism• Setting in TLBR,

characterisation, key motifs (faces, creativity, waste/regeneration)

• Narrative voice, conclusion

Victorian related texts and archives

http://www.victorianweb.org/

Open-access databasehttp://ausmed.arts.uwa.edu.au/

• Screen shot removed

Visual resourceshttp://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au/agsa/home/Collection/searchResult.jsp

Case Study 3: Sylvia Plath (Extension: After the Bomb)

Images removed:

Fromm: Escape from FreedomJudgement at Nuremberg – filmPlath ArielImage of Trial of EichmannTed Hughes

Thick analysis of Plath as post-war poet

• Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941) - political psychology

• Adolf Eichmann trials• Cinematic revisitation of WWII• Debates over instrumentalisation of

history• History vs mythology • Afterlife in feminist scholarship• Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

General: building a research archive

• http://uow.libguides.com/hsc

General: building a scholarship archive open-access journals

• Early Modern Literary Studies(http://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/emlshome.html)

• CLCWeb (Comparative Literature and Culture)

(http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/)• RAVON (Romanticism & Victorianism on Net)(http://ravonjournal.org/)• JASAL(http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/

jasal)