Children's Literature at Perdue School

In 1996, Jessica Latshaw, a university researcher, noted that most teachers were not using more children's literature in teaching language arts, even though they had been encouraged to do so in the recently revised language arts curriculum. She concluded:

I do not believe teachers are disinterested; they are more likely overwhelmed by the complexity of the reader response process. Further, they have not had a way to explore the potential value of using more children's literature within their respective teaching contexts.

On the basis of this conclusion, Latshaw began working with five school teachers in Perdue, a rural community located 70 kilometres west of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Together they designed and implemented a two-year research project intended to explore the pedagogical and practical implications of using more children's literature in the elementary curriculum at Perdue School. More specifically, they hoped to accomplish any or all of the following:

• develop in the teachers a broader reading background in children's literature,
• encourage them to use more children's literature in their teaching practice,
• assist them in integrating children's literature across the curriculum,
• encourage them to learn and use new formative evaluation methods for supporting students' developmental learning of response to literature, and
• form a reading community that would support students' response to literature.

In each of the classrooms that undertook to explore ways to use more children's literature across the curriculum, the initiative took different forms, according to the grade level and the teachers' preferences:

• The Kindergarten teacher used a variety of teaching strategies to encourage students' interest in literature and to support early literacy learning. For example, she used a collection of Big Books to introduce students to narrative and the pleasure of playing with language. She also encouraged her students to make and share their own books, and she let them take home regularly a book bag containing a picture storybook, a puppet, and a response journal to share with their families. During the research project, a new Kindergarten tradition was started, in which each class creates a storybook T-shirt that is sent home, like the book bag, to increase interest in the community in reading and sharing literature.
• The Grade 1-2 teacher used book talk, puppet shows, and a variation of traditional readers' theatre in her basal reading program. She also immersed her students in stories that she read aloud several times each day.
• The Grade 3-4 teacher used post-reading, extension activities and readers' theatre with masks. After reading Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the students made their own chocolate candies with the assistance of parent volunteers. Small inflated balloons were dipped in melted chocolate and then dried to form cups that held other kinds of candies.
• The Grade 5-6 teacher had her students conduct literature circles, share readers' theatre presentations, and engage in a variety of literature-centred writing activities. She is also investigating other possible classroom projects as part of her graduate studies at the University of Saskatchewan.
• The Grade 7-8 teacher involved her students in novel studies and engaged them in a range of literary awareness activities. As a science specialist who found herself assigned to teach language arts, she also helped others in the research team understand more fully the challenges facing the teacher who is learning alongside her students.

In addition, the reader response activities within each classroom were complemented by the sharing between classrooms of creative writing (narratives and poetry) and reader responses to selected books. Thus, the Grade 2 students tape-recorded their own stories for the Kindergarten students; the Grade 5-6 class shared their readers' theatre presentations with Grades 1-4; and the Grade 11 students shared their creative writing with students in Grades 3-4.

Throughout the project, Latshaw spent one day a week at the school, in which she played some roles that she had expected and some that she had not anticipated. Among the expected roles were co-teaching, modelling new teaching strategies, reading children's literature aloud and observing students' responses to literature-centred activities. Among the roles that were unexpected but important to this school community were taking over playground duties so that teachers had time to prepare materials, working in the canteen during a soccer tournament in order to meet some of the students' parents, participating in school hot dog sales to finance various projects, and helping primary students carve pumpkins for Halloween. In general, Latshaw's role in the research was to act as a participant-observer, supporting wherever possible the explorations of children's literature by individual teachers.

The research group held a series of half-day workshops in which they explored cooperatively a variety of ways to encourage students' broad response to literature. This meant exploring ways to help students make both reader-centred responses and text-centred responses to what they read. A text-centred workshop and a reader-centred workshop clarified the difference between the two types of responses: the first workshop involved an examination of ways, other than book reports, in which students could share their reconstruction of their reading with peers; and the second workshop involved the teachers in sharing personal associations with selected literature. In other workshops, the researchers created sound-enhanced poetry tapes of published poems and original poems, which were then shared with students at different grade levels. Other research activities involved doing two versions of readers' theatre based on examples of traditional literature, and examination of the potential role that keeping a reading journal might play as part of a portfolio writing program.

Although the project has been extended until December, 1998, some preliminary findings have been identified:

1. Some teachers are interested in using more literature and realize that they are not fully using even the small collections available in the school library. More use is dependent on these teachers developing their own reading backgrounds and doing more short-term explorations to identify ways of addressing community-based literacy learning problems.
2. Teachers require self-directed time to implement the more extensive use of children's literature expected of them in the language arts curriculum. Latshaw comments:
   
   When we started the project, I anticipated reading and sharing literature with the teachers regularly during lunch time. Playground duty, hall duty, extracurricular activities and a shortened noontime made sustained communication impossible. Examination and exploration of potential curriculum content concerning literature-centered activities is very time-consuming. Teachers need self-directed time to develop increased reading backgrounds, to learn new ways of sharing literature with students and to identify ways of integrating required teaching content. Historically, self-directed time has not been a characteristic of top-down change in curriculum development.
   
3. Teachers require support and encouragement to make more use of children's literature, and the form that this support and encouragement should take can be quite different for each teacher. Latshaw observes that for some teachers participating in the research, the explorations they undertook were a positive experience. For other teachers, the prospect of exploring the use of children's literature raised unsettling concerns about evaluation, parental expectations, and the time needed to cover required teaching content. Although such concerns were honoured and the project supported these teachers in a variety of ways over the two-year period, the variation in teachers' reactions to the explorations was notable..