124084 VK BEd 08a.3: VK Literature for Language Teachers (2021W)

Racism and systemic injustice have persisted over centuries and remain sadly topical today. As teachers, we have a crucial role to play in helping young learners develop critical awareness and take their first steps towards active social change. In many respects, literature featuring issues of racial discrimination is an ideal tool to provide learning experiences which foster the emotional engagement and political curiosity of young students of EFL.

In our course, we will examine how literature can be used to alert learners to racially motivated inequality, its history and its complex intersections with economic, social, and cultural power structures. We will be reading (YAL-)novels, poems and plays by African-American, Black British, Caribbean and South-African writers, texts which despite their historical and cultural diversity are united by the deep and lasting impact of colonial and racial oppression on their protagonists’ lives. We will see how literature can help learners understand the inner workings of racism in a very direct, ‘visceral’ way, and we will discuss culturally responsive teaching practices geared at making the teaching of literature more inclusive for culturally, linguistically, and ethnically diverse students.

In an extensive introductory section, students will be given tools for a pragmatic literary analysis suitable for use at school. There will be ample information (including several practice tasks) to assist students with writing this course’s proseminar/BEd-paper.