Around 30 years ago, the English curriculum underwent a significant pedagogical shift into the explicit teaching of genres, most notably the narrative, information and persuasive texts. It was claimed that this change would allow all students across the board equitable access to the ‘genres of power,’ so that all could participate in the valued text types current in society. However, were the promoters of this change fully cognisant of what was sown by this movement (?) which, in effect, turned out to play a significant part in the ongoing suppression of true expression in children.
PART 1: NARRATIVE GENRE:
‘Those Who Tell the Stories Rule Society’*
For several years now, I have been observing the tortuous looks on the faces of the young children I teach when they are asked to write fictional stories. The curriculum demands that they make up something that is remote from their actual present moment and their lived experience based on the belief that this is a normal thing to do. What I see daily in my classroom is that the bodies of young children when asked to do this show that it is not normal for them. They tightly knit their brows and furrow their forehead; their head hangs heavily into the palms of their hands; they wriggle in their seats, and I am beset by multiple and frequent requests to go to the toilet. These very physical responses to being asked to express in this way are signs of stress, anxiety and discomfort. This then leads me to the question of Why this is the case – hugely so.
What is it about the narrative text type that arouses these bodily discomforts in almost all children?
Tell me a story, spin me a tale
Our society is drenched to the bones in both book and movie narratives. There is a smorgasbord of narrative flavours – fantasy, adventure, romance, historical, sci-fi, comedy, horror, crime - almost as many types as there are flavours of ice cream. This extensive supply comes with the assumption that we will all partake in a preferred type of narrative, while it confers the illusion of autonomous choice and personal taste. But nonetheless, underlying this is the expectation that you will choose at least one flavour and that flavour will be your unique and individual choice.
The option of saying ‘No – I want no part of narratives’ is interestingly not presented. Indeed, it is actually the case that in schools, a demonstrated preference for a particular narrative style is woven into how teachers are directed to assess the maturity of a child’s reading capacity as it is said to indicate reading advance and progress. How can advance be based on a forced choice? This means that any perceived preference is fundamentally based upon this baseline assumptive imposition.
If it is true that perceived preferences are fundamentally sourced from imposition, then why is it that so many of us derive satisfaction from reading or viewing narratives? Why in society is there such value placed on this genre?
The majority of us see the narrative genre as entertainment but is it not more accurately described as escapism? A distraction from our lives? The permission to check out for a few minutes or a few hours in a socially endorsed way? We tread water with our lives as our minds withdraw into mental and emotional ‘other worlds’ where the dramas belong to others and are not our own. We often openly express that we have gone into our heads or into our own daydream world. Yet we vacate our own physical body when we do this and can be completely unaware of the physical world around us. It’s like a socially acceptable, scaled down version of temporary dementia and amnesia. Quite a cocktail.
As a teacher, it has become very evident that the physical wriggling, the grimaces and the array of more serious ‘symptoms’ described above, are actually indicating that children’s bodies are saying No to this level of escapism. They are saying No to vacating their bodies just to make up a story that has no immediate relevance to the present moment. I find that boys, in particular, would much prefer to be moving their bodies in some way, rather than ‘making stuff up.’
Being Present or the Fancies of Imagination?
There is an entire lineage of wisdom that presents the absolute significance of being present with life and with the body. Children often do this naturally when unhindered by other influences. The physical body in childhood is exquisitely delicate and responsive to all that is around it and to what is presented for the body to attend to directly in the fullness of its physicality. The expectation that children vacate this fullness of presence to perform in a fixed and rigid way in compliance with an external demand has a definite sense of subtle, or normalised, abuse.
It also exposes that imagination, which involves going into the head to access images from an undiscerned source, may not quite be the romanticised idyll that it has for so long been made out to be. Indeed, effectively we are placing our children into the arms of an impostor to their natural way of being.
The well advised, cautionary awareness of ‘stranger danger’ was never more pertinent.
The Bastardisation that Became the Modern Genre of Narrative
Unravelling the thread back to the source of the narrative text type, we see that the genre itself became popular well after the invention of the printing press, with Robinson Crusoe being the first English novel in the 1700’s. Whilst some heroic tales (Beowulf and others) had circulated prior to this, they were basically embellished recounts of the adventures of heroes woven into myth.
Equally worth noting are the expressions known as parables, examples of which were presented by Jesus and recorded in the Christian Bible. These orally delivered ‘stories’ presented observations and truths about life as evolutionary offerings to a non-literate populace. The energy of distraction was completely absent in these parables and their purpose was not to entertain, as the modern narratives do, but to offer an evolutionary advance to the listeners by imparting wisdom that could be directly and practically applied to their lives.
Until recently, every school in Australia had access to a form of parable in The Tales of Scheherazade and the 1001 Arabian Nights, a transcribed anthology of parables from C: 900 BCE that were originally delivered orally. Although the Middle Eastern setting of these parables was unfamiliar to most Australian students, their language and message was timeless and universal. I observed how all children were completely still as I read the tales out loud to them. When I left the books out on the reading table, they became dog-eared with so much regular use. The children loved them, as did I. These tales / parables were as a breath of cool, refreshing air across the educational landscape of the narrative genre. The contrived use of language to hook and entertain was significantly absent; their prevailing qualities could not be compressed into a type of story – comedy, horror, sci -fi; they offered a simplicity and richness of wisdom expressed through symbolism and the space to embody this in our own lives. There was no imposition and significantly, no wriggling from the young listeners.
This timeless quality is also experienced in many Eastern sutras, where the written or oral language served the same purpose of evolving their audience.
Today we have the narrative genre broadcast ubiquitously across the globe and we feed this diet of entertainment and withdrawal from life to our children from infancy. We raise them as we were raised, on language that hooks, compresses and restricts what we are, in lieu of language representing the profound truth of what we are.
Please read on to Part 2 of this article where we explore how this genre is taught in schools.