roses among thorns?

Drama is introduced in the new KBSM literature component for 2010 for the lower and upper secondary together with new poems and short stories. Rumplelstiltskin by Angela Lanyon is used for the lower secondary while Gulp and Gasp by John Townsend for the upper secondary. Will it be roses or thorns for the teachers as well as the students? It all depends on the teachers approach and the students acceptance. 

Opening the door to the world of creative arts

Teaching literature is a challenging task if our students are not interested in it. Teachers have to give room to the students and opportunity to express their view and thoughts and appreciate their involvement. Feedback and comments from teachers do not have to be always positive, there are times we need to response to the students answers by asking them to support their stand with more textual evidence. Literature is pieces of creative writing, which can be also valued as work of arts, that can arouse interest in reading and also enhance language competency. Cultural models, language models and personal growth models for teaching literature can be applied when we teach literature in order to stimulate their interest and develop the cognitive and affective domains of the students.

“Teaching literature is a subject, and a difficult one. Doing it well requires scholarly and critical sophistication, but it also requires a clear idea of what literature is, of what is entailed in reading and criticizing it. It requires, in fact, some very self-conscious theorizing. But beyond the questions that ought to feed any serious critic’s sense of what doing literature might mean, there are questions about the relation between such sophistication, and the necessities of the classroom: what, how, and when are students more likely to learn?" (Levine,2001:14)