Arts and Humanities Colloquium Series: Firing the Canon and Hiring the Reader: How to Win the Classroom War on CanLit

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Friday, March 27th, 2015
10:00 AM to 11:30 AM

Firing the Canon and Hiring the Reader: How to Win the Classroom War on CanLit

Noam Chomsky said, “To safeguard a revolution first you have to get to the teachers and the priests.” Gugeler's presentation will leave religion out of it, but will attempt a somewhat radical overturning of the curricular aristocracy, or the way in which Canadian Literature is taught in schools. In an age when the assumption that fiction is essential in the classroom cannot be taken for granted, the task of revolutionizing Canadian teachers and students seems all the more essential.

Author Daniel Pennac says it is easy to blame “outdated programs, the incompetence of teachers, the lamentable state of the classrooms, the threadbare libraries [and] ... the cutbacks at the Department of Education. "But," says Gugeler, "it is much more challenging to propose a practical and inspiring alternative."

Gugeler suggests that a student-centred approach, employing modern leisure reading strategies in the classroom, could radically expand opportunities for teachers by encouraging them to use new activities on and offline: collective reading and writing projects, virtual author visits, book camps, teen publications, radio and television communal reading campaigns, student-juried contests, digitally shared lesson plans, cyberseminars, mobile and digital libraries with “sample” podcasts, trailers and more.

"To inspire generations of students engaged enough to read, write, buy, publish, and teach CanLit for a lifetime," she says, , "we must present them with  a wealth of Canadian novels and story collections written by authors from as varied backgrounds as their own.  They need to see their cultural, linguistic, gender, geographical, sexual and social identities reflected, and they need help imagining the backgrounds and identities of others. Reader Response Theory, pioneered by teacher and critic Louise Rosenblatt, further invites students to displace the authority and autonomy of the text and make meaning in the act of interpreting it through their unique lens. This theory redefines literature not as an object or subject, but as something unique that happens when we read. These are our stories, written for and about us."

"This approach," she argues, "gives students permission to interpret their lives through their chosen texts, and represents a sea change in how literature could be taught. Students are not empty vessels that await pre-screened information; they possess hidden knowledge that stories evoke, stimulate, and resist. The question is not only “What does this mean?”, but ''What does this mean to me?” This strikes a balance between honouring a student’s experience and enhancing it. If we empower students to claim authority previously only accorded the author, text and instructor, authority they have when reading texts of their own choosing at home, students will seek out those titles personally meaningful and imaginatively relevant, Canadian titles chief among them." 

Gugeler is completing a doctoral thesis in Communications at Simon Fraser University, from which this talk is drawn. In the past she launched and hosted “Write On!,” a bi-weekly radio program interviewing Canadian writers of fiction and poetry on CKCU, was on the editorial boards of Quarry, Arc and Room literary magazines, and worked for 20 years as an acquiring editor of fiction for Quarry Press, Beach Holme Publishing, Raincoast Books, and ECW Press, publishing over 100 award-winning Canadian titles. She now publishes Portal literary magazine and helps to organize The Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poets Lecture Series. She also founded the Canadian Children’s Book Camp that has run annually in Vancouver and Toronto for 11-17-year-olds for the last 15 years. 

Presentation by Joy Gugeler, Departments of Media Studies and Creative Writing and Journalism