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Part of
Children's Cultures after Childhood
Edited by Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Macarena García-González
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 16] 2023
► pp. 185–200

Chapter 12
Literature and culture studies in classrooms

From petrification to spark

| University of the Witwatersrand

This chapter is about pedagogy and research. It does two things: firstly, it tells an inspiring story of poetry and culture in a secondary school classroom in South Africa, depicting how the English Second Language classroom was sparked into life by the teacher’s challenge to official pedagogy. Secondly, the chapter analyses the story from postphilosophical and postqualitive perspectives. These enable central features of the pedagogy to be noticed and articulated in ways that are helpful for students, teachers, and researchers. The structure of the chapter follows, to some extent, the experimental approach encouraged by postqualitative inquiry, including a poem as the theory section.

Keywords: literary education, poetry, new materialism
Article outline
  • 1953: Educational petrification
  • 2002: The poetry story
  • 2021: Returning to and re-turning the story
  • “Re-turning” the story through “post” concepts
  • Thinking-with and remaking the poetry story
  • The minor gesture as the giving of speech
  • Conclusion: Silence, the minor gesture, and speech
  • Postscript
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 8 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.16.12new
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