Chapter 12
Literature and culture studies in classrooms
From petrification to spark
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.
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
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Acknowledgements
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Notes
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References