Embracing the Risk of Teaching Literature

• Contemporary Western educational systems have been described as a landscape of control and assessment meant to make education, in Gert J. J. Biesta's words, "strong, secure, and predictable," and ultimately "risk-free." Against this desire for strength, Biesta argues forweakness, focusing on therisksof the unpredictable and the unknown as primary features of an education worthy of the name. In this article, Ingrid Lindell promotes this weaker attitude specifically in the context of teaching literature. Guiding her analysis is the question,How might we create a practical approach to make the unmeasurable more accessible and assessible?In applying some of Biesta's concepts to the practical considerations of teaching literature and assessing student outcomes, Lindell identifies a tension that arises when demands for educational transparency and measurable outcomes are imposed on teachers of literature: in literary education, it is very often not desirable to know outcomes in advance. Against this background, Lindell introduces the methodological idea ofteaching in the gap, an attempt to apply some of Biesta's concepts and ideas in the literature classroom in order to explore how we might embrace and teach "The Risk." Lindell aims to strengthen the case for reading and assessing literature as ametacognitiveactivity rather than submitting to a ratio-based approach to literary education that focuses narrowly on reproductive knowledge that is measurable.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature (hsv//eng)

Keyword

literature studies

the unmeasurable

Gert Biesta

risk

metacognition

humanities

Education & Educational Research

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)