Sunday, September 25, 2011

The Isles of my Portfolio in Literature 111

II. Students Outputs of E-Portfolio

III. Literature as a Platform in Education for Sustainable Development

Literature & Education
Dickens believed that enriching people’s life with knowledge and enjoyment of the arts was key to building a fair society and creating opportunities. Dickens 2012 is committed to following Dickens’s educational mission by supporting learning activities around the world, from teachers’ conferences and family workshops to creative writing master classes and writing competitions.

WHY WE NEED LITERATURE
1. Literature offers the best way of teaching extensive reading skills. Non-literature reading programs, and especially programs for non-native speakers, focus on short passages. Big international surveys such as PISA (or tests of basic skills) are based on many readings of very short passages. Yet extensive reading is a different kettle of fish. To read something longer, you need to stay aware of macrostructures such as plot.

2. Literature offers a way of linking the emotional with the intellectual. If students are to learn reading effectively, they have to remember significant turns in plot, and this will only happen, in the first instance, if those turns have emotional impact. So it harnesses the emotional to the cognitive. When literature does what it should, though, it acts against the alienation of the emotional and the intellectual.                                                         

3. Literature teaches values with emotional force. To take an American example, To Kill a Mockingbird is at once a condemnation of America, and a celebration of an archetypal American hero: the man who stands up to defy his whole community in defence of what's right (the same character as John Proctor of The Crucible, in  a way). Khaled Hosseini does something similar in A Thousand Splendid Suns when Mariam stands up to accept her death in defence of her co-wife and her co-wife's children. Students need to feel the force of these things, or values will not be strong in their lives--but they also need to be able to defend themselves. There's nothing about literature that says it always has to be moral. Many people think that the Yugoslav war comes down in part to poetry, to the sort of thing Serbian students learned in school. Karadzic is an expert on folk ballads. 

4. Literature has the power to change destructive ways of thinking on many levels. In my life, poetry has been a wonderful thing. When your emotions bear down on you to see the world in a negative light, and believe that it's not you, it's just real, at a time like that, you need something as powerful as poetry. It can crystalize what you feel at that moment, or it can transform it into something better. I believe in memorizing poetry. If you memorize a poem, it will become a part of your emotional structure, and it can only do that because its structure is unyielding. It will not give, and that's why it is worth it to you. When I was in teachers' college in Montreal in 1983, I read George Gabori's wonderful book When Evils Were Most Free.
He was a political prisoner in Stalinist Hungary. When he was in solitary confinement, he exercised his mind by trying to remember all the poetry he ever knew. He says by the time he got out, he could recite for eight hours at a stretch without repeating himself. That is how important literature is. 

5. Literature is about reality.  Some of you out there have probably read deconstructionist criticism from the eighties that goes on about literature being only about itself. What nonsense. Literature is about itself in so far as it is a self-contained system. But so is mathematics, and yet the bridges built by mathematical calculation stay up. "Poems are imaginary gardens with real frogs in them." Who said that?




IV. Reflection in Literature

 Cactus (Tita Lacambra)
 INK (Guillermo Castillo)
The Quarrel (Andres Cristobal Cruz)
  People of Consequence (Ines Taccad Camayao)
The Rural Maid (Fernando M. Maramag)
  Frustrated Wish (Carolina Arceo)
  Ridiculous Welcome (Carolina Arceo)
. The Old Things and New (
  But the Western Stars (Angela Manalang Gloria)
  Two Brothers (Rony Diaz)
. Youth (Maximo Ramos)
  A Night in the Hills (Paz Marquez Benitez)
  The Small key (Paz Latorena)

V. Integration of Education for Sustainable Development


The Internet has tremendously changed the landscape of literature education, especially in recent years. Entries in literary journals, some of which are left neglected in libraries, can now be accessed online. You can also download copies of literature theses from almost anywhere around the world with just a click of a mouse. With the increasing accessibility to various literature sources, how do you find the best? What are the most respected sources for literature in the education field?

Gale Literature Resource Center is an online database for literature targeted towards high school students and college undergrads. It encompasses not only literature but also theater and the humanities. It boasts a collection of over 100,000 author biographies and over 70, 000 unabridged critical reviews and essays that deal with literatures across the ages and across genres. It also contains 11, 000 overviews of writings that are most frequently studied and over 30, 000 texts of poetry, short fiction and plays. It also includes useful references, like Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature.
Just like all databases, it has a search feature for easy access to what you're looking for. You can access this database through your school library, so ask your librarian if they have it.
In terms of free e-books, what are the most respected sources for literature in the education field? Apart from the popular Google Books and Project Gutenberg, another respected legal database for free e-books is Bartleby. It hosts electronic text copies of books whose copyrights have expired and presents them as web pages. The Harvard Classics, which include the complete poems of John Milton, Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" and Homer's "Iliad", can be accessed through the site. Its comprehensive collection also includes references like the sixth edition of Columbia Encyclopedia. You can also use its search function to find a literary classic you need to read, whether it's a nonfiction treatise from Freud or a Shakespearean play.
The Norton Anthology of American Literature also has complementary website. It contains brief summaries of periods in American literature. It also gives you the option to explore the connections among these periods. It also has sections which are dedicated to authors, topic clusters and timelines. You can also take multiple choice quizzes which cover the Middle Ages to the 20th century and are based on the anthology's 7th and 8th editions. You can also check the audio recordings of lines from works like Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales."
Of course, the contribution of magazines to the development of literature cannot be ignored. Just like newspapers they now also have web platforms. So with regard to literary magazines, what are the most respected sources for literature in the education field?

The soul of The New York Review of Books is its book reviews. This fortnightly magazine has an online counterpart that features some articles for free, some for the price of a subscription. While it also has articles that deal with other aspects of culture and current affairs, it's still more known for being at the forefront of making dialogue as to the significance of books a literary activity we cannot be without. Not only does it contain reviews about important books. It has also published works of and interviews with movers and shakers of the literary scene-- Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Saul Bellow and Joseph Brodsky, among many others.
Regarding poetry, what are the most respected sources for literature in the education field? The website of Poetry magazine's publisher, Poetry Foundation, is probably the most wide-ranging source for poetry online. Poetry Foundation, an independent literary organization for poetry, makes English poetry-reading very easy with its website's browse feature and meticulous organization. You can look up poems according to subject, author, occasion, period and poet's region, among others. When you read a poem, you can easily access information regarding the period or movement it was part of, the biography of the author and similar poems. Annotations for and audio versions of poems are also made available on the site. Under the site's Learning Lab, there are a glossary of poetic terms and resources for students and teachers.