Linking Criticality and Creativity: Engagement With Literary Theory in Middle Grades English Education

Introduction

This chapter examines the connection of critical reading and creativity and provides guidance for how current English Language Teaching (ELT) practices can, through the explicit inclusion of elements of literary critical theory, additionally build what can be seen as an interpretative and creative link between comprehension, opinion-formation, and language production. The chapter focuses on these developments from two perspectives: that of Norwegian and Nordic curriculum objectives and textbooks from grades 5-10, and how teachers and teacher educators at these grade levels, both in the Nordic region and internationally, can implement specific changes to ELT, including a heightened awareness of basic critical theory and its role in English education, in order to better take advantage of the exciting prospects of integrating multiliteracy in their lessons through a new emphasis on criticality. Based on experience and examples from the Norwegian educational context, but with clear relevance to other teaching situations, this chapter also provides a new model for adding critical theory into the middle-grades English classroom.

Contextually, we understand criticality as the ability to meet texts, concepts, and understandings with a number of different questions with the aim of developing an understanding of what is being expressed. In times where the exposure to any number of types of texts that all claim to express truth is high, criticality becomes an important tool to navigate and to establish understanding of the world around us, to develop necessary skepticism, and to question the truths presented. In this context, creativity can be understood as the ability to create something new, which can be an object, an intellectual construction, or a feeling that only exists in a person’s mind. This can either be done through recreation and reproduction where people use their memory or previous experiences, or through combination or creation using cognitive skills to rework experiences and create new combinations. One, perhaps underutilized, bridge between the two, as will be explored throughout the chapter, is critical theory, which can be understood as the system of literary and social concepts and intellectual assumptions that are engaged in the interpretation of literary texts (Lynn, 2011).

Using curriculum development as a departure point, this chapter discusses how English as a school subject has become a significant testing ground for ideas about multiliteracy, which can be understood as supporting culturally diverse, responsive, and multilingual learning practices and strategies, and which “involves an awareness of the social, economic and wider cultural factors that frame communication” (Müller, Sancho, & Hernández, 2009, p. 88). The realities of English as a lingua franca, which include the economic, technological, social, and cultural motivations for becoming a fluent English user, require a certain flexibility and willingness in learners to attempt new approaches to learning about literature, even when these approaches seem initially challenging (Hall, 2015).

Recent developments in the Norwegian National Curriculum provide a clear illustration of a mandate to improve critical engagement with the contents of English as a school subject as well as its methodological practices, this itself being a response to various Nordic outlooks and subject curricula. The 2020 updates to the Norwegian curriculum for English published in November 2019 (LK20) (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training, 2019a), and scheduled to be implemented in August 2020, foreground the need for learners to encounter English language texts. Learners are hereupon asked to “reflect on, interpret, and critically evaluate literature in English, including young adult fiction,” and there are numerous other references to critical reading in the curriculum renewal (Norwegian Directorate for Education and Training 2019b, p. 8).