The scenario of teaching literature at Graduate and Post Graduate level is quite ominous. The one-sided, teacher-fronted presentations done in the name of teaching make the entire process as sheer transmission of information about a piece of literature rather than an active, lively and dynamic process wherein the learners get themselves engaged in RAICE(Review, Appreciation, Criticism, Interpretation and Evaluation) of literature. This calls for a novel approach of teaching literature following the principles of participative pedagogy. The theories of co-operative learning and recent approaches like constructivism advocate the active role of the learner in the learning process. There is a wide demand of incorporating such theories in practice. But Higher Education seems to be banging head against a brick wall by utilising the age old, traditional methodology of teaching in the classrooms.
Keeping these trends in mind the authors of this paper have developed some facilitative and participative tasks for teaching literature at Higher Education level. For the tasks, a novella titled “Siddhartha” written by Hermann Hesse was selected. The focus of the taskswas the extent to which the learners get the chance to get involved in higher order thinking skills for comprehending, appreciating, reviewing and evaluating the text under study. The discussion on the sample tasks given in the paper is targeted to explain further the learning outcomes from pedagogic point of view. A table has been devised to explain the productivity of the mental activities to be carried out on the part of the learners. This discussion, in the paper, ultimately leads the authors of the paper to design a model of teaching novel for higher education.
Thus, the paper encloses the need of participative pedagogy for literature and enumerates how it could be actualised. The participative pedagogy developed in this paper for teaching literature is in the form of a ready to implement model.
Teaching Literature, Task Based Teaching, Pedagogy
