Att se den andre: texten eller världen? : Interaktion mellan gymnasieelever och en kenyansk novell.

• Main Author: Gustafsson Nadel, Tammi
• Format: Others
• Language: Swedish
• Published: Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för språkdidaktik 2018
• Subjects: world literature; thematic analysis; critical literacy; literature analysis; Swedish; liter-ature education; upper secondary school; Didactics; Didaktik
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-181009; http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:isbn:978-91-7797-987-6

The present licentiate thesis aims to investigate students’ written reflections after reading a Kenyan short story, distant from the students’ previous experiences from a geographical, cultural and societal point of view. The study was carried out at Swedish upper secondary school with 83 16- and 17-year-old students in year one and two at a college preparatory program. After individual reading of the Kenyan short story “Treadmill love” (“Kärlek på löpande band”, Kahora, 2006/2010) the students were instructed to write down “what in the short story they took notice of”). The research questions that guide the study deal with aspects such as what themes can be identified in the students’ written reflections about the short story, what characterizes the interaction between the students and the short story, and what kind of choices connected to the teaching and learning of literature the teachers of these students face? The findings reveal a tendency to use the short story a source of factual information of society and geographical as well as cultural aspects. This may lead to a meta-perspective and suggests a critical literacy. The same students’ reading strategies tend to enhance what they consider as exotic in the text, which contributes to an imagined authenticity. At the same time, the aesthetic aspects are de-emphasized and aesthetic and literary characteristics of the text risk remaining unnoticed, The results also show how some of the students tend to define literary aspects of the text, such as choice of language, form and characters’ actions, with what they describe as “non-western” qualities. In these cases, the students move away from the text, which also tends to strengthen binary oppositions of “us and them”. A pedagogical implication of the study concerns the necessity, when reading world literature, of helping the students develop their ability to shift perspectives and observe their own subjective point of departure from a critical perspective. But equally important is the need of tools for putting focus back on fiction as an aesthetic and fictional piece of work.