Teaching literature through the thinking routines

Abstract

Literature is an expression of life through the medium of language. Taken to mean only written works, literature was first produced by some of the world's earliest civilizations—those of Ancient Egypt and Sumeria—as early as the 4th millennium BCA literature-enriched curriculum not only helps learners improve their reading and writing skills but more importantly helps them internalise the differences in culture existent all over the world and to develop their own thoughts about what happen surrounding them. In the past, most educators agreed that teaching literature was a way of making people better human beings and better citizens. Teachers of literature believe that it is important not only in education but in life. However, the ways in which literature has been taught along the past years focused the act of teaching literature on subject-centred theories that emphasized content and information; teacher-centred theories in which the focus was on the teacher as an active doer in facilitating education; and the student-centred theories focused on the way people learn. It is this last type of theories where Project Zero emerges as the new trend in teaching promoting the culture of thinking. Its main goal is to make thinking visible for both students who develop their capacities of learning through the process of thinking actively and for teachers who drive their lessons according to their students‟ thinking results. To do so, Project Zero suggests s series of thinking routines to make students being engaged in this process of learning. Here, it is proposed some thinking routines to help teachers to develop their work with the literature subject.