Prof. Dr. Peter Lutzker was a high school teacher for Music and English in Waldorf Schools in Germany from 1986-2011and from 1991 on, he has been active as a teacher educator in different European countries including Germany, Austria, Hungary, Russia and England. Since 2010, he has been a Professor at the Freie Hochschule Stuttgart (Waldorf Teachers College). In 2019 he was also appointed an Honorary Professor at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. He has written numerous articles and books in English and in German, including “Der Sprachsinn: Sprachwahrnehmung als Sinnesvorgang” 2 nd ed. (2017), and the “The Art of Foreign Language Teaching: Improvisation and Drama in Language Learning and Teacher Education” 2 nd ed. (2022). Email: lutzker@freie-hochschule-stuttgart.de       

 

Introduction

This article focuses on different ways of teaching literature in a foreign language in Steiner/Waldorf education. First, an approach based on reading a literary work in the high school classroom will be discussed. Secondly, two different performative approaches to teaching literature, one focusing on prose fiction and the other on poetry will be described. All that follows is based on 25 years of teaching in Steiner/Waldorf schools and parallel to this period and extending well beyond it, 35 years of teaching in-service and pre-service courses in teacher education.

 

Literature in foreign language lessons

As already elucidated in the first article in this issue, the Steiner/Waldorf approach views pupils' fully integrated engagement in the entire language learning process – physiologically, emotionally, volitionally and cognitively – as an overriding goal. Accordingly, the primary methodological challenge in working with a literary text in a foreign language is to introduce and ‘accompany’ it in way/s in which such engagement becomes possible. What most often hinders this process is when a literary text is treated as a means of language learning. This happens both quite obviously when a focus is placed on learning vocabulary and grammar and more subtly in the kinds of questions which are asked, in what is visualized, in what is discussed, in the pace of a lesson and in the general pedagogical atmosphere which is created. 

This distinction between supporting pupils in their attempts to ‘enter into’ those imaginary worlds which literature creates and using the text to consciously work on improving specific language skills points to a fundamental difference between an approach to literature which emphasizes language learning and one whose aim is to support pupils in being able to experience a work of literature as fully and intensively as possible. An approach to teaching a literary work that "interrupts" the affective and imaginative connection to the work in order to enhance language skills has, at that moment, prioritised learning the language over deepening the experience of the work itself. It is always an act of "distancing" - stepping out of the story, play or poem - to learn (and perhaps even write down) vocabulary and/or draw attention to a grammatical structure with the aim of improving grammar skills. The affective and cognitive experience of the literary work is disrupted at such moments, and I believe that such interruptions reduce the experience and enjoyment of the work and, in the long run, can very much impair it, sometimes irreparably.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers a radically different understanding of what can happen in an encounter with a literary text:

"When someone - be it an author or a friend - knows how to express himself, the 'symbols' of language are immediately forgotten - and what remains is the meaning. The perfection of language apparently lies in its invisibility. Therein lies the power of language. It is it that leads us to meaning; it hides itself from our eyes by its own activity - its triumph is to extinguish itself and give us the possibility, beyond words, of entering the realm of the author's thoughts - so that afterwards we believe we have communicated with him without words, from spirit to spirit, from soul to soul. [...] Only in this sense can the reader or author say with Paulhan: 'At least for this fleeting moment I was you'" (Merleau-Ponty, 1984, p. 34). (emphasis in original)

Helping students to forget the "symbols of language" when reading foreign-language literature and to experience that "what remains is the meaning", enabling them to "enter the author's world of thought" and to communicate with the author "from mind to mind, from soul to soul", obviously requires a very different approach from that of focusing on language skills. The crucial methodological question is obvious: How can such experiences be facilitated in a foreign language in which pupils do not understand many of the words?

 

Reading a literary work in a classroom

Particularly in reading short stories and plays, pupils benefit from taking turns reading aloud in class while the teacher quickly and unobtrusively corrects pronunciation when it seems appropriate to do so. Speaking and listening to literature aloud as opposed to silent reading is a very different experience. Henry James refers to the “close pressure” required to speak and listen to a literary work being read aloud, and he continues: "For it is only under this pressure that literature reveals its most beautiful and numerous secrets" (James, 1934, p. 346). This thought is both relevant to the entire atmosphere which can be created in a classroom and to the individual pupils’ experience. Literature read aloud in a classroom not only leads to sharing an experience in common - one begins and arrives at the same place at the same time – but also to giving individuals a chance to speak literature aloud on their own. When one takes into account the manner of superficial reading which digital media often leads to, listening together to each line of a work of literature read aloud offers students a very different, shared experience. It also effectively resolves problems arising from the very different capabilities of pupils which remain hidden and unaddressed in silent reading and other types of difficulties which are created when not everyone has done the assigned reading of what will be discussed in class that day. [Naturally, when reading an entire novel, it will be necessary to have pupils also read and prepare chapters and/or parts of chapters at home.]

Depending on the content and the particular class, it will generally be necessary after one or several paragraphs to briefly pause and clarify that which the teacher has deemed to be essential in order that all the pupils and particularly the less advanced ones are able to fully ‘enter into’ the story.  When first encountering a literary work in a foreign language, clarifications of meaning at some points will be unavoidable, but, ideally, they will remain within the feeling, atmosphere and "rhythm" of what is, above all, intended to be a satisfying initial reading of the text, enhancing rather than disrupting the experience of what is read.  Thus, one of the most important skills that language teachers need to develop is a sense of what really needs to be explained and that is certainly not every unfamiliar word or even sentence that is not understood.  By doing so, teachers can support students in understanding what is most essential for their ‘immersion’ in the story, always trying to do this in an unobtrusive and effective way so as not to interrupt the flow of reading more than necessary.

 

The art of asking questions

In these short pauses, it is most fruitful to ask questions whose aim is to enable pupils who have not yet understood enough to follow the narrative to be helped by listening to their classmates' answers. At the same time, such questions can draw the attention of those students who have more or less understood what they have read to aspects or details that have not so far been fully recognised or felt. These are questions and answers that should be as quick and "seamless" as possible, so as not to interrupt the flow of the reading more than necessary, and make it possible to still stay in the ‘atmosphere’ of the work. 

What can also significantly contribute to the initial ‘felt experience’ of a literary work is, after the initial reading by pupils, to briefly call attention to and illuminate particular images, words, or lines, in order to enable pupils to more closely perceive and experience what they have just read and thus to enter more deeply into the work itself.  When reading and listening to a literary work, the reader's imagination and feelings are called upon and the teacher can often support these imaginative and affective processes by then returning to specific lines, putting them back into the room through speaking them herself, then finding questions that draw attention to those aspects that can enhance the imaginative and felt experience of the work.

Vladimir Nabokov describes his understanding of the crucial relation between the reader's inner experience and learning to "see" what the author has written:

"In my opinion, an artistic, harmonious balance should be established between the reader's mind and the author's mind. We should remain somewhat detached and enjoy the distance while at the same time passionately enjoying, with tears and shudders, the inner fabric of a particular masterpiece. It is, of course, impossible to be entirely objective about these things. Everything that is valuable is to some extent subjective.... But what I mean is that the reader must know when and where to restrain his imagination, and he does so by trying to understand the specific world that the author makes available to him. We have to see and hear things, we have to imagine the rooms, the clothes, the customs of an author's people" (Nabokov, 1980, p. 3).

The type and quality of questions that are posed at different points in the course of a lesson will often prove to be decisive in achieving the level of engagement with a literary text which Merleau-Ponty and Nabokov have described. Asking appropriate questions at the right time depends on the teacher's sense of what is called for in a particular situation and comparable to all artistic-performative processes, it depends on a dynamic and ever-changing perception of what best serves those students at that moment. It is in such processes, which by their very nature are often unpredictable, that the high degree of artistry which teaching calls for becomes particularly evident. This is not to imply, however, that questions do not need to be thought about and prepared in advance. It is precisely the preparation of different types of possible questions that should be considered as perhaps the most crucial part of lesson preparation.

 

The preparations for teaching literature – beginning a lesson 

As Silvia Albert-Jahn and Natalia Plotkina have elucidated (Lutzker, 2022c, Plotkina in print), working on a literary work at a beginning or intermediate level generally requires some kind of brief dramatic introduction to the text which already conveys enough meaning and emotion through the choice of words, movements, gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice - a kind of ‘storytelling’- to facilitate the encounter with the written text. Especially for the less advanced students, such "preludes" to what will be read that day make it much easier to understand and relate to the subsequent reading. In high school EFL classes, this kind of approach will not usually be necessary or appropriate, but the significance of the beginnings of lessons is quite comparable. 

This starts with the first lesson on a new work. Whether one first briefly touches on something about the author's biography and/or some specific references to the plot, background, setting or situation, it can be very helpful in sparking an initial interest in what will be read and thereby avoiding the difficulties of a ‘cold start’. To give a concrete example: before reading one of James Joyce's short stories from his collection Dubliners, one can tell pupils about its background and particularly the difficulties Joyce had afterwards in getting it published. The censor, who had to check all books before they could be published, discovered some "indecent" words - for example, the word “dammed” – and wanted to force Joyce to replace them with others. Moreover, some characters who appear in Dubliners were actually real people called by their real names and still living in Dublin who were not exactly pleased to appear in Joyce's stories as they were described there. Joyce had already left Dublin by this time and stayed away from Dublin for the rest of his life; nevertheless Dublin  remained the setting for all of his works. Because of Joyce's refusal to change even a single "indecent" word, and, in fact, to change anything at all in the book, the book was not allowed to be published and at first could only be bought on the black market. One can then briefly explain how revolutionary and influential his later works Ulysses and Finnegans Wake were and read a few lines or passages from each of them.  This kind of relatively brief introduction creates both an interest in reading the work and a very suitable atmosphere in which to start a story afterwards.

At the beginning of all subsequent lessons, it will be necessary to ‘reawaken’ and ‘re-enter’ the story. Often a few days have passed since the last lesson, so that the story is initially far away for most of the pupils. The beginning of the lesson aims to include the recollection of what was read in the last lesson as well as its ‘felt remembrance’; to a certain extent experiencing again what was last read. For the teacher, preparing and teaching this first phase of the lesson, in order to then be able to as seamlessly as possible continue where one last left off, presents one of the greatest challenges in working with literature.

There are, of course, various ways of doing this, such as having some students read their homework aloud, as the homework usually relates to what was last read. This has the advantage of allowing students to become aware of others’ thoughts and insights; however, this method has the disadvantage of sometimes taking a relatively long time – especially in the higher grades –  and also it does not necessarily allow for directly connecting to what will be read next. Another possibility is to ask pupils what images, moments, situations, have most clearly stuck with them. However, this approach can be confusing for pupils who were absent in the previous lesson and, in that case, this phase will need to be more coherently structured. The method that I generally prefer to use, is to ask a few questions that serve to reorient students as to what was last read and also specifically attempt to bring back the felt remembrance of those images, moments and passages that were most strongly experienced, ending this phase where we last stopped. This first phase does not need to be very long - often five minutes will be sufficient.

An example of an initial reading in class

To give a concrete example, here is the first paragraph of the story “The Boarding House” from Joyce’s Dubliners.

"Mrs Mooney was a butcher's daughter. She was a woman who was quite able to keep things to herself: a determined woman. She had married her father's foreman and opened a butcher's shop near Spring Gardens. But as soon as his father-in-law was dead Mr. Mooney began to go to the devil. He drank, plundered the till, ran headlong into debt. It was no use making him take the pledge: he was sure to break out again a few days after. By fighting his wife in the presence of customers and by buying bad meat he ruined his business. One night he went for his wife with the cleaver and she had to sleep at a neighbour's house. After that they lived apart. She went to the priest and got a separation from him with care of the children. She would give him neither money nor food nor house-room; and so he was obliged to enlist himself as a sheriff's man. He was a shabby stooped little drunkard with a white face and a white moustache, white eyebrows, pencilled above his little eyes, which were veined and raw; and all day long he sat in the bailiff's room, waiting to be put on a job. Mrs. Mooney, who had taken what remained of her money out of the butcher business and set up a boarding house in Hardwicke Street, was a big imposing woman. Her house had a floating population made up of tourists from Liverpool and the Isle of Man and, occasionally, artistes from the music halls. Its resident population was made up of clerks from the city. She governed the house cunningly and firmly, knew when to give credit, when to be stern and when to let things pass. All the resident young men spoke of her as The Madam" (Joyce, 2006, pp.49-50).

After reading the first paragraph of "The Boarding House", brief introductory questions such as " "What have we already learned about Mrs Mooney’s life and her boarding house?" and "What are your first impressions of Mrs. Mooney?” can support the understanding and experience of what has been read, particularly for the less advanced students. One or two further questions about what we have found out about Mr. Mooney can be added. In this context, it would be worth highlighting an image here: "...he went for her with a cleaver" with the question "Who knows what a butcher's cleaver looks like?" or "What does a butcher use a cleaver for?" In the spirit of Nabokov – "We must see and hear things, we must imagine the rooms, the clothes, the manners of an author's people" – we must imagine Mr. Mooney, going after his wife with a cleaver in order to imagine and feel the brutality of this scene. Such and similar questions can help students to ‘enter into’ and stay in the story, and at the same time gain a clearer and more precise impression of what they have just read. Such details can be crucial for the felt experience of the story and at such moments they are often what most clearly shapes the atmosphere in the classroom.

There are a number of words in this paragraph (and in those that follow), which will be unfamiliar to most or all of the pupils and at later points – in discussions of the work in class and/or in homework – they may very well be clarified when they appear relevant, but in the first reading to stop and explain each unknown word will considerably slow down the process of reading the story and thus reduce the enjoyment of reading it. In an initial reading, it is certainly not necessary that pupils understand each word or line; what matters most is that they can get into and then ‘remain’ in the story, they are following what is happening and can experience and imagine what is most important.

 

Discussing the story in class and designing homework

After reaching a satisfying and manageable point in the story to stop for that day, (which generally requires having different possible ‘endpoints’ since lessons sometimes go quicker or slower than one plans for), there are other questions that can lead to discussions with neighbours, groups or the whole class. These questions are open questions without a clearly defined or expected answer.

To continue with the  example cited above: Joyce's short story “The Boarding House” is about a secret affair between Mrs. Mooney's flirtatious young daughter Polly and Mr. Doran, an otherwise very correct, serious and well-off man who lives in Mrs. Mooney's boarding house; an affair that Polly had with her mother’s full knowledge and consent, since she had been looking for a well-off man for her daughter for some time. Towards the end of the story, a supposedly horrified Mrs Mooney intends to call the guilty and bashful Mr Doran to her office to demand, out of her feigned shock and dismay, that he marry her daughter immediately. As the narrator reports:

"At last, when she judged it to be the right moment, Mrs. Mooney intervened. She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat: and in this case she had made up her mind. [...] She stood up and surveyed herself in the pier-glass. The decisive expression of her great florid face satisfied her and she thought of some mothers she knew who could not get their daughters off their hands" (Joyce, 2006, p. 51, 53).

Various open-ended discussion questions can be asked here about Mr Doran's responsibility, about his "guilt", about the different kinds of feelings the two lovers had for each other, about the role of the mother and, of course, the question Mr Doran asks himself before he runs anxiously down the stairs on his way to Mrs Mooney's office: "What could he do now but marry her or run away?"

Finally, there are homework questions designed for individual reflection and elaboration.

In this story, one could, for instance, consider the theme of “entrapment” and how it affects the different protagonists through the entire story. Another possibility would be to trace the relationship between Polly and Mr. Doran from its beginnings to its final consequences and discuss the different emotions and thoughts that each character has experienced along the way. Is it possible to concretely imagine the nature of their relationship afterwards? What role/s has Mrs. Mooney directly and indirectly played in this affair? The complex and sometimes ambiguous relationship between mother and daughter could also be explored.

Offering pupils a broad range of different homework questions and allowing them to choose the question or the questions they want to write about, is an essential part of an individual engagement with literature. The nature of the questions should take into account the different interests and abilities of the students in a class and each question should offer students the opportunity to explore in depth and express in their own way/s their understanding and experience of what they have read. (These questions share much in common with the discussion questions mentioned above.) In the higher grades, the questions are meant to be as differentiated and ‘thick’ as possible – unanswerable in a paragraph or two – which often means that each question contains several sub-questions. Designing an interesting and fruitful selection of homework possibilities for students is one of the most important tasks in a teacher's preparation. Therefore, one of the most important tasks in teacher education is to jointly consider and critically discuss concrete possible homework questions.

In this section, a perhaps non-traditional approach to teaching literature in a foreign language has been discussed within the framework of a traditional classroom situation. In practice, this is often the most familiar and manageable situation in which teachers and pupils work together. However, there are also very strong arguments that can be made for taking literature ‘off the page’ and into the realm of performance. This can, of course, happen quite naturally while reading a play. The following sections will explore how a performative approach to literature can also be very fruitful in working on prose fiction and poetry.

 

Chamber theatre: performing prose fiction

Chamber theatre encompasses a wide range of theatrical possibilities, usually of works not written specifically for the theatre. It is an approach closely associated with the pioneering work of Robert Breen, Wallace Bacon and Frank Galati at Northwestern University (Bacon, 1972; Breen, 1978). I have often worked with a particular type of chamber theatre in high school and in teacher education where prose literature - a short story or an extract from a novel - is transformed into a dramatic form.

Part of the richness of prose narratives is that they allow the author to subtly and ‘invisibly’, through a third-person narrative voice, switch back and forth between internal and external perspectives. Thus, a third-person narrator can be both ‘inside’ the characters, revealing their intimate thoughts and feelings to the reader and an objective observer, describing, for example, the necessary background to what has already taken place, or the specifics of the setting and what needs to be ‘seen’. It is this broad spectrum of possibilities offered by prose fiction that chamber theatre tries to adapt into a dramatic form.

As opposed to typical theatre (or film) adaptations of a prose work, chamber theatre transforms the ‘narrative voice’ of the third person narrator into a character who actively participates in the drama as a ‘narrator-character’, embodying the different roles and perspectives that a third person narrator can have. The nature of the relationship and interaction between the narrator and the other characters and between the narrator and the audience, becomes an essential part of the dramatization. For both the actors and the audience, the nature of these interactions can offer fascinating insights into the story.

An essential part of the creative and artistic work involved in this transformation of prose fiction into drama is the writing of the script. Students begin with this task. In most chamber theatre scripts, the language of the original work remains entirely unchanged. This means, for example, that the characters can refer to themselves in the third person when speaking ‘their’ lines. Line by line, it must be decided whether a character's ‘voice’ or thoughts are expressed in such a way that they should speak those lines themselves, or whether the ‘voice’ is that of the narrator, whose own recognisable way of speaking is evident in the language and tone of what is said. Dividing lines according to whether a character or the narrator should speak a line requires a sensitive process of attentive reading and ‘listening’, often trying out different variants before deciding what seems most convincing.

Working through a text in this way presents a number of challenges. Firstly, students are asked to read the text very carefully and try to notice the nuances of what is being expressed both in the lines and between the lines. They need to actively immerse themselves in both the content of the story and the language of the author. For high school pupils, as well as university students and teachers, this becomes an intensive lesson in a 'close reading', sensing and feeling what is revealed in (or within) a single line or passage.  As this work is done in small groups, it also requires openness and flexibility to try out different ideas for dividing the text. The whole process of reaching consensus, which is often revised during the rehearsal process, can be seen as another form of artistic practice, learning to feel what can be revealed and expressed in different ways through the division and speaking of the lines, and experiencing the particular joy of a collective creative process.

To give a more concrete picture of this work, what follows is the same extract from the beginning of Joyce's short story "A Boarding House" that was copied above. Below is an example of how one group divided up the beginning of the story. One has to imagine that the two protagonists are partly looking at the audience to address and inform them, but at many other points they speak directly to each other.

Narrator: Mrs. Mooney was a butcher's daughter.

Mrs. Mooney: She was a woman who was quite able to keep things to herself:

Narrator: a determined woman.

Mrs. Mooney: She had married her father's foreman and opened a butcher's shop near Spring Gardens.

Narrator: But as soon as his father-in-law was dead Mr. Mooney began to go to the devil. He drank, plundered the till, ran headlong into debt.

Mrs. Mooney: It was no use making him take the pledge: he was sure to break out again a few days after.

Narrator: By fighting his wife in the presence of customers and by buying bad meat he ruined his business. One night he went for his wife with the cleaver

Mrs Mooney: and she had to sleep at a neighbour's house.

Narrator: After that they lived apart. She went to the priest and got a separation from him with care of the children.

Mrs Mooney: She would give him neither money nor food nor house-room;

Narrator: and so he was obliged to enlist himself as a sheriff's man.

Mrs Mooney: He was a shabby stooped little drunkard with a white face and a white moustache, white eyebrows, pencilled above his little eyes, which were veined and raw;

Narrator: and all day long he sat in the bailiff's room, waiting to be put on a job. Mrs. Mooney, who had taken what remained of her money out of the butcher business and set up a boarding house in Hardwicke Street, was a big imposing woman. Her house had a floating population

Mrs. Mooney: made up of tourists from Liverpool and the Isle of Man and, occasionally, artistes from the music halls. Its resident population was made up of clerks from the city.

Narrator: She governed the house cunningly and firmly, knew when to give credit,

Mrs. Mooney: when to be stern and when to let things pass.

Narrator: All the resident young men spoke of her as

Narrator/Mrs Mooney: The Madam.

The initial work on the script leads seamlessly into the rehearsal phase where passages and scenes are acted out and further theatrical elements such as movement, gesture, blocking a scene etc. are explored. I often have students work on a single short story and have them work in small groups on different parts of the story so that at the end of the process the entire story can be performed.

There are many ways to perform the text afterwards: the simplest is to read the text aloud in a classroom, as a kind of 'reader's theatre', where the characters with their texts on music stands try to bring the story to life just by reading the text dramatically, similar to a radio play. A second possibility is to perform the text as a workshop drama in an "empty space" without costumes or set design. Finally, a full production with costumes, set, lighting, etc. is also possible, but this is generally more artistically demanding than the performance of a play. I have usually opted for the second option, but, of course, there can be good reasons for either variant, depending on the particular situation.

"Lyrical theatre": the performance of poetry [The term „lyrical theatre“ for this kind of work was suggested by  Theresa Hermanns, one of my students at the Freie Hochschule Stuttgart in her excellent Masters Thesis about this process.]

The term "lyrical theatre" refers to a form of dramatization of poetry in small groups. In this process, students usually work in groups of three and are given a selection of poems with the general instruction to "take the poem off the page" and bring it into the realm of performance. The poems offered are mostly selections of 20th or 21st century poems of manageable length that lend themselves to a performative approach. Some examples are Mary Oliver's poems "When Death Comes", "the spirit likes to dress up", "Wild Geese"; Billy Collins' "On Turning Ten", "Questions about Angels"; e.e. cummings' "anyone lived in a pretty how town", "what is". Students are asked to experiment with different ways they could dramatize the poem as a group, with the aim of performing it in front of an audience. The only stipulation is that while they can decide to repeat or cut lines, they must not change any of the words.

On the first day, I read a selection of poems to the students. After they have made their choices, they are asked to form groups of three to work on the selected poems (sometimes this ends up taking place in pairs or in groups of four). Immediately afterwards, and in all subsequent lessons, the sessions begin with a short warm-up programme for the whole class before they break up to work in their respective groups. The time frame for the pupils can vary, generally they have between three to five lessons to rehearse their poems.

They are strongly encouraged not to spend too much time talking about the poem, but to quickly start experimenting with how it can be translated into movement, language and different forms of interaction. During the first session, the teacher visits the groups to answer any questions that arise. In the next sessions, the teacher can go around and observe the work of each group and give them feedback on what she is seeing and perhaps make suggestions on how what they have already worked on could be presented in an even more accessible and moving way for an audience. This feedback often serves to help them realise that even when they are not speaking, they play a crucial role in creating and sustaining the performative ‘space’ of the poem, by actively listening and responding to the others.

I have used this approach to working on poetry for more than thirty years, first with 12^th grade students, then in teacher education and in-service training. I am always amazed at how students and teachers find ways to creatively and artistically embody their poems, which are then performed in front of an audience made up of the other groups and sometimes invited guests. After each individual performance there is a short feedback session, where the audience can respond to what they have seen. The audience's appreciation of both the poetry and the way the group has brought it to life is an essential part of this work. After all the groups have performed, there is a final session to discuss the whole process. Students often comment that through this work they have developed a very different connection not only to the poem they have worked on, but to poetry in general. In working with teachers, participants often say that their own experience of working on a poem and the opportunity to see others' poems on stage have given them new impulses and ideas for their work in school.

 

Performative approaches to literature

Both Lyrical Theatre and Chamber Theatre offer students the opportunity to engage with literature artistically and performatively and to embody it in imaginative ways. They open up new ways to actively explore what can be discovered in a poem or a prose work; the artistic challenges of embodying and performing it almost invariably leads to a heightened and richer experience of literature. Bringing a poem or story to life in this way, having it heard and seen, is something completely new for most students and teachers: they experience literature in unexpected ways by rehearsing and performing them and watching the performances of others. This kind of performative/artistic work can also be experienced as a paradigmatic basis in teacher education for the development of further artistic approaches to teaching literature. Moreover, it can provide new impulses and objectives for more traditional literature teaching in the classroom.

 

Conclusions: aesthetic processes in education  

The view that reading literature in foreign language lessons stands apart from the expectations and necessities of 'real' life can often lead to having testable vocabulary and grammar become the main focus of foreign language teaching and/or the prioritisation of exam preparation. As argued at the beginning of the first part of this chapter, this approach to language teaching and learning ignores a substantial body of research demonstrating that language itself, as well as first language acquisition, is deeply rooted in affective, volitional and embodied experience. Language teaching which pays no heed to the actual nature of language and language acquisition will inevitably be ineffective. At the same time, it effectively reduces the rich possibilities that foreign language learning can actually offer. It is exactly in this regard that literature in foreign language learning can play a unique role. 

Leading educators such as John Dewey, Maxine Greene and Eliot Eisner have repeatedly argued that all forms of education that enable engagement with works of art do not stand apart from life, but rather enable a more holistic, living and fulfilling experience of life. Dewey writes:

"...artistic activity is an undivided union of factors which, when separated, are called physical, emotional, intellectual, and practical - these last in the sense of doing and making. [...] Because of this wholeness of artistic activity, because the entire personality comes into play, artistic activity which is art itself is not an indulgence but is refreshing and restorative, as is always the wholeness that is health. There is no inherent difference between fullness of activity and artistic activity; the latter is one with being fully alive. Hence, it is not something possessed by a few persons and setting them apart from the rest of mankind, but is the normal or natural human heritage" (Dewey, 1948, pp. ix-x.).

Maxine Greene's offers a complementary perspective insofar as she sees all forms of  education which focus on artistic or aesthetic experience as exemplary for learning in general:

"I believe that the learning provoked by what we call aesthetic education is paradigmatic for the kind of learning many of us would like to see. Learning stimulated by the desire to explore, to find out, to go in search. This is the learning that goes beyond teaching - the only significant learning, I believe. It is self-initiated at some point, permeated by wonder, studded by moments of questioning, always with the sense that there is something out there, something worthwhile beyond" (Greene, 2001, pp.46-47).

For Greene, aesthetic education can lead to an expansion of life experiences, opening up new and transformative biographical perspectives. She sees this as the primary goal of education:

"Most significantly, I think we too often forget that the primary purpose of education is to free persons to make sense of their actual lived situations - not only cognitively, but perceptually, imaginatively, affectively - to attend mindfully to their own lives, to take their own initiatives in interpreting them and finding out where the deficiencies are and trying to transform them. And discovering somehow that there is no end to it, and there is always more to see, to learn, to feel" (Greene, 2001, p. 206).

For Elliot Eisner, the arts in particular are the preeminent instrument for developing the senses and the imagination. He too sees the importance and impact of such aesthetic experiences as extending far beyond the arts and into their social impact:

"The arts have an important role to play in refining our sensory system and cultivating our imaginative abilities. Indeed, the arts provide a kind of permission to pursue qualitative experience in a particularly focused way and to engage in the constructive exploration of what the imaginative process may engender. (...) A culture populated by a people whose imagination is impoverished has a static future. In such a culture there will be little change because there will be little sense of possibility" (Eisner, XX, pp. 4- 5).

Whether it is a short story by James Joyce, a poem by Mary Oliver or a drama by Shakespeare, - it is the spirit of the work itself that a teacher and her students can attempt to evoke. Whether in discussion, or through performance, it is this spirit that can offer experiences that are, as Greene writes, "...permeated by wonder, studded by moments of questioning, always with the sense that there is something out there, something worthwhile beyond." As Eisner points out, it is precisely such focused, imaginative powers and abilities that our present and future require. I am convinced that working with literature in a foreign language can open up untold possibilities for pupils, students and teachers. In this article, from a perspective shaped by Steiner/Waldorf education, I have attempted to describe different ways that such possibilities might be realized.

 

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