Reflections after working on Romulus, My Father
A few years ago the New South Wales English Teachers’ Association declared that Study Guides were not desirable material for students of senior English to use. Having written a number of Study Guides for a reputable publisher I was shocked by this sudden announcement. I don’t know what effect it has had on the publishing industry, but from my point of view no-one seems interested in publishing study guides any more. Was this declaration the result of a serious academic study or was it simply the result of intellectual snobbery? As far as I remember there has been no academic study on the use of study guides, not even a tick box form on the subject to English teachers.
So what were these teachers objecting to? The content and style of study guides themselves? Or perhaps the use young people put them to?
Content and Style
What do Study Guides do that is so heinous and what could they do better?
English study guides traditionally include a number of different chapters which include:
A plot summary
Notes on the author
Notes on background issues in the text
Character analyses
Language analysis
Typical examination questions
A sample essay possibly with a marking scale
Perhaps the idea of a summary being already done for the student is repellant to teachers?
Students at all levels of English use Study Guides. For those doing ordinary levels or struggling with English perhaps as a second language, a summary can give them access to a text. Having a good idea where the plot is headed, of the big picture, helps a lot of people keep going with a book.
For students at higher levels, studying long texts, a summary can help them hold onto a surplus of characters and subplots. At this study level the language demands of nineteenth century literature can be overwhelming, a summary can be useful for tiding students over the difficult passages.
Or is it the presentation of character analyses that offends teachers?
Perhaps it is here that writers can tighten their work. Traditionally, very thin character analyses were presented in study guides and could be problematic if all the students in a class accessed one guide. Analyses need to be thorough, with many possible interpretations considered, especially through questioning. It is not necessarily for the study guide writer to present all the possible ideas about one character, but to assist the student to think of as many of their own as possible.
There is however the increasing problem of writing study guides on memoirs. Finding questions about a person in a memoir as opposed to a character in a work of fiction is fraught with difficulty. A study guide writer can’t just make guesses about a real person’s life or about their intentions, especially if the text is written in a way to disguise the truth. For instance, a study guide writer of Romulus, My Father could not say that there was any possibility Romulus Gaita was interred in a Concentration Camp in World War II. There is no evidence in the text to point to that. But by presenting scrupulous background notes and a few key questions the writer is able to lead students to see more than the memoirist has recorded. A study guide can show that the proximity of the Buchenwald concentration camp system to Romulus Gaita presented him with terrible choices and no matter what decisions he made he would always feel some sort of guilt. He would inevitably be left with bad memories that would haunt him for the rest of his life, no matter what side he took. These would affect his health, but this not spelled out by Raimond Gaita.
Writing about language use for a study guide is a little easier. Students typically need more assistance in this area, especially with the wide interpretation the Board of Studies gives for the word ‘language’. Students need to be constantly reminded that ‘language’ means film techniques and graphic design as well as vocabulary, rhetoric and diction. But in their search for their own supplementary material students have to be well informed so they can write in detail about the language in their own choice of material. In this case, modeling is of key importance, with a sample essay invaluable. Of course, the best teachers are already doing this with their students in class. But not every teacher has the time or feels confident to write essays or creative pieces with every text they teach. Access to the work of other teachers is a great encouragement to the classroom teacher.
Inclusion of essays and marking scales in a study guide can be problematic for a study guide writer. ‘Brilliant’ essays that score highly on the HSC are usually idiosyncratic, rarely following a tight pattern that can be copied. A writer can demonstrate for students how to plan an essay and write a solid piece to cover the question and the outcomes. It is more difficult to demonstrate how to achieve at the highest levels, with suggestions the main process for this. It is of course, always humbling to try and write an essay on the text. Even when the writer chooses the question and outcomes and can tweak the question to fit their material, the difficulty of what is required by the HSC always becomes obvious.
Study guides have not generally included bibliographies or other lists of related texts.
This can be done better: As a result of the changes to the Higher School Certificate English courses in 2000 it is now preferable that study guides do include bibliographies of their reference materials and lists of related texts for the Area of Study and electives requiring support material. My experience in the classroom was that once a number of texts had been suggested to students for use as supplementary material and a rationale provided for their choice, students would understand the process and begin selecting from their own resources. Students rarely used what was suggested in class, but the material was a springboard for their own ideas. Consequently, choosing works to use in study guides as supplementary material should be no problem, as long as students understand the depth of understanding they require to write on the text.
In general I found study guides useful in teaching. They are difficult to write, requiring large amounts of unseen research and analytic thought. For relatively short works they take a long time to produce. And to cover the outcomes of the HSC a writer now needs to include some personal writing which can be even more time consuming and intimidating. Used in conjunction with reviews and literary essays I believe they should be part of the teacher’s resources for any text they teach.
By Glen
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