War in the Classroom: A Qualitative Model for the English Literature Classroom

This disseration, War in the Classroom: A Qualitative Model for the English Literature Curriculum shows how war and trauma – past and present – are a pervasive presence in pupils’ lives. This book proposes how secondary school teachers can overcome their anxieties about discussing sensitive topics such as war in the classroom. Rather than ignore these, it is important for the teacher to foreground these calamities and connect them to canonical and non-canonical multimodal literature in their classrooms. This disseration outlines how the forces in society, politics, and science aim to establish calm control in and of the conflicting world we live in. Each of these force fields seek out schools, as they are one of the last strongholds of collective memory and bastion of shared culture that can affect this. This book shows how teachers can empower themselves vis-à-vis the force fields’ influence by accepting the central role they play in maintaining and preserving society’s collective cultural memory. Teachers have an obligation to overcome their anxiety to act and engage with humanity’s violent past and present. This disseration will help them to do so. Though its focus is on English literature, this book is also valid for teachers of other subjects, such as Dutch, French, and German language and literature, and to a lesser extent history and social sciences. It is an answer to the widespread and urgent call for value-driven education. This book shows how current curricula can be reshaped in such a way that they accommodate and incorporate the concerns and demands of society, science, and politics. It shows that English literature, part of a larger English language and culture curriculum at secondary schools in the Netherlands, and war narratives specifically, is an appropriate platform to addressing the wider social, political, and scientific picture, involving current global conflicts. This dissertation suggests a multimodal approach to literature in the classroom and analyses poetry, prose, movies, and blogs; chronologically tracing art that has sprung from the ashes of the major wars of the 20th and 21st centuries, World Wars I and II, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and the War on Terror. Doing so broadens the required curricula extensively, moving beyond the remit of what is required of modern language and literature teachers in the Netherlands. However, this book shows that a different, more creative and expansive design of the (language) curriculum is urgently needed, to rise up to the increasing demands upon teachers, and the challenge of involving society’s pressing issues of citizenship at schools, as well as being forerunner to the general curricular overhaul in the Netherlands. This book is aimed to function as a flywheel to achieve this. It suggests an extensive re-draft of the English language curriculum, emphasising the importance and strengthening the position of literature and literature education in schools. Ultimately, the broad range of literary classroom interventions this dissertation describes culminates in a qualitative literary model for the English literature curriculum, as formulated in the conclusion. This is meant to serve as a guideline for the teacher-reader of this book in their ambition to design their own literary interventions. This book aims to motivate teachers to explore similar pathways, such as taking students on excursions to Ypres, venturing away from Owen to more diverse, non-canonical war poetry in the classroom (chapter 2), moving beyond Anne Frank’s diary and visiting Bergen-Belsen with pupils (chapter 3), or as inspiration to putting Vietnam War Movies on the curriculum in troublesome classes (chapter 4), or even inviting a veteran to the classroom (chapter 5)