As part of our ongoing work to support decolonising efforts in relation to the English A-Level, we visited our longtime collaborators at Loreto College in June to offer curriculum-targeted sessions on the New Woman and New Woman Writing.
Jade delivered an hour-long lecture, with the rest of the team – Katie, Keren and myself – joining in later by putting attendees’ newfound knowledge to the test with a close-reading exercise in the classroom.
The students were invited to analyse an extract from Olive Schreiner’s feminist allegory ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’ (originally published in Schreiner’s 1890 short story collection, Dreams). With themes of female emancipation, anti-colonialism and conflicting religious ideals all carefully allegorised, the text is a challenging one that requires deep analyses of both form and content. The Loreto students were – as per usual – more than up to the task. I opened my workshop by explaining the concepts of close-reading and allegory, and many of them immediately recognised what would be required of them throughout the session.
By starting with close examination of Schreiner’s literary techniques and questioning why she uses them, students were soon able to start breaking down the multiple meanings generated by the text.
Following a reading of the passage, it was a delight to see everyone form into groups and enthusiastically share ideas about the text. The intertextual nature of the text seemed to be of particular interest to them. As I went around the room and spoke to each group individually, one student remarked that it was particularly striking to see feminist concepts discussed by a South African writer. This, of course, lends the extract a unique perspective that goes beyond the parameters of the current curriculum. It is so encouraging to see this being recognised as we introduce South African writers to a new readership.
Our tried and tested approach to the sessions works for several different reasons. In her pre-workshop presentation, Jade provides A-Level students with a university-level lecture by a leader in the field without talking down to them. Meanwhile, the extended close-reading sessions we provide afterwards give them a further taste of the university experience, with such exercises later to become the bread and butter of many assignments for those who choose to pursue English Literature study post-18. It also offers them a potentially different perspective for approaching their own upcoming A-Level assessments which they may not have considered before. Many of those we had the privilege of teaching this time around were about to sit exams that would require analysis of a piece of unseen prose from 1880-1910, and these workshops offer a valuable opportunity to test these exact skills.
We encourage the students to offer feedback in the form of a questionnaire and a ‘Postcard to My Future Self’. The latter allows students to reflect on what they wish to take away from the session going forward, and the feedback we have received from these has been overwhelmingly positive.
As well the relevance to their upcoming unseen prose exams, many of the students found that they were making connections between our teachings and texts that they were currently working on. They were able to apply newly realised ideas relating to the New Woman to texts such as E. M. Forster’s A Room with A View. One student suggested that the sessions were useful for “context and a better understanding of the concept of the New Woman emerging during this time”, and this was a sentiment that I constantly saw repeated. Another wrote that it helped them to “think critically about the relationships between men and women in other book [they had] read from that period or before”. Allowing them to interactively engage with these concepts enabled them to practice what would be expected of them in their assignments. One student simply wrote that they found the session “a lot of fun”, and that was good enough for me!
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