Disorderly Contexts: ELAC Conference 2024

This session will encourage the study of literature as a vehicle for enabling students to acknowledge, be comfortable with, and communicate understanding of the complexity of characters and issues in the texts they deal with, and hopefully also in the mindset they bring to the world and people in general.  We will emphasize the concepts of irony, ambiguity and paradox as essential to overcoming a temptation to simplify perspectives and to see people and issues in binary terms.  Honouring complexity in significant literary texts will improve the quality of student understanding and work in the classroom, on summative assessments, and ideally in the attitudes and perspectives they bring to people and issues in the "real" world.   The session will discuss strategies to enhance this mindset in the classroom, including the consideration of a short literary text as a specific example of this approach.