Möten med dikten: Poetiska läspraktiker inom och utanför gymnasieskolan

Abstract in English

The aim of this compilation thesis was to increase the understanding of secondary students’ poetic literacies both inside and outside school. The study employed an overarching theoretical framework derived from New Literacy Studies in which poetry reading is understood as a social practice (Barton, 2007; Barton & Hamilton, 2000; Street, 2001). Paper I was a systematic literature review of international research discussions on the teaching of poetry reading in secondary school. The descriptive analysis showed that the research has mainly come from English-speaking countries, namely Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and the US, and the primary areas of research have been in the fields of education, literature, and psychology. The majority of studies were qualitative, and methods such as interviews, observations, surveys, and textual analyses were used. An inductive thematic analysis of topics in the research identified four major themes: “personal response pedagogies”, “development of poetry reading during secondary education”, “educational politics and poetry reading pedagogy”, and “boys and poetry reading”. Paper II explored secondary students’ leisure use of poetry with special regard to the reading of poetry. The study comprised 21 interviews and was inspired by constructive grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014). The analysis showed that the most common activity was private reading at home. Poetry was read for inspiration in order to create poetry, prose, and images. The participants’ examples of their favourite poems showed that lyric poetry and song lyrics were favoured. Paper III was based on the same empirical material as paper II and aimed at exploring the participants’ main reasons for reading poetry for leisure. Felski’s (2008) theory about leisure reading was employed in the analysis. The analysis rendered three categories: “being seen by the poem”, “an internal community”, and “support in difficult periods”, which indicated that there is a relational dimension to the reading process. Paper IV explored secondary Swedish teachers’ perceptions of key elements of poetry pedagogy. The study comprised 15 interviews. A thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) identified four themes: “drawing on personal engagement”, “discussing pupils’ conceptions from the outset”, “creating a safe classroom atmosphere”, and “scaffolding pupils’ interpretations”, which comprised the two sub-themes “scaffolding the aesthetic experience” and “scaffolding textual analysis”. Rosenblatt’s (1994 [1978], 1995 [1938]) theory of aesthetic reading and Shulman’s (1986, 1987) concept of pedagogical content knowledge was employed to interpret the participants’ perceptions. In the final section of the thesis, trends in the results in papers I–IV were discussed. The findings suggested that the aesthetic experience of poetry was key to the reading practices inside and outside secondary school. Students’ statements about their poetry reading outside school showed that they tended to read for psychological reasons, whereas the teachers’ statements about the teaching practices indicated that these were oriented towards textual analysis.