Life skills and literary texts about the First World War

Abstract

This article addresses how literary texts about the First World War opened spaces for the life skills of critical thinking and empathy in an English language classroom in a lower secondary school in Norway. It reports on parts of a study conducted in a 9th grade English class, where the learners read four texts, prose and poetry – The Amazing Tale of Ali Pasha (Foreman, 2013), ‘The Soldier’ (Brooke, 1914/2014), ‘Does it Matter?’ (Sassoon, 1917/2014) and an excerpt from Stay Where You Are and Then Leave (Boyne, 2017) – and responded to them in an individual assignment. As its point of departure, this article considers the implementation of the interdisciplinary topic Health and Life Skills, one of three topics introduced in the current Norwegian National Curriculum, the 2020 Knowledge Promotion. It draws on the idea that responding to literary texts about history facilitates critical thinking and expressions of empathy. Judith Langer’s theory of building envisionments was employed to describe how the learners engaged with the texts. The findings indicate that the two prose texts proved particularly fruitful to help learners think critically and empathetically about some of the demanding and challenging aspects of life in times of war. To dig deeper and more critically into the literary texts, further teacher involvement and integration of historical information when working with the texts and responses are needed in order to balance historical knowledge and the learners’ immediate response to the texts.