Why Literature Matters

Rationale

Social skills are important to an individual’s growth. They make us adept at dealing with life’s challenges, however big or small. These skills are needed to “interact adaptively in our cultural environment.”¹ A lack of social skills is evident through my students’ need to be either popular or to be accepted. This lack is evident in our students throughout the school through reported incidents of bullying and/or making unwise choices.

To address this lack of social skills, our school employed a program run by volunteers from a private local high school; these volunteers came into the classrooms for fifteen minutes to talk about how to behave respectfully and treat others with respect, how to solve problems on the playground and in the class. These fifteen-minute problem solving sessions were not successful as they took away instructional time that we already were striving for, and they were discontinued. There are other programs especially designated to teach social skills, using picture books and certain read-aloud books that especially cater toward an understanding of these skills. In my experience, these books, though helpful, tend to be either too deliberate or come across as lecture-like. This situation inspired me to bring in classic imaginative literature to teach social skills that promote real-life problem-solving skills.

With the advent of Common Core, we have moved away from a set curriculum for English Language Arts, which has given us more liberty to build a curriculum that would cater to the needs of our students. This has provided me an opportunity to bring quality literature into my classroom. This is also possible because we follow Sobrato Early Academic Language, SEAL, “a comprehensive model of intensive, enriched language and literacy education designed for English language learners, starting in preschool and continuing through third grade.”² Dr. Laurie Olsen, “a national expert in English language learner education,”³ pioneered this model with the goal of having students be English proficient by third grade. English language development is integrated in science and social studies units, and the focus is on the use of powerful and complex language by the teachers while teaching these subjects. Our curriculum for English Language Arts is usually incorporated with science and/or social studies using the SEAL strategies. For this reason, this unit, while focusing on the social skills and problem-solving in real life, will also be integrated with the science unit on ecosystems: students will analyze how organisms depend on each other and their environment to survive.

For this unit, I selected the original, unabridged version of the book Winnie-the-Pooh, as it contains humorous stories about a character that is recognized by my students in the form of Disney productions and merchandise. This book consists of ten stories or chapters that can be read independently, as each has its own plot. When read together; they show growth of the characters. Though these stories appear to be silly on the surface, the story has a deeper meaning, which allows students to experience values like empathy, respect, and problem-solving skills through two main Common Core Standards: characters’ points of view and their choices. 

Pooh bear is the main inspiration for creating a curricular unit based on this piece of literature. Winnie frequently empathizes with his friends and solves problems in clever and sometimes silly ways in these stories. Winnie-the-Pooh not only engages students in problem-solving activities in a relaxed atmosphere but also exposes them to real-life problems such as weather hazards and bee attacks.

By digging deep into the enchanted world of “The Hundred Acre Woods,” my students will experience other cultures and time periods that are different from their own, which they are seldom able to do otherwise. I hope to nurture the ideas that other worlds exist, “full of imagination, curiosity, and humor” and that they “don’t have to experience things the way [they] do now.”⁴  Though some critics might call this reading a form of escapism, I see it as an opportunity for children to connect with the characters, associate with them, and find ways to “cope with difficult situations.”⁵ They are able to “experience people, places, and circumstances that they may not be able to experience in real life. This allows children to develop a sense of empathy for other people and understand their own lives in more meaningful ways.”⁶

Maxine Greene explains that children need literature to internalize knowledge about situations, for instance, how we treat others and how we feel when others treat us. A situation in a story becomes a part of the child’s social imagination⁷ as s/he thinks of the character and its choices. Children begin to think about the characters’ situations as real-life situations and empathize with the characters.

Empathy seems like the missing link in today’s competitive world, as is evident from the events taking place currently around us. Our interactions with others are preoccupied with our own mental spaces, and we seem to have become too self-centered, with little consideration for others. We empathize with others when we are able to think about their perspective and understand how they feel. “Empathy allows us to really connect with other people.”⁸ Milne clearly brings out this need for empathy through Eeyore’s sentiment, “A little Consideration, a little Thought for Others, makes all the difference.”⁹ Throughout this book, Pooh shows empathy toward his friends and is always ready to solve their problems, no matter how challenging. In the fourth story, in which Eeyore is sad because he loses his tail, Pooh takes up the challenge of finding it: “Pooh felt that he ought to say something helpful, but didn’t quite know what. So he decided to do something helpful.”¹⁰ Pooh’s helpful nature makes him a great problem-solver. This character is “powerful to make choices that change other characters’ lives.”¹¹ Reading literature and having “thoughtful discussions facilitate critical thinking and meaningful interactions with both peers and texts.”¹² Through the interactions among the characters, students understand the value of empathy and the meaning of friendship.

Pooh’s actions teach students the value of perseverance and keeping our heads about us in times of “[a] Very Great Danger.”¹³ During the “Terrible Flood,”¹⁴ Pooh does not let himself be overcome with emotion, nor does he panic. He analyzes the situation and thinks how he can solve the problem of reaching his friends to rescue them. He does not know how to swim but does not lose hope. He comes up with a solution; he uses his honey jar as a floatation device: “If a bottle can float, then a jar can float, and if a jar floats, I can sit on the top of it.”¹⁵

Students analyze how characters can grow over the course of the story or series of stories; as Pooh progresses from being called a “Bear of Very Little Brain”¹⁶ to being called the “Brain of Pooh,”¹⁷ the title that he earns by using problem solving skills as he turns the umbrella to function as a boat and uses that to rescue Piglet during the “Terrible Flood.”¹⁸

The playful language of this text gives it a humorous tone. Through the humorous conversations among the characters, students find out the importance of clear communication. For instance, Eeyore is usually gloomy and comes across as sad and pessimistic, as he complains about others being inconsiderate. Yet when Eeyore shares his feelings with Pooh, he understands and helps him out. This is an important lesson for the students as one of the major steps in problem solving is to understand how we feel and then analyze the problem. When Owl says, “issue a reward,” Pooh misunderstands the word “issue” and thinks he is sneezing in the middle of a sentence and finds it rude. Students realize the importance of listening carefully: if a person doesn’t listen, they need to be patient as they might just have a “small piece of fluff in their ear.”¹⁹ Thus communicating clearly is an important skill that students learn through the characters of this book.

Through these humorous tales, students gain an important concept about learning through our mistakes: it is okay to make mistakes as we constantly learn and grow. We should be open to other people’s ideas and not put them down because of their mistakes. Carol Dweck termed this concept, “growth mindset.” Students with a growth mindset take up challenges and difficult problems as an opportunity to learn and grow. They don’t think about failure; they think of how they can learn.²⁰ Through this unit, students develop growth mindset by analyzing the choices made by Pooh, as is evident from Pooh’s song: “Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston Pie, A fish can’t whistle and neither can I,” to emphasize the fact that no one knows everything and that is alright; one should be open to new ideas and learning. By comparing Pooh and Eeyore, students realize the importance of trying out new things and not worrying about mistakes: they might not get a new concept the first time, but with patience, they will get it. They need to keep an open mindset as portrayed by Pooh, “I wonder what’s going to happen exciting today?”²¹

Students often feel lonely and ignored. That creates a feeling of pessimism and a belief “that no one cares about them,”²² which is quite similar to Eeyore’s perspective. Students react in different ways in this situation: some act out to get attention, however negative; while others do anything their popular peers demand, to be accepted, however dangerous that might be. This gives rise to bullying. A lot of times, we think of bullying as people doing physical harm or saying mean things, but when someone has no friends and no one tries to make friends with that person, that is bullying as well: a feeling that causes anxiety and keeps students from academic achievement.

This is evident in the seventh story or chapter, in which we are introduced to Kanga and Baby Roo. Rabbit decides to kidnap Baby Roo, by replacing Piglet in Kanga’s pouch. He thinks that “[Kanga and Roo] are Strange Animals… whom we have never heard of before!” and they should be scared away from the forest. Students might analyze Rabbit as a bully and Piglet as the person who always agrees because he wants to be accepted. This story offers an important message to the students about respect and empathy: it is a vice to judge other people by their appearance. Through the consequence that Piglet receives from Kanga, students realize another important message: others will treat them the way they treat others. Through Rabbit and Roo’s friendship, they realize they can always learn from their mistakes.

The character’s choices and decisions give students an insight into their own decision-making processes. According to the novelist Orson Scott Card, “One of the most potent devices for making a character important to the readers is to use the character’s point of view.”²³ M.H. Abrams defines the third-person point of view as someone outside the story who calls all the characters by name and uses of pronouns like “he,” “she,” or “they,” whereas, in the first person point of view, the narrator uses the pronoun “I” and becomes a character in the story.²⁴

Point of view sets the tone of story. Milne’s writing craft, though unusual, is clever at inviting the reader into the action of the story. As he skips between the first-person and the third-person narrative, he introduces his reader to Pooh and Christopher Robin, who are the main characters of the stories. Once the stories begin, the narrator takes over the third-person, omniscient point of view as he goes in and out of the characters’ minds. This makes the characters come alive in the readers’ minds, as they are able to experience a story from the perspective of a character and the narrator. This allows the students to have their own perspective on the situations in the stories. The students are able to distinguish their points of view based on the evidence in the text about the point of view presented by the character or the narrator. In fact, Milne took inspiration from people in his life to write these stories. Moreover, when he published these stories, critics like Humphrey Carpenter noted, “Don’t we, indeed, recognize [the characters] in ourselves?”²⁵ This provides a way for the students to put themselves in the shoes of the character and distinguish their points of view from those of the characters.

My students relate to Winnie-the-Pooh in a variety of ways. These stories are about things that matter most to children, such as family, friends, tree houses, birthdays, adventures, expeditions, mysterious animals like Heffalumps.²⁶ Students make connections with the science concepts taught in class, such as bees making honey; bad weather and flood, as a part of natural disaster.

By making these connections with the characters and events in the story, students are able to infer meanings in the text that are not explicitly stated. For instance, when Pooh visits the Owl to help find Eeyore’s tail, the author doesn’t explicitly state that Owl was using the tail in the place of a bell pull; the students can make that inference through reading the signs outside Owl’s house and looking at the illustrations.

“Children’s conception of the world is rooted in the literature they read.”²⁷  Therefore, through an imaginative text like Winnie-the-Pooh, students develop a higher level of thinking that in turn helps them go from factual to metacognitive knowledge and to apply the examples from the book to their daily lives.²⁸