Collective creative etude in developing literary education

Abstract

Вackground. The article is devoted to one of the organizational forms of teaching created for a fundamentally new course of literature at school. The course was developed by G.N. Kudina and Z.N. Novlyanskaya in line with the system of developmental education by D.B. Elkonin and V.V. Davydov and is based on the theoretical position of M.M. Bakhtin on the relationship between the author and the reader of a literary work as a specific correspondence dialogue. From this point of view, each of the participants in this dialogue is supposed to have the experience of «being» in the place of the other: the author is to be a reader, and the reader — to be an author. Therefore, the positional teaching method serves as the methodological basis for the new course, which allows to build the process of children training as their engagement into 2 main positions: the author's and the reader's ones, and to ensure the possibility of moving from one position to another. The need for early engagement of children into the author's position requires developing the new types of training that are not typical for traditional education. One of them is a collective creative etude. Objective. To substantiate, describe, and illustrate with typical examples the process of conducting collective creative etudes with schoolchildren of the 2nd and 3rd grades. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the new type of training for mastering the author's position, for developing children's ability to transform life impressions into verbal art images and for their transition to individual creativity. Results. The article provides an analysis of two collective etudes: the one connected with the perception of reality object, and the other — with the development of cultural forms of the verbal creativity. As a result of such activities children learn to select and transform life impressions in accordance with their plot, to embody them in an adequate cultural form, for example — in the form of a riddle. It is shown that a collective creative etude contributes to the emergence and implementation of individual creative ideas and the development of the author's position in the primary schoolchildren. Conclusions. A collective creative etude is an effective “pre-action” for the subsequent independent activity of a child in the author's position. It promotes the awakening of children's “creative initiative”, their ability to find material for the adequate embodiment of a creative idea in the life phenomena. It also opens the way to the assimilation of the author's position and to successful attempts in individual creativity.

Keywords

• developmental education
• positional learning
• author’s position
• reader’s position
• collective creative etude
• point of view
• riddle