"At the very least, a practice is something people do, not just once, but on a regular basis. But it is more than just a disposition to behave in a certain way; the identity of a practice depends on not only on what people do, but also on the significance of those actions and the surroundings in which they occur." (Stern, 2004, p. 166)
In the previous pages, we have discussed the balance of instruction and the stages of literacy development. It is at this point that we would like to "get to the rough ground" and emphasise the importance of establishing routines and practices based on quality teaching principles that progressively build and extend a learner's capabilities. We are contrasting what may appear as sporadic, isolated activities with activities that are carefully arranged and which contribute to the development of meaningful literacy skills.
We will spend the present discussion on the following: that developing language, literacy and learning skills involves a range of practices through which learners develop skills in decoding, comprehension, composition and critical thinking. With that central term (practices) laid out onto the page, our attention now turns to defining what - indeed - is a practice, or "what makes a practice?"
Sometimes the best way to approach this is to imagine the culminating event that is the fulfilment of a range of building blocks acquired over time that finds closure in the ability to "do something". This may be cake baking, fly fishing, trumpets blowing, or advanced spelling. For instance, the ability to write a great short story, prepare for that spelling bee, or draft a persuasive essay involves the culmination of heaps of practice, revision, learning and exploring. It is also often impacted by the practices and expertise of others, who instil the appreciation and the tips of - let’s say - storytelling into the learner. It is often necessary for the individual to have certain experiences to develop the skills that are synthesised into a practice and rewarded as a practice. The learner is also benefited if he or she lives in an environment that regularly reinforces the practice of - again - storytelling, and which contain many ways to unmask the mysteries of the craft.
When we speak of developing practices, we similarly speak of “scaffolding” practices. Scaffolding refers to supports that teachers and/or parents provide to learners during some act of learning or problem-solving. These supports take the form of activities, axioms, mnemonics, reminders, hints, routines and encouragement, which are essential to ensure successful completion of the task. An important feature of scaffolding - especially in authentic, apprenticeship contexts - is keeping the task/goal whole and visible (Shepard, 2005). For instance,
- when a child is learning to sew or set the table, adults may step in and help with the trickiest most difficult part — threading the needle or taking the breakable glasses down from the top shelf;
- in classrooms, teachers may help students with the research before sending them to the library. When a student is stuck because he or she can’t find information on a given topic, the teacher may suggest a new search term or help the student narrow the topic (Shepard, 2005);
- when a student is learning to write a short story, the teacher might divide the story into its most significant parts (orientation, complication, rising action, conflict, climax and resolution) to gradually build the learner's skills; or
- when learning to write an argumentative paragraph, one might suggest the clever "burger" device to make visible the implicit structure of the form.
Gradually, as competence increases, the teacher and/or parent cedes more control to the learner. To be successful, the learner must also come to understand and take ownership of the goal. In other words, what becomes necessary is the individual's "willingness to engage with such activities in a particular way, thus changing ‘mere’ activities into practices where standards of excellence do matter.” (Smeyers and Burbles, 2010 pg 196) The two elements of this quote are quite significant. We would like to draw our attention to two factors (a) the ”willingness to engage" and (b) "where standards of excellence do matter." In the first instance, it is important to mention the implied term: motivation. The question being, is the learner motivated, aware and strategic enough to engage in the activities to such an extent so as to develop the practice? We will ignore the complexities of motivation for the present moment. In the second factor, engagement in activities will be impacted by the extent to which the individual understands and appreciates what "the standard of excellence" - or a successful practice - would look like. Does the learner have access to models that exemplify goal states on the way to excellence and encouragement to meet these goals?
The above suggests that a learner ideally must comes into a practice as a member of a community or culture, so to speak. This reminds me of the Australian novel Maestro by Peter Goldsworthy. In the novel, the adolescent protagonist is a talented pianist growing up in Adelaide and - subsequently - Darwin. His parents provide the optimal conditions and support that allow the young man to develop into a technically sound and accomplished young musician in Australia. It is only when he encounters a new teacher - a pianist from old Europe - that the young man comes to realise that there is something missing in his repertoire that will limit the possibility for his talent to be fully realised. He is missing culture. The Australian culture lacks the depth of connection to the music, and so the young protagonist becomes an adept pianist but not a profound one. At first, he rebels against this realisation, since all signs in Australia point to his technical and musical prowess. However, it is clear as the novel unfolds that the young man lacks access to the culture and the temperament behind the music to really understand the depth of its practice and the role that the music plays for those who are immersed in its history. He has the capacity to alter his musical practice, but that might require an initial act of submission and immersion.
If we return to a previous example, we would see that being able to write an absolutely great story is not enough evidence to suggest that the individual has acquired the practice. It shows that the individual has completed the activities to write that one great short story but not necessarily adopted the practice of story writing. The writing of a second “fantastic short story" would be strong evidence to suggest that the practice has evolved. The fact that the individual writes a second story without any prompting or with only limited prompting would also be great evidence. If the person could articulate how he or she went about writing both the original short story and a subsequent story, then we would be quite satisfied. If the person could also articulate the purpose and/or motivation of the story writing, then the person would be approaching the ability to express his or her appreciation of the practice's significance. If the person could join a peer group who discussed the merits of short fiction, then we could say that the learner was well on his or her way to membership in a community of practice.
Being initiated into such a practice - therefore - involves the internalising of - what we might call - deliberative talk. For instance, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein models this aspect by presenting the inner monologue of a character who is building something:
Every now and then there is the problem “Should I use this bit?” — The bit is rejected, another is tried. Bits are tentatively put together, then dismantled; he looks for one that fits etc, etc.. So I sometimes make him say “No, that bit is too long, perhaps another’s fit better.” — Or “What am I to do now?” — “Got it!” — Or “That’s not bad” etc. ...
"If he has made some combination in play or by accident and he now uses it as a method of doing this and that, we shall say he thinks. — In considering he would mentally review ways and means. But to do this he must already have some in stock. Thinking gives him the possibility of perfecting his methods. Or rather: He ‘thinks’ when, in a definite kind of way, he perfects a method he has." (Wittgenstein, Zettel #100 & 104). Whilst the character's dialogue is personal and internal, this internal voice - or self talk - is developed in practice with others:
“Our deliberations seem to be entirely personal and self-determined - yet which obviously derive from previous conversations with others, in which their voices and perspectives are represented in one’s own internal deliberations. Often this dynamic is what we call ‘conscience.’” — (Burbles and Smears, 2010, pg 180)
In refining a practice, we become conscious of our actions, their intentions and the consequences. Therefore, a practice “is something people do, not just once, but on a regular basis.” (Stern, 2004, pg 166). For some reason, people pray, brush their teeth, complete their tax, hike in National Parks, long for the next dance, etc. Each “activity” is part of - let’s says - religious practices, hygienic practices, economic practices, artistic practices, social practices and more. Each practice is much more than the sum of its parts. The activities become part of a way of acting, anticipating and performing. For instance, the combination of spelling practice, shared reading, guided comprehension, writing practice, concept exploration, and experiential learning amounts to more than a collection of disparate activities. They amount to a form of life, and they rely upon resources, other participants, teachers, a sense of attachment, cultural artefacts, instruction (or initiation) and more. Time and space must be carved out in the great hurly burly of life so that the practice can grow, flourish and evolve. Richard Allington (2002) captures this well when he describes the six T's of effective literacy instruction:
- Substantial time allocated to real practice in reading and writing;
- Availability of texts that are engaging and suitable for learners;
- Teaching that is of the utmost quality, which is adaptive and which scaffolds the development of key skills and understandings;
- Teachers who facilitate rich "talk" (conversations) that allow learners to solidify and expand on ideas;
- Tasks that are deep, authentic, and purposeful; and
- Assessments (or "testing") that provide real information about a learner’s progress toward complete, comprehensive literacy (Allington, 2002)
Therefore, “one can distinguish activities, games, practices and rituals ... When we consider a ‘practice’ we must think about (1) how they are learned - for instance through imitation, initiation, instruction and so forth; and (2) how they are enacted.” (Smeyers and Burbles, 2010, pg 193 - 194) It is a practice to commit facts to memory and to draw connections between this knowledge that will enhance one's understanding. This act of developing knowledge and understanding involves many stages and processes, which a person (in school) is often asked to do without clear guidance. For some, the practice is obscure and there are few opportunities for one to find guidance. For others, the practice is moulded and shaped and reinforced by a parent, teacher, family friend, and/or peers. Vygotsky (1978) would remind us 'every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people..., and then inside people... All higher [mental] functions originate as actual relations between human individuals' (p.57)
So ... how do we make certain activities part and parcel of the practices of home, school, the community, etc? What are the material and social conditions that make this happen? What roles do adults and peers play in establishing the conditions of a practice? Is it realistic that all budding "apprentices" will have access to "teachers" (including parents) with sufficient expertise and wherewithal? Overall, how does something become a practice and, through practice, how does the learner's engagement with the world change?
To begin with, we must acknowledge that any practice occurs in environments through engagement with others (peers, adults, etc). And particular environments provide better venues for certain practices to prosper than others. In this case, we may illustrate how the multiple conceptions of literacy practices - for instance - take shape within the dynamics of a given household or classroom (Heath, 1983). In some homes, it is not surprising for one to imagine how bedtime reading, alphabetic flashcard practice, scaffolded writing instruction and language-in-context practice can occur with only limited orchestration. The adult has a bedtime routine of rich reading of favourite books (building vocabulary), time set aside to play with enticing alphabetic games (enhancing word recognition), time to write a birthday card to grandma (modelling of genre conventions), and an emphasis on language in the act of - for instance - baking a cake (learning vocabulary connected to a valued activity).
In the above example, each activity emphasises different aspects of language and literacy development, and each activity - occurring more or less frequently - is integrated through the joint intentional activity of the adult & child. If more direct, formal instruction is necessary, it is woven into the fabric of the overall practice. Therefore, “every instance of the use [or participation in a practice] … is the culmination of a process of socialisation.” (Phillips, 1979, pg 126). Through this journey, the learner “develop[s] an impressive variety of skills.” (Smeyers and Burbles, 2010, pg 191). As stated in the essay "A Framework for Considering Literacy Instruction" the inculcation of such skills involves the careful arrangement of:
- (a) systematic instruction in core skills,
- (b) meaningful routines and practice in reading and writing, and
- (c) scaffolded practice of literacy in authentic and/or disciplinary contexts.
The images to the left/above extend this thinking. We see how literacy practices involve a range of elements, including intentional (instructional) conversations; vocabulary development; word/language study (including phonemic awareness); reading for fluency and comprehension; writing and composing; developing knowledge; and the fostering of interests, habits, routines and expertise. We see the need for a parallel emphasise on core skills, meaningful routines and authentic practices. We acknowledge that time must be plentiful, resources made available, teaching made accessible and partnerships formed (between home, school and community) if literacy practices are to emerge, deepen and mature.
The most skilled teachers, families, communities, etc. are those who orchestrate a variety of experiences for learners in different environments which are able to bring about meaningful routines, habits, ceremonies, perspectives and more. They are sensitive to the needs of the learners and they carve out time and space so that learning, development and communication are happening. When you look down at the daily, weekly, monthly and term calendars of exemplary teachers, you see that careful arrangement of opportunities that provides time for explicit and scaffolded instruction as well as spaces for creativity, exploration, application and inspiration (Chall, Jacobs & Baldwin, 1990; Snow, et al, 1991). When you look at the arrangement of classroom spaces, home environments and community resources, you are likely to see literacy- and learning-rich environments that facilitate the practices that take place within them. In the classroom, you see literacy rotations, regular and diverse readings, incursion from the community, formative assessments, and research into relevant, purposeful tasks. It appears that teachers and students know where they are going and what needs to be done.
"According to research, amount of teaching is the single most important determinant of amount of literacy learning [and practice] (Carroll, 1963; Siedel & Shavelson, 2007; Walberg, 1986). Research has not been very precise about what counts as teaching, but it certainly would include teacher presentations, modelling, and explanations. It would also usually include many student activities such as guided practice or independent practice. Some researchers make the valuable distinction between allotted time and engaged time." (Shanahan, 2008 pg 3-4)
The following are some core principles to be mindful of when thinking about factors that impact our engagement in practices.
- To become a participant in the practice - whether artistic, athletic, religious, etc - involves an engagement in a whole raft of behaviours, rules, perspectives, and more.
- Practices are "part and parcel of our early socialization in life, [through which] we each learn ways of being in the world, of acting and interacting, thinking and valuing, and using language, objects, and tools that crucially shape our early sense of self.” (Gee, 2008, pg 100)
- Practices rely upon resources, other participants, a sense of attachment, cultural artefacts and avenues to be rewarded for the practice.
- It is much easier for a practice to be adopted when it builds upon (or extends) “the informal practices [people already] find themselves involved in.” (Smeyers and Burbles, 2010, pg 196 - 197).
- And furthermore, a practice is only possible "if one trusts something,” which includes trusting others as well as the situations in which we find ourselves in. (Klagge, 2011, pg 66)
- Consequently, “it is [much] easier to be a ‘tacit teacher’ within an ongoing community of practice, where one is not the only influence drawing learners into reflective participation; conversely, it is harder to be a ‘tacit teacher’ when a cacophony of other influences distract and compete with one’s own influence.” (Burbles, 2010, pg 212)
- Practices can be defined by “how they are learned - for instance through imitation, initiation, instruction and so forth..” (Smeyers and Burbles, 2010, pg 193 - 194). The novice proceeds to quite literally practice “a certain kind of know-how [that] is gained through repetition: watching and doing the same thing over and over again, under the watchful eye of a skilled practitioner." (Burbles, 2010, pg 208) This is also described as a process whereby, “newcomers pick up both overt and tacit knowledge through a process of guided and scaffolded participation in the community of practice, a process that has been compared to apprenticeship.” (Gee, 2008, pg 91 - 92).
- This is teaching by any other name, otherwise described as “the structuring provided by a community or practice, [which is] physically necessary because the very possibility of any learning at all is the presence of exemplars and models.” (Smeyers and Burbles, 2010, pg 186).
- We want to focus on, "people’s willingness to engage with such activities in a particular way, thus changing ‘mere’ activities into practices where standards of excellence do matter.” (Smeyers and Burbles, 2010 pg 196).
- "The child's understanding is not achieved in an instance or a flash, but requires multifarious repetition in multifarious contexts." (Moyal-Sharrock, 2010, pg 6).
- “What seems to be needed is the development of a theory of social learning which would indicate what in the environment is available for learning, the conditions of learning, the constraints on subsequent learning, and the major reinforcing process.” (Bernstein, 1964, pg. 55)
We - then - return to questions raised above ... how do we make certain activities part and parcel of the practices of home, school, the community, etc? What are the material and social conditions to make this happen? How does something become a practice and, through practice, how do we see improvement?
We must emphasise the importance of motivation, understanding, effective teaching, and access to the space and time for engaged concentration. As the diagram to the left illustrates, we must also consider factors internal to the individual (e.g. cognitive and language processing), factors in the environment (ecological factors), and factors impacting motivation and engagement (psychological factors) (Chiu, McBride-Change & Lin, 2012). In the view of Timothy Shanahan (2008), the five most important aspect of literacy learning are (1) amount of teaching/time, (2) access to appropriate content, (3) quality of instruction, (4) motivation of the learner, and (5) whether the instruction/resources align with the needs of the learner. And from a sociological perspective it is important to remember how a child’s acquisition of knowledge (and literacy) is influenced by five characteristics of the sociocultural context: (a) the identity of the participants, (b) how the activity is defined or executed, (c) the timing of the activity, (d) where it occurs, and (e) why children should participate in the activity. (Tharp and Gallimore, 1988)
As mentioned elsewhere, it goes without saying that the experienced language/literacy user takes many items for granted. It is helpful to forget that it was once quite a challenge to read and hear that code; to shape letters with delicacy; to retrieve a word from memory and understand its spelling; to form a sentence; to make sense of sentences whether they appear in poetry or in a textbook; to write in a manner fitting the occasion and the audience; and to allow oneself the time to read-interpret-and-learn.
This section asks readers to reflect on the principles that influence the ways in which we manage environments, activities, resources, people and expectations. In the future, I hope to provide some concrete examples in different contexts which would help us better reflect upon the impact of our activities on the daily, weekly, monthly, quaterly, and yearly levels. We should seek out examples that magnify the importance of forming partnerships amongst parents, teachers and communities so that language, literacy and learning practices can permeate these spheres, as we explore the conditions that give rise to learning practices and we consider how to be more inclusive in our teaching. The discussion borrows sparingly from an extended essay (Why We Do What We Do?) which we encourage you to visit when/if you have the time. We also encourage you to visit the Practices Glossary, which also presents a number of key concepts on the topic. Please explore and enjoy!
“I do not remember that first moment of knowing I could read, but some of my memories - of a tiny, two-room school with eight grades and two teachers - evokes many pieces of what the language expect Anthony Bashir calls the ‘natural history’ of the reading life. The natural history of reading begins with simple exercises, practices, and accuracy, and ends, if one is lucky, with the tools and the capacity to ‘leap into transcendence.’
“My other vivid memory of those days centres on Sister Salesia, trying her utmost to teach the children who couldn’t seem to learn to read. I watched her listening patiently to these children’s torturous attempts during the school day, and then all over again after school, one child at a time ... My best friend, Jim, ... looked like a pale version of himself, haltingly coming up with the letter sounds Sister Salesia asked for. It turned my world topsy-turvy to see this indomitable boy so unsure of himself. For at least a year they worked quietly and determinedly after school ended.” (Wolf, 2008, p 109 - 112)
Allington, R. L. (2002). What I’ve Learned about Effective Reading Instruction from a Decade of Studying Exemplary Elementary Classroom Teachers. The Phi Delta Kappan, 83(10), 740–747.
Bernstein, B. (1964). Elaborated and Restricted Codes: Their Social Origins and Some Consequences. American Anthropologist, 66(6_PART2), 55–69. doi:10.1525/aa.1964.66.suppl_3.02a00030
Burbles, N. (2010). Tacit Teaching. In M. Peters, N. Burbles, & P. Smeyers (Eds.), Showing and doing: Wittgenstein as a pedagogical philosopher (pp. 199 – 214). London: Paradigm Publishers.
Burbles, N., & Smears, P. (2010). The practice of ethics and moral education. In M. Peters, N. Burbles, & P. Smears (Eds.), Showing and doing: Wittgenstein as a pedagogical philosopher (pp. 169 – 182). London: Paradigm Publishers.
Carroll, J.B. (1963). A model of school learning. Teachers College Record, 64, 723–733.
Chall, J. S., Jacobs, V. A., & Baldwin, L. E. (1990). The Reading Crisis: Why Poor Children Fall Behind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chiu, M. M., McBride-Chang, C., & Lin, D. (2012). Ecological, psychological, and cognitive components of reading difficulties: testing the component model of reading in fourth graders across 38 countries. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 45(5), 391–405. dos:10.1177/0022219411431241
Gee, J. P. (2008). A sociocultural perspective on opportunity to learn. In P. Moss, D. Pullin, J. P. Gee, E. Haertel, & L. Young (Eds.), Assessment, equity, and opportunity to learn (pp. 76 – 108). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Klagge, J. (2011). Wittgenstein in exile. Cambridge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Moyal-Sharrock, D. (2010). Coming to Language: Wittgenstein’s Social “Theory” of Language Acquisition. In SOL Conference 6-8 May 2010. Bucharest.
Seidel, T. & Shavelson, R. J.(2007). Teaching effectiveness research in the past decade: The role of theory and research design in disentangling meta-analysis results. Review of Educational Research, 77, 454-499.
Shanahan, T. (2008). Literacy across the lifespan: what works? Community Literacy Journal, 3(1), 3–20.
Shepard, L. A. (2005). Linking Formative Assessment to Scaffolding. Educational leadership, 63(3), 66-70.
Smeyers, P., & Burbles, N. (2010). Education as initiation into practices. In M. Peters, N. Burbles, & P. Smeyers (Eds.), Showing and doing: Wittgenstein as a pedagogical philosopher (pp. 183 – 198). London: Paradigm Publishers.
Snow, C. E., Barnes, W. S., Chandler, J., Goodman, I. F., & Hemphill, L. (1991). Unfulfilled expectations: home and school influences on literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Stern, D. (2004). Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: an introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tharp, R. G., & Gallimore, R. (1988). Rousing minds to life: Teaching, learning, and schooling in social context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. (M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, & E. Souberman, Eds.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Walberg, H. J. (1986). Syntheses of research on teaching. In M. C. Wittrock (Ed.), Handbook of research and teaching (pp. 214–229). New York: Macmillan.
Wittgenstein, L. (1967). Vettel. (G. E. M. Anscombe & G. H. von Wright, Eds.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Wolf, M. (2008). Proust and the squid: the story and science of the reading brain. Cambridge: Icon Books.


Oral literature, the standard forms (or genres) of literature found in societies without writing. The term oral literature is also used to describe the tradition in written civilizations in which certain genres are transmitted by word of mouth or are confined to the so-called folk (i.e., those who are “unlettered,” or do not use writing).
Oral literature is, arguably, the best phrase available for describing these two senses. The term oral covers both, but these two meanings should be distinguished. While certain forms, such as the folktale, continue to exist, especially among the unlettered component of complex societies, what might also be called oral tradition (or folk literature) is inevitably influenced by the elite written culture. The term literature also poses problems because it is ultimately derived from the Latin littera, “letter,” essentially a written, indeed alphabetic, concept. Among scholars, the phrases standardized oral forms and oral genres have been suggested in place of oral literature, but, since the word literature is so widely used, it has to be reckoned with, even though it is essential to recall the major differences between the two registers, oral and written, as well as the way in which the latter influences the spoken word.
The storyteller speaks, time collapses, and the members of the audience are in the presence of history. It is a time of masks. Reality, the present, is here, but with explosive emotional images giving it a context. This is…
The relation of speech to writing
Because writing is an additional register to speech, writing’s advent has an important influence on speech. Writing’s effects have been dramatic on society generally, but, for much of the vast span of recorded history, writing and reading were confined to a small, elite minority of a population, while a large proportion of people continued to depend on oral communication alone. In many cases these two traditions existed side by side. Such a combination creates problems for the analysis of the various genres or oral literature, for there is a tendency today to read back the characteristics of literate literature (such as the use of a narrative structure) into purely oral genres. Written literature is never simply a matter of writing down what already exists; a myth or story is always changed in being “transcribed” and takes its place among a set of new genres as well as among modifications of old ones.
The term folklore generally refers to certain of the spoken (or nonwritten) activities of complex literate cultures where only a minority can read and write and where the rest are illiterate, a frequent situation of the peasantry in the post-Bronze Age cultures of Europe and Asia especially. While these activities have some links with parallel ones in purely oral cultures, they are inevitably influenced by the always-dominant literary modes, especially those related to the major (written) religions. (Folklore is largely confined to the exposition of peripheral beliefs.) But even the forms taken by genres such as the epic can influence folklore.
It is clear that, in societies with writing, a great deal of communication—including communication that takes literary forms—is still done by word of mouth. Not only is this an aspect of all human intercourse, but it was inevitably the case until near-universal literacy was achieved in Europe during the last quarter of the 19th century. Until that time, literature had to be oral for the large part of the population. That did not mean oral literature was uninfluenced by the written word. Indeed, some of the oral communication consisted in the repetition of written texts, as when lessons from the Bible were preached to an unlettered populace. A written epic, as was the case with the Hindu Vedas or the works of Homer, might be learned by heart and recited to the population at large, by priests in the former case and by the rhapsodes in the latter. Of course a society with writing might inherit some genres, such as folktales, largely unchanged from an earlier, purely oral culture whereas other genres, such as the epic, would undergo a sea change.
Part of the influence of the written word on speech consisted in the development not of oratory but of its formal counterpart, rhetoric, with its explicit body of rules. Specialists in the spoken word might achieve fame and be rewarded for their appearance in presenting a case at court. More directly in the field of the arts, specialist reciters, especially of praise songs but also of epics and other lengthy recitations, might be recompensed for their contributions, either as freelance performers or as professionals.
Many early written forms, such as the Breton lays, draw their subject matter from spoken genres, though inevitably transformations take place in the face of the new media. There has also been a good deal of exchange between coexistent folk and written (elite) literature. Homer’s poems incorporated “popular” tales, for example, as did the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, although these transfers are as much between genres as between the registers of speech and writing, akin to when popular melodies, such as the bourrée of rural France, were taken up by those composing elite music in the urban courts of 17th-century Europe.
The example of the epic
The Homeric poems are often viewed as oral epics that have been transposed into writing. Commentators have dwelt on the presence of certain features, such as the formulaic expressions (epithets and repeated verses) that they see as typical of oral forms. Yet, while the regular repetition of phrases is found in such forms, some have argued that the precise format of Homer’s formula—as defined by the American scholar Milman Parry, who in the 1930s recorded epics in Yugoslavia performed by guslari—is very likely an early literate device.
The epic itself is a case in point. It is often assumed to be a typical product of oral cultures, being sung by bards at courts or in camps. However, records of epics in purely oral cultures are sparse. Epics tend to be found in early states with important warrior classes that enjoy hearing of the brave exploits of their predecessors. These societies already have writing, but the texts are often committed to memory and reproduced by the speaker rather than read aloud from a written version of the text. These oral texts are recited in gatherings of chiefs and warriors by specialist bards and, in fact, are the works that have been written down at some point. Indeed, only because they have been written down are they known at all. And it is a regular characteristic of early written works, such as Homer’s or the Vedas, that, although written versions exist, these are learned by heart, internalized, and reproduced through the spoken word alone, just as is often the case with religious texts such as the Qurʾān and the Bible. At the very moment in history when writing allows one to dispose of verbal memory as a means of recalling such works, the role of verbal memory is in fact enhanced—hence part of the difficulty in deciding whether these works are both orally composed and orally reproduced. They are typical of societies where only the few can read and where mnemonic skills and devices that encourage the perfect oral reproduction of written texts are therefore encouraged.
The way that purely oral forms have been changed under the influence of written cultures is illustrated by the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, a final version of which was published in 1849 by Elias Lönnrot. A systematic collector of folk poetry, Lönnrot concluded that what had been recorded as distinct poems could be conflated into a continuous folk epic. He joined a number of shorter compositions together with material of his own and imposed on the whole a unifying plot. Its publication had an enormous influence on Finnish culture. It has been suggested that the Gilgamesh epic may have been constructed in a similar way; other cases have been reported from Africa. In North America stories that centre on particular characters such as Coyote or Raven (see Raven cycle) are sometimes grouped together by scholars into cycles, but it seems doubtful whether these cycles represent a meaningful category for the Native Americans who created these tales.
Differences between oral and written literatures
Oral and written literatures differ in their authorship and audience. In oral cultures the memory of authorship, though never entirely absent, is of little general importance—occasionally with songs but not with myths, folktales, and, rarely, epics. That is not to say that these genres do not become the subjects of intellectual property rights. Songs may be associated with particular clans, recitations with specific groups or gatherings. But usually no individual author is traced. That absence, however, does not imply that there is a process of collective composition. Each reciter will introduce variations of his own, some of which will be taken up by succeeding speakers for whom the previous version will have been the (or a) model. In this way changes are constantly being introduced by individuals but anonymously, in a syntagmatic (contextual) chain, without looking back to any fixed original. Only with writing and with oral recitations in literate societies, as in the case of Homer or the Vedas, is the oral transmission of an original possible, partly because writing introduces a new dimension to verbal memory and partly because reference can then always be made back to the “correct” version. As a result, it seems to be in these early literate societies that the development of mnemonic skills and aide-mémoire is first found.
Beyond the epic, the main oral genres include the folktale; song, including laments, praise songs, and work songs; folk drama; myth; and, closely related, legend and historical recitation. There are also the minor genres of the proverb and the riddle.
While these genres are not necessarily always given separate designations in local languages, in scholarly practice they are distinguished because of their different forms, content, and functions, which relate partly to their audience. At the very broadest level, folktales are rarely seen as anything but fictional, whereas the other genres, apart from song, have quite a different relation to “truth.” In purely oral societies, recitations and songs encompass the whole of life’s experience, including cosmology and theology. In early societies with writing, the religious domain tends to be incorporated by way of texts associated with a religion’s canon (its most important scriptural works), leaving the oral literature to deal with the peripheral—with magic, charms, and fairy tales.
With oral literature, as with any other literature, it is important to always consider not only the speaker but the audience and the situational context. Intention, form, and content make all the difference between recitations in a religious or ritual ceremony and the kind of story told at a veillée (a small private gathering for storytelling) in Europe. These differences mean that to incorporate all these genres in one holistic analysis of culture, symbolism, or myth runs the risk of mixing levels of communication that should be the subject of distinct interpretations.
Folktales are virtually universal. These are short, occasionally in verse, sometimes with an ending that echoes the explanations embedded in Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories (e.g., “How the Camel Got His Hump”), and possibly with an irrelevant coda. The personages consist of humans, animals, gods, and, more rarely, inventions such as giants and monsters, who interact with one another by speech and by other means. In this wide array of tales there is a place for the salacious, and some stories are apparently directed to adults (or at least to adolescents), but the bulk of folktales undoubtedly anticipate an audience of children. Grim as some of their contents can be, they are “nursery tales,” to use an English term equivalent to Charles Perrault’s “fairy stories” (contes des fées).
Because the vast number of folktales are intended for children, it is quite mistaken for anthropologists to use them as evidence of the typical thoughts of primitive societies or for historians to do the same for, say, the rural population of 17th-century Europe. But just such an approach is sometimes taken by those who see culture holistically, with each item having the same representative status and value in characterizing mentalities, beliefs, and practices and with each item taken to exist within an undifferentiated cultural ensemble of artistic forms. In fact, the relationship of these stories to other aspects of culture is very particular.
While their relationships to culture are very particular, the stories told within folktales also persist over long periods of time and have no very close relationship to a particular culture at a particular time; examples from English-speaking societies include children’s rhymes and songs such as “Ring a Ring of Roses” and “Three Blind Mice” and the story “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Like the rhyme “Frères Jacques” or the story of Cinderella, they cross sociopolitical and linguistic boundaries rather freely and are adapted by individual storytellers. Such movement across boundaries is encouraged by the relatively small size of individual oral cultures, and these stories may be transposed into other dialects and other languages; the ease with which that can happen emphasizes the transcultural character of their themes and expressions. It is this comparative insulation of children’s stories that, arguably, accounts for their relative homogeneity around the world, as does their frequent use of nonhuman animals and panhuman themes.
Fables are a subcategory of the folktale, employing animals as well as humans as the main characters. In the form they are known today, either from ancient Greece and Rome (e.g., Aesop’s fables) or from India, they are in fact products of written cultures but are close in many respects to folktales more generally.
Song plays a very general role in oral culture. A song’s words often resemble lyric poetry, having to be of a tight metrical structure because of the musical accompaniment. Equally, when epic and other recitations are accompanied by a musical instrument or a strong beat, the rhythmic verbal structure is always influenced. An important variety of song is the lament at the death of an individual, which may take the form of stressed speech or follow a more melodic line.
Songs may be included in rituals and in folktales and other genres, but they are often performed solely for entertainment. The melodies themselves may be elaborated and expanded upon by way of musical instruments, leading to innumerable variations invented for the occasion, as with jazz. An important subcategory is the work song, the performance of which is likely to be gendered, as is the work itself.
The ballad is a form of narrative song that arose in Europe during the Middle Ages and hence is arguably part of a mixed oral-literary tradition. The genre displays strong metrical forms associated with a melodic accompaniment; it is often concerned with conflict (especially in the Scottish-English border ballads of the 15th and 16th centuries), celebrating heroes and outlaws, and has held its popularity in the modern period, as exemplified in popular songs such as “Frankie and Johnny.” Narrative songs of this kind are much less common in oral cultures, though varieties of the form mark early literate societies.
Songs are distinguished from chant by being shorter and more melodic. Chant is a rhythmic manner of presenting speech that verges on recitation; while it may be accompanied, chant is carried out with a regular beat that does not interfere greatly with the words, which are deemed more important than the music. Chant may be used for shorter recitals and in such contexts as the Maori haka, and it is sometimes employed for epic poetry or for the long recitations typically categorized as myth.
Theatre in the modern sense is an outcome of the written tradition in Greece, Europe, India, Japan, and elsewhere. It is sometimes difficult to draw a distinction between drama and ritual; indeed, the origins of drama in Europe lie in religious and ritual performances. The occurrence of secular drama in oral cultures is not well attested and, where it does occur, is peripheral. Nevertheless, (folk) plays of a more or less secular kind do occur in the popular culture of literate societies, such as the mumming plays of the European tradition, which stand in opposition to the written plays of the elite theatre.
Myth is a particular form of oral literature, the subject of which is cosmological. It was earlier thought that many such stories were explanatory. A few undoubtedly are, including those of “that is why the camel has a hump” variety, but most are not, even though intellectual curiosity (sometimes expressed through the notion of the quest, for example) is often incorporated. For some commentators, myth was central to folktales: the meaning of folktales was seen to derive from their assumed status as broken-down myths that accounted for solar, meteorological, or other natural phenomena. Other commentators (such as representatives of the myth and ritual school at the beginning of the 20th century) have seen the explanation of myth as a function of ritual and of ritual as a function of myth. Such an explanation, however, does little to explain the content of myth or ritual. Others, such as Bronisław Malinowski and the functionalist school, have understood myth as a legitimizing “charter” of social institutions. Later in the 20th century there was a move to interpretations of myth that were dependent on a search for hidden meanings, some relying on psychoanalysis, others on different approaches to symbolic decoding, and yet others on structuralist analyses, especially in the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, which sought in myths an underlying structure of abstract similarities (often binary in character) between a range of social institutions.
Myth is often considered to be the highest achievement of oral literature. It has certainly proved to be the most interesting to outsiders and at the same time the most difficult to comprehend, because, even though it deals in cosmological matters, myth is in some ways the most localized of genres and the most embedded in cultural action (such as when it is recited in a very specific ceremonial context). The oral literature of the Australian Aborigines, for example, has an essential ceremonial function. The song cycles and narratives relate to the Dreaming, a mythological past in which the existing environment was shaped and humanized by ancestral beings. These performances may be open to the world at large (and hence akin to entertainment) or closed to all but initiates.
It is important to distinguish between contributions to mythologies (i.e., accounts of worldviews constructed by observers) and myths in a narrower sense, which are actual recitations around a cosmological theme (for example, creation myths). The latter are relatively rare and unevenly distributed around the world, being recited in particular restricted circumstances. As such, the knowledge they contain is available not to all but only to certain individuals. Women in some groups, for example, may be excluded from certain ritual occasions. Yet these women, precluded from some knowledge, may also have parallel ceremonies from which men are excluded and during which women hand down different bodies of knowledge.
Myths were earlier thought to have been transmitted verbatim from one generation to the next, partly because that is how those who conveyed the myths often understood the situation. As such, the myths were interpreted as “keys to culture,” throwing a privileged light on society as a whole. But the advent of the portable audio recorder and of air travel enabled investigators to return at intervals to record such recitations in the actual context of performance rather than with pencil and paper in a decontextualized situation. These new techniques showed that myths vary considerably over time, the exigencies of oral reproduction making such generative transmission a virtual necessity. In other words: people invent and fill in where they do not have perfect recall. The result is a plurality of versions spread over time (and space), but, arguably, no fixed text such as often found with written literature.
Legends and historical recitations
Legends and historical recitations—or “histories”—occur everywhere: chiefless societies might produce stories of clan migration, for instance, while chiefly societies might generate stories of the coming of rulers and of the establishment of kingdoms. Examples proliferate with writing and become more differentiated, but they exist in purely oral cultures as an important formal activity, to be told on ritual occasions. These genres may also be associated with totemism, telling how a particular animal helped a past ancestor in troubled times and so is taboo to his or her descendants. The term legend (derived from the Latin legenda, “to be read”) was especially applied to the stories of saints in Roman Catholic Europe, but similar kinds of narrative, believed to be true, are also characteristic of oral cultures and often later form the basis for the construction of written histories, as was the case in early Greece.
Some formalized historical recitations in purely oral cultures retain earlier forms and content that have passed out of current usage. The speech of former generations can legitimize the material within a recitation, making that material more valuable and more sacred at the time of the recitation, but it can also make the material less comprehensible, more mysterious, and more prone to conflicting and ambiguous interpretations. More broadly, histories are often more concerned with legitimation, especially in providing a suggested link with the distant past, rather than with the story itself.
Performance, content, and distribution
In oral cultures the genres described above are not simply categories in a library catalog but are part of an ensemble of actions that constitute the setting, often the ritual, and sometimes the music and dance of the performers; these actions also guide the voice and gestures and the intentions of the performers, as well as the audience and its expectations. Each genre has its characteristic context of performance, its own place, its own time, its own performers, and its own aims. Myths, in the concrete sense, are unlikely to be recited by “ordinary” people but instead by specialists in special ritual contexts. Folktales may be told by adults who have built up a reputation for doing so, but they are more likely to make the rounds within families or among groups of children.
Given the variety of genres of oral literature, it is difficult to generalize about their content as a whole, but it is (perhaps misleadingly) easy to generalize within each genre. Mythology deals with gods, deities, and supernatural agencies in their relationship—whether distant or close—with humankind. Epics often deal with human as well as half-divine heroes and monsters. Folktales show a nearly universal concern with animals, and they introduce as actors humans, gods, and sometimes monsters. The widespread inclusion of animals, in turn, may indicate a recognition of a continuity between living things; animals often reenact the lives of humans, not only by speaking but in their roles and actions. A continuity between living things is also expressed in tales of humans born of animals, being cared for by them (as in the case of Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome), or being looked after by them in a more mystical sense (as with the North American Indian notion of the guardian spirit or in versions of totemism where humankind is aided by or even descended from an animal). Yet animals recur across many of the genres that can be classed as oral literature, where they take on multiple meanings and stand for many concepts. It is, again, difficult to generalize in good faith about the content of oral literature.
While similar genres are found widely distributed in oral cultures and in oral traditions, they do not occur equally in all contexts. Long recitations defined above as myths are very unequally distributed even in neighbouring societies that otherwise display rather similar practices and beliefs, for they occur only under very restricted conditions. Epics and histories tend to be associated with warrior and chiefly societies, respectively. Some researchers have argued that there appears to be little use of proverbs and riddles in America, a situation they contrast with Africa, where collections of proverbs (such as those made in Asante by the Swiss missionary J.G. Christaller) were considered very common. (Other researchers disagree and question the historical and geographical generalizations embodied in such characterizations of “America” and “Africa.”)
The content of myths and legends is considered by many in oral societies to be true; by contrast, the content of folktales and fables is believed to be fictional. While the first are often tied to particular societies (and later to written religions), the latter travel relatively freely between groups, including linguistic groups. That ability to travel reaffirms the fact that both have a different “truth” status, with folktales rarely tied to specific cosmologies but instead showing a more universal appeal, especially to children. Märchen (folktales with an element of the magical or supernatural) and ghost stories have a wider appeal and are widespread features of both oral literature and written literature told orally; monsters are found in many societies, and even specific types, such as dragons, turn up over large areas. Fairies and trolls are found yet more frequently as characters in folktales and cosmologies, operating as intermediaries between humankind and the higher deities and either helping or hindering their activities. Attempts to explain “rationally” and “historically” (which are nothing but speculation) the contents of oral literature have led the enquiry down false paths. As with oral literature in general, it is essential, wherever possible, to consider the context of performance and of transmission.


Grades4 to 12
tag(s): vocabulary (314)
In the ClassroomWhat a perfect addition to music or art class! Share this site on your interactive whiteboard or projector. Have students work in cooperative learning groups, divide up the vocabulary words, and have each group find the definitions for their assigned vocabulary words. Have the groups share their words and definitions in an online book, using a tool such as Bookemon (reviewed here). Encourage them to add terms of their own, as well. Have the groups share the online books on your interactive whiteboard or projector. If you don't have the time to complete online books, have students share the definitions using a class wiki. Be sure to also check out the interactive word puzzles!
Grades2 to 12
This site includes advertising.
tag(s): organizational skills (122)
In the ClassroomOnce an account is created, add the bookmarklet to your browser bar for quick access. Check with your IT department to have the ability to download bookmarklets on your computer. Knowledge of embed codes are required to manage Livebinders in other sites. To get a better idea of Livebinder basics, watch the 90 second video tour before you "play."
Click on "start a blank binder," enter a description, tags, category, and mark it private or public. Click yes to "use Google search to fill a binder" to find plenty of information fast. Your new binder will instantly be filled with a new tab for each site matching your search term. After entering "climate change," a new Livebinder was created with tabs that matched research I had previously spent a lot of time to find. Now it can be instantly shared. Click on "edit menu" in the upper right of your binder to change description, title, etc. as well as fonts, tabs, and other details. To share, click on share this binder along the bottom right to share by email, Facebook, Twitter, or embedding via link or embed code. Embed your Livebinder in a blog, wiki, or other site or provide the link for access by others.
Safety/Security: Users must be 13 years of age to create an account. Teachers can create an account and share Livebinders for student use at any age. Create a class account with a global login and password. Students use the same login to access the Livebinder and create tabs on various topics. As each collaborator would not be known, ask students to add initials to tabs they create so you know the source. Check your school policies on whether student work may be displayed online and what information is permitted, then enforce that policy with your students.
Create a Livebinder to assemble information and requirements for a student project. Make the Livebinder the actual ASSIGNMENT sheet. Use a new tab in the binder for each type of resource or topic of information. In English classes, use to offer spelling, writing, or grammar hints for students. Create a binder for specific sports teams that showcase team accolades, resources for increasing skills, or to create snack lists and travel information. Create a Livebinder for groups of students to plan or report on vacation plans, learn about cultures or countries, or maintain information for student projects. Students can use Livebinders to assemble information for group projects that can be discussed with the teacher to track progress. Consider creating a binder for assignments for students that focus on the use of information versus just the searching for the information. Any content or subject area can be easily managed by creating a Livebinder for student learning. Create an art or music gallery easily with a Livebinder. Use each tab of a Livebinder for each cell part necessary for the functioning of a cell. Create tabs in a binder for each battle or campaign in a specific war. Create a tab for each candidate in a specific election. Have students or student groups (13 and over) create Livebinder "tours" or annotated collections on a topic such as the pros and cons of organic foods, a cultural tour of a country, or applications of geometry in architecture. Of course their student-written annotations and commentary will be key to make these collections into meaningful products. They might even create tasks and questions for other students to try to learn about the topic.
If you are simply looking for a way to share technology-infused project assignments with students from grade 2 and up, a teacher-made Livebinder is an easy way to do it, and you can share the assignment with parents and learning support teachers by simply providing the URL.
Parent permission advised before posting student work created using this tool
Includes Interaction w general public/ public galleries with unmoderated content
Requires registration/log-in (WITH email)
Products can be embedded
Products can be shared by URL
Multiple users can collaborate on the same project
Includes teacher tools for registering and/or monitoring students
I've used LIveBinder successfully at the 3rd/4th grade level to share web pages with students on specific subjects and topics. My students went back to the binders to read more, even when that unit was finished. I also create and fill binders as I am planning and gathering webpages as I plan my units.Linda, IL, Grades: 3 - 4
Takes some getting used to, instructions not as clear as they could be, but very helpful for sharing lots of resources that share a common theme.Frances, CT, Grades: 6 - 8
GradesK to 7
In the ClassroomThis colorful website will appeal to lower elementary students immediately, but its activities are stimulating for older students as well. Share this site on your interactive whiteboard. Have pairs of students explore the site together and create multimedia presentations to share with the class. You could create a class wiki for students to share their thoughts on the podcasts, video clips, or artwork. Not comfortable with wikis? Have no wiki worries - check out the TeachersFirst's Wiki Walk-Through. Another idea, have students create online books demonstrating their new knowledge using a site such as Bookemon, reviewed here.
Grades5 to 12
In the ClassroomWhile this is a free site, in order to participate in all its functions, each student will need to sign up for a "flork" account which is open to worldwide use and discussion forums. Teachers may want to limit student use to the content that does not require membership or use a whole-class account created by the teacher. This site could be used with an interactive whiteboard or projector to illustrate how author selection works and show relationships between similar authors. Students may search individually for new authors. In higher level literature classes, ask students to explain why certain authors are shown as similar. What similarities do they see? Have students use this question as a prompt for a blog post or full expository writing piece.
GradesK to 8
In the ClassroomStudents can use the activities on this site to help improve those all important problem solving and critical thinking skills. Each activity starts out easy and then builds to more difficult situations. This site can be used as a center in the classroom, in the computer lab as an activity, or at home for extended problem-solving practice. Tie games into geometry, scientific method (hypothesis testing), design and composition, and many other curriculum concepts. Primary teachers can reinforce basic sequencing with maze games. Challenge your students to build informational writing skills buy writing their own desriptions or directions for a favorite game. Share the writing pieces on your class wiki. Not comfortable with wikis? Check out the TeachersFirst's Wiki Walk-Through.
Grades2 to 12
tag(s): vocabulary (314)
In the ClassroomThis site does far more than aid memorization. Reading teachers can also use it to teach comprehension skills, such as using context clues to determine meaning in a paragraph. Paste in the paragraph (perhaps a passage from a non-fiction science or social studies article) and use this tool on your interactive whiteboard for students to "figure out" the missing words. Do the same with world language texts to reverse match using subject verb agreement and to analyze missing content using inflected endings. In science class, use this site to remove clues from a paragraph explaining a concepts or terms, subtracting information and having students fill it back in as they review for test and quizzes. Learning support teachers will love this option! Enter passage students write that include new vocabulary words, letting students challenge each other by subtracting portions. Speech and language teachers can use this tool to provide practice with expressive language.
For work with memorization, use this site with popular song lyrics in class. Listen to the song first and give the students the lyrics to be memorized. Or, go to YouLyrics (if district policy allows) to get the song and see a video of it and then have the students use this site to help them memorize the lyrics. ESL, ELL, and students of other languages will enjoy memorizing songs which helps them improve their vocabulary and accent. Use this site in a group by projecting the screen on a whiteboard or projector and systematically show fewer and fewer words on the screen. Have teams of students compete against each other by writing the text as quickly as possible on two boards in the classroom. Share this link on your class website for students to use both in and out of the class to memorize new information. Share it as a personal study skills tool, as well.
GradesK to 12
This site includes advertising.
In the ClassroomNo registration is needed to use this free, web based application. Users need to be able to find an appropriate You Tube video and know where the start and end times of the portion they wish to cut. If more than one portion is wanted from the video (i.e. remove the whole middle), users will have to create two chopped segments which can be posted separately.
First, select the video you want to use. If the URL is not known, no problem. Search for the video within TubeChop itself. Once the video is selected, click the "Chop" button. Select the part you want by dragging the two black sliders that appear under the video to choose the desired start and end times of your chopped piece. It is helpful to note the time markers when you are previewing the original video and then move the markers to those points. Once your chopped piece has been chosen, simply click "Chop it." The chopped video appears with its own Tubechop link. Copy the embed code to share the video on your blog or website. The embed code is easily entered on a wiki as well.
If YouTube is blocked in your district, Tubechop videos will not show, either, since they are "pulled" from YouTube. Check school access before you plan to use TubeChop! (When tested in a district that blocks You Tube, the actual Tube Chop video did not play.) Be sure to check District policy about use of You Tube videos. Even if YouTube is not filtered, as with all resources used in the classroom, be sure to preview the appropriateness of the video before using in the classroom. TubeChop removes unwanted material whether inappropriate or not needed for that particular lesson.
Choose only portions needed for use in that particular lesson or remove unwanted portions that are inappropriate (or boring!) Create little clips to use as a webquest. Though it is time consuming, it would be easier for younger students to focus on smaller pieces of video to locate information. Chop small pieces of video for use as writing prompts for essays, creative writing, or blog posts. Chop portions of videos showing different viewpoints or arguments to any scientific, political, economic, or historical event. Use in the Arts to showcase music, dance, art, or other creative pursuits. Use chopped portions of video footage captured by the public to compare with news accounts to uncover bias and discuss perspective.
TubeChop is a great tool to select one part of some YouTube video, but if you are interested in selecting multiple parts of the same video, then you will need something else. I've found www.vibby.com to be great for this purpose - and it even allows annotating and commenting each specific part!Toni, , Grades: 0 - 12
GradesK to 12
tag(s): news (258)
In the ClassroomCheck here for well-developed lesson plans for a specific topic you'd like to teach. Or scroll through the offerings for your grade level and subject. Complete directions for each lesson plan will guide you through how you can use it in the classroom. Share the interactive or photos on your projector or interactive whiteboard. Save this site in your favorites to visit often for some new ways to freshen up the content in your class.
GradesK to 5
In the ClassroomUse these videos as starters for discussions in class. These videos could be used as whole class activities on your projector or interactive whiteboard or individually (don't forget the headsets). You may also want to create a story learning center where students can view the videos in small groups or individual computers. Many topics are discussed with these classic videos from Sesame Street, Disney, Muppets, PBS, and more.
Grades9 to 12
In the ClassroomStudents will love this site for reviewing and preparing for exams. Share this link on your class website for students to access both in and out of the classroom. Take advantage of the FREE study guides. Why not have cooperative learning groups investigate specific topics relative to your current unit of study and create multimedia presentation. Create podcasts, using a site such as PodOmatic (reviewed here). Have students create a Have students create an annotated image including text boxes and related links using a tool such as Thinglink, reviewed here. Challenge students to find a photo (legally permitted to be reproduced), and then narrate the photo as if it is a news report about the event or topic. To find Creative Commons images for student projects (with credit, of course), try Compfight, reviewed here. Teachers can also use this site to differentiate between the typical lectures used to teach a US history project. Use the images on this site to create a "picture walk" in your classroom, introducing any one of the topics offered. Select 10-15 of the more powerful and diverse images, hanging them up in different locations around your classroom. Have students rotate around the classroom every 30-45 seconds, jotting down what they observe and infer about each image until the entire class has completed the circuit. After the class is back in their seats, have a class discussion based on what they observed and what this says about the topic.
Grades3 to 12
tag(s): music theory (44)
In the ClassroomTest this site to be sure you can open it at school. Then turn up your speakers and open this site on a projector or -- even better -- interactive whiteboard to begin a music class, discuss key signatures, pitch, or instrumentation, and allow students to mix and remix their choice of sounds in harmonious blend. In science class, use the various sounds and an oscilloscope to teach about sound waves and the physical nature of sound. Challenge your musically gifted students to create a very simple version of this musical "machine" by recording and embedding videos of their own in a class music and technology wiki. Upload the videos to a school-friendly site such as SchoolTube reviewed here or TeacherTube reviewed here to avoid filtering issues. Set up a simpler face-to-face option by allowing student "conductors" to "turn on and off" multiple instruments and objects in your music classroom all playing the same pitch.
GradesK to 12
This site includes advertising.
In the ClassroomYou need to know how to browse and upload a file from your computer or find the URL of an image already on the web (one you can legally use, of course!).
Make sure students are aware of copyright laws. Use this site to encourage proper use of photographs that students have the authorization to use. Model including appropriate photo credits on the posters.
Younger students can use this tool together as a whole-class activity or simply enjoy the posters their teacher creates. Have students create a picture about what has been studied with a caption of what has been learned. For example, create posters about predators and prey or classifications of animals. Students can create a poster of a study skill or learning activity that helps them learn. Create a caption that explains how the student learns the best. Every subject area can use this resource to create interesting presentation posters for display or as springboards to talk about what was learned. For example, in Biology, students could create a poster about a cell part with a clever caption about the importance of the job. In Literature or History, students can create posters about the perspectives of others in the story or at that time of history. Rather than a traditional research project. Have cooperative learning groups use this site to show their knowledge in any subject area. Ask students to apply concepts such as constitutional rights by illustrating them in poster images with captions. Teachers can create bulletin board images, as well. Have a classroom motivation poster competition to start off the school year! Share the winners on your class wiki or in a PowerPoint presentation at back to school night/open house. As special occasions approach, have students bring in or take a digital picture they can make into a poster as a family gift with their own inspirational saying.
GradesK to 8
In the ClassroomUse these minute-length videos to introduce a topic on your interactive whiteboard or projector. These would also make a great introduction to writing prompts or blog posts. Consider using these as examples for one minute projects for students to demonstrate understanding for any topic or content area (and make accompanying quizzes for their peers to try). Have cooperative learning groups view videos of their choice and add their findings to your class "One Minute Wonder Wiki." Not comfortable with wikis? Have no wiki worries - check out the TeachersFirst's Wiki Walk-Through. In lower grades, have students plan and act out their own one minute wonder plays to explain something they have learned or simply share the videos as humorous but accurate portrayals of science topics. American students will need to grow accustomed to the British accents.
Grades2 to 12
In the ClassroomShare specific activities on your interactive whiteboard or projector. Teachers should provide the address URL of the actual game to prevent students from accessing other games (or advertisements that you may wish to avoid). Use these interactives as individual activities or in groups to learn a variety of data. For example, play "Element by Symbol" to review the names of the elements of the periodic table by knowing the names of the symbols. This game entertained this science teacher editor and her chemistry student son for fifteen minutes. Enjoy other science games or in subjects such as Geography, History, or Literature. Use the unknown answers that are shown at the end to create study cards in order to improve scores the next time.
Grades4 to 10
tag(s): air (146)
In the ClassroomUse these lessons as part of a unit in social studies, Family and Consumer Science, or several other subjects. Take your students on a visit to a local food coop or invite one of their members to speak to your class live or via Skype (explained here.). Have students do a project comparing coop grocery sales with the more commercial establishments. Maybe even have student groups create an online Venn Diagram comparing the two using a site such as Interactive Two Circle Venn Diagram (reviewed here). If you have international students from the Dominican Republic or other cocoa producing countries, share this site with them and allow them to compare what the students say on the video to their own experiences. Create your own videotaped interviews with food growers or their families. Share the videos using a tool such as Teachers.TV reviewed here.
Grades6 to 12
In the ClassroomShare the graphics on an interactive whiteboard or projector. Use data visualizations to ask questions about interactions among the parts shown. For example, use any of the food chain visualizations to look at the interactions in the chains and identify roles of organisms. Ask students to use the whiteboard tools to explain how the visual "shows" the underlying information. Be prepared for less visual students to struggle while more visual students thrive using such a tool. Share the interesting map graphics in geography class. Use this at the beginning of a discussion and identify the organisms in the chain to uncover the relationships. Use the graphics for creative writing projects (displaying the graphic on a whiteboard while students react in writing). Ask your gifted students to choose a graphic they particularly enjoy as an inspiration to create one of their own.
GradesK to 8
In the ClassroomThe site is so simple, you can utilize the entire pre-prepared curriculum and lesson plans or just add pieces of it to your current curriculum. Integrate the lessons into your language arts component as cross-curricular activities. The pre-K to 1st grade activities and curriculum are available in Spanish. Choose the Spanish version for ESL/ELL lessons or enrichment activities. The Spanish version would be a great supplement for secondary Spanish teachers. Have your science or health class create a Heart Health wiki or use Click2Map, reviewed here, to map out walking landmarks for your community.
GradesK to 6
In the ClassroomUse the activities, videos, songs, and puzzles to reinforce the lessons during center time. Have students create their own superkids character using their favorite fruit or vegetable. Students can compile their own fact sheets using the information provided on the website. Have students report to the class all of the pertinent information they located about their assigned fruit or vegetable and the overall affects it has on their diet and within their body. Conduct a taste-testing for students to try new fruits and vegetables on the list. Check out Mia Mango's Recipe Maker by allowing students to create and name their own recipes and proceed to make them in class or at home. Be sure to catch some of the activities on video (if district policy allows) and share the video using a site such as SchoolTube reviewed here. Consider having students video their own cooking show or short commercial.
Send a list of the superkids characters home and have families choose 5 new fruits or vegetables from the list to try together. Encourage families to post their comments about the new fruits and vegetables to the class blog.
Grades5 to 12
NOTE: Music on this site is submitted by the general musical public and may include lyrics inappropriate for school. The "Hip Hop" genre includes some inappropriate offerings, so teachers will want to decide the best way to handle use of this site by students. Each genre has its own URL, so it is possible to make only certain areas available. The "classical," "jazz" and other instrumental areas are safer. Depending on the maturity and trustworthiness of students, teachers may want to directly supervise use of this site.
Listeners can find their favorite music by browsing through the many genre categories or trying some of the daily featured artists.Besides music files, there are artist and album profiles, and listeners can star favorites.
tag(s): air (146)


V.S. Naipaul once wrote that Indian indentured labourers to Trinidad came from an 'old and perhaps an ancient India' untouched by 'the great Indian reform movements of the nineteenth century'. The Indian migrants Naipaul referred to were part of a movement of humanity which began soon after the abolition of slavery. In response to a request by white settlers in the sugar growing colonies for labour, the British Government turned to India and began recruiting workers from the populous United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh) and Bihar in the first instance to work in the sugar plantations of British Guiana (Guyana), Dutch Guiana (Surinam), Trinidad, Mauritius, South Africa and, finally, Fiji. This movement of labour spanned some eighty years, from 1840 to 1917, when the 'new system of slavery' was finally abolished. Thus began the saga of indenture, or girmit, as it came to be known by the indentured labourers themselves. The 'agreement' that had to be signed, through a characteristic process of linguistic transformation, became girmit, the contract now representing an entire ethos, a legend, a tyranny, and, finally, a history and an ideology. What V.S. Naipaul referred to was in fact a background which would affect the psychology of these migrant Indians and would become, in years to come, a defining feature of the three million or so Indians of the Indian diaspora. Since these Indians came, on the whole, from a relatively homogeneous part of India, they developed a language (a variant of Bhojpuri and Standard Hindi) which quickly became the language of the indentured labourers regardless of their place of origin. Such was the impact of this language that indentured labourers to these plantations from other linguistic groups (Tamil, Telegu, Malayalam and Bengali for instance) quickly adopted this language. Subsequent free migrants too, notably from Gujerat and the Punjab, acquired this language with a speed that has confounded linguists.
Some 60,000 Indians came to Fiji during indenture which, for Fiji, began in 1879 with the arrival of 467 labourers on the Leonidas. The initial batch of indentured labourers were from North India, mainly Hindus and peasant in origin. By the time the system came to an end the Indian population in Fiji stood at a few thousand above the 60,000 figure with small additions to it being made by the migration of free traders from India. The population also reflected in a microcosm the caste and linguistic divisions of India itself. The unified experience of indenture and the remarkable linguistic homogeneity that followed helped in the creation of a phenomenon to which I gave the term 'Girmit ideology' some fifteen years ago. Though internally ruptured and empirically elusive, this 'Girmit ideology' unites the experience of indentured labourers of the Indian diaspora, from Natal to Fiji, from Mauritius to Trinidad. Like any ideology, however, its strength lay precisely in its capacity to falsify reality and project itself unwittingly, though appealingly, as an imaginary set of beliefs which nevertheless is invoked as a point of reference for purposes of (spurious) legitimation.
The Indian fragment in Fiji constructed imaginary belief systems for its own self-authentication, self-generation and legitimation. But the Indians themselves were essentially a fragment which had been forcefully wrenched from its centre. For the Girmitiyas (the indentured labourers) their life in Fiji was retrospectively seen as a deception played upon them by recruiting agents (arkatis) who convinced them of future possibilities filled with millenarian expectations. This dual process - the logic of a fragment and the process of millenarianism - led to a Fiji Indian cultural complex which is both specific to that racial group as well as connects it to the larger Girmitiya diaspora around the world. As Australian settler society knows only too well, one of the characteristics of any fragment is that it very quickly becomes fossilised. The principle of dynamic growth which is at the very centre of the contradictions of the land left behind is replaced by a synchronic principle which 'stills' history and constructs a world based upon fantasies which have no real foundation in fact. In this respect the Fiji Indian fragment was no different.
The imaginative world of Satendra Nandan grows out of the special predicament of this Indian fragment in Fiji. It is built around an intuitive grasp of the Girmit ideology, which Nandan occasionally blasts open, often parodies, but invariably enters into through a process of self-dialogisation. To read Satendra Nandan's fables about Fiji has been, for me, a kind of a return to a past which I had repressed through something akin to racial amnesia. His fables confront me with uncanny specular images which haunt me and which rekindle a language and a cultural complex I left behind so many years ago. Like a ghost from one's past, Nandan's fictions suddenly energise my powers of imagination as they take me back to a world no longer available to me directly. What are the constituents of Satendra Nandan's fictive world that,years later, remind me of my own rootlessness, lack of permanence and, as if to over-compensate for an absence, my almost perverse idolisation of great (yet decaying) civilisations?
The first thing that strikes me about The Wounded Sea is the enormous weight of an 'anxiety of influence' which stalks these pages. Behind the literature of the Indian diaspora stands the gigantic figure of V.S. Naipaul. It was Naipaul who gave form and language to the Girmit ideology; it was Naipaul who gave the Indian diaspora a distinctive discourse and a consciousness. Two fictive figures borrowed from Naipaul - Biswas and Ganesh Pandit - sum up Nandan's character types: the tragic hero, Biswas, trapped in the contradictions of the fragment and its fictions, finally, fails to recognise himself in the mirror, and the comic hero, Ganesh, seeking release from the girmit ideology through the mastery of a colonial language. By introjecting the Girmit ideology and transforming it into a comic discourse, the comic heroes plunge on regardless; the tragic hero, a shadow of the totality left behind, play out Gautama's curse from which release is possible only through Rama, himself banished. In a way Naipaul is the literary precursor for Nandan, a 'structure of possibility', defining limits and suggesting alternatives. Great writers have the capacity to do this since great writers, as Foucault once said, are founders of discursivity. Naipaul is the founder par excellence of the Girmitiya discourse. What other writers of the Indian diaspora will have to do is embellish that discourse, add to it, challenge it, destabilise it and yet recognise that founding discourses - like those of Marx or Freud - can never be dislodged. In this respect I believe Satendra Nandan adds to the Naipaul discourse through a writing which modifies it. Where Naipaul, the monolingual Girmitiya, transformed a Hindi discourse into English, Nandan brings the discourse of the colonised to the fore, thereby simultaneously appropriating and abrogating the language of the coloniser, and problematising bilingual writing itself.
Naipaul finds a centre, a fictive order by, initially, positioning himself at the very heart of oppositions and tensions in the Girmit ideology itself. It is a device not unknown to Western literature, and certainly not unknown to Indian literature where the authorial voice often expresses itself in a signature line such as kahata kabira suno bhai sadhu ('says Kabir, the poet, listen to me fellow saints'). The centre in Nandan's fiction is also the self; the beginning of all his narratives is the writer himself. This is not to say that what we have here are simply autobiographical pieces. No, that is certainly not the case. In fact Nandan transforms his 'memorial reconstructions' (since the memories are really of 'texts') through a strategy of polyphonic composition. Here the narrator's own sympathies never remain fixed as other voices destabilise the seeming monological imperialism of the narrator. As a consequence a plethora of voices invade Nandan's text as the various utterances of the grandfather, the father, the son, the Fijians, the school master or the priest struggle for momentary ascendancy. In the Mahabharata such multiplicity of voices is marked by the use of the Sanskrit verb uvaca (said or spoke) alongside the speaker to indicate his/her quite independent narrative presence.
Discovering the Naipaul text in Nandan is, however, not necessarily the central nor indeed the primary role of the informed reader. What the reader like myself discovers beyond the influence of the precursor text are the ways in which the Indian fragment reconstituted itself and the texts that framed the life of the fragment. The crucial text that emerges in these fables is the Ramacaritamanasa of Tulasidasa (1532-1623), the Avadhi -Hindi re-writing of the Sanskrit epic the Ramayana. Popularly known as the 'Ramayan', this vernacular version of the Sanskrit classic seems to have acquired the status of the 'Book' among the Hindu Fiji Indians. The concept of the 'Book' or the single 'Holy Text' invested with all moral and spiritual authority is something new though it is clear that peasant North India had in fact given the Tulasidasa Ramayana something of this auratic status. Yet in India, where textual heterogeneity and ritual seem to be the over-riding principles, the power of the single book had to compete with other texts and rituals. In the Fiji Indian fragment, probably in response to the Christian missionary's emphasis on the Bible as the ultimate 'Book', the Ramayana found an extraordinary receptivity and soon became the pre-eminent text. In many ways the principle of fictive order that Naipaul imposes finds an earlier expression in the dharmic order always already present in Tulasidasa's 'book'. The narrative structure of Rama's banishment is already there, as are the discourses on suffering and salvation, the renouncer and the man-of-the-world, and the paths that lead one towards human perfection.
The narrative of Rama's banishment is an underlying structural imperative of Fiji Indian culture and society. Its force lies not in any vulgar homologisation - as if Fiji Indians consciously played out this structure - rather it is a function of the complex transformation of the fossil society itself as it attempts to construct a narrative to explain its own existence in terms of the only available and shared discourse in which a similar act of displacement or banishment had been documented. Satendra Nandan's work expresses the agony of banishment in other forms but the narratives are written against the backdrop of this 'primal' banishment. Thus the complete inclusiveness of the village world, its closed world-order and most importantly its myths and idioms are informed, at every point, by a complex transformational process which, finally, left the Fiji Indian with an ideology which was dated and bereft of any revolutionary impetus. A fossil retreated into its memories of a prior narrative which was itself an uncritical glorification of a mythic past, with its sexism, racism and caste ideology intact.
It is this dominance of a fictional imperative that takes me to the second crucial historical 'moment' after the foundation event itself that informs The Wounded Sea . This 'moment' was the Fijian rebellion of May 14, 1987. Exactly 108 years after the arrival of the Leonidas in Fijian waters, the Fijian coup confounded the Fiji Indians at the very moment when, through political power, one kind of millenarian fulfilment was within their grasp. If the Girmit ideology was a consequence of a repression based upon unfulfilled expectations, if the Fiji Indian could be cured only by a political act which would legitimate his/her existence in a land to which he/she had been banished, then the Fijian rebellion effectively brought an end to that possibility. The repressed returned to haunt them and the Indian fragment was left in a state of shock. The fictions which the fragment had internalised - the pre-eminence of parliamentary democracy, the contradictory obsession with all things colonial and Indian Ð when my father built his house in 1959, the first thing he did was cover the wooden floorboards with lino and place pictures of Gandhi and Nehru on the walls (he also painted the outside walls of the house blue and red) Ð manifested themselves for what they were, an empty ideology responding to psychological rather than social needs. The Girmit ideology lay in tatters, its believers distraught; there was no self-sustaining belief system since the ideology was always retrospective, a racial memory. The cure for the Fiji Indians lay in political power and this was denied them. Without the dynamic tensions of the centre left behind, the Indian fossil turned inwards and panicked. It could not respond through any radical action, since its own commitment to Fiji remained so deeply ambiguous. The Fiji-Indians, as a relatively homogeneous and self-sufficient community, trapped in a cultural time-warp which existed only as a fragment and not as a political totality, relapsed into a pathetic rhetoric which could not grasp the real issues at stake.
The peculiar logic of the Indian psychology and even the inevitability of the Fijian rebellion seem to me to be so prophetically implicit in Satendra Nandan's fictions. In this respect The Wounded Sea offers both representations of the fragment as well as its simultaneous critique. If literature is to be critically read as much by the unsaid, the marginalised, as by the said, the central, then Nandan's curious absences, negations and self-enclosed imaginative worlds are equally important points of entry for purposes of critical interpretation. In other words, the ideological flaws in this fragment's world-order from which Nandan himself is not immune and which makes immensely problematic Nandan's own position on the fundamental question of race in Fiji (marked, for instance, in his rejection of the Fijian 'Other' and the failure to define the Fiji-Indian self in terms of this 'Other') are heightened precisely by the self-enclosed world of The Wounded Sea. It is a kind of a black-hole theory of race relations in which self-sufficiency and gestalt replace interaction and mutual dependence.And in this crucial sense Nandan is never able to transcend the blinkered racial lebenswelt of the Fiji Indian. Thus when the Fijians do invade the text, they are there as already formed texts, as racial stereotypes such as the comic village chief and the screaming brothers of the Fijian girl framed, finally, in an essentially scatological discourse. It is informative at this point to recall the way in which the entire tradition of the carnivaleque and scatology is so much more powerfully deployed by another Pacific writer Epeli Hau'ofa in his hilarious Kisses in the Nederends (Auckland,1987). Here we get an ethnographic narrative that uses the oral traditions of the culture of the informants and grafts them upon a massively silenced underside of the bourgeois novel. Rabelais and the picaresque rather than the dominant discourses of realism now invade the texts of the Other as it seeks to legitimate itself through writing. In Hau'ofa one gets a reworking of the parable of the chief of the Nambakawara tribe stoically responding to Levi-Strauss's notes, his ciphers, on paper. Nandan, however, avoids any real encounter with the Fijian Other because he has no unmediated access to it (as Epeli Hau'ofa has). For both races - Indian and Fijian - the 'Other' has existed only as scattered idiomatic phrases (kai si bakola, kai Idia, magaichinamu, rakshasha, junglee, etc.). The 'Other' never became a legitimate object of knowledge in its own right. A hundred years later neither the Fijian nor the Indian understood each other's social practices. And Nandan's fiction refuses to intervene except to caricature.
Throughout The Wounded Sea the generic conventions and discursive domain of comedy mediates between the irreconcilable yearnings of the rootless fragment for its past, and its desire to adapt to the new land. Humour, as any reader of Naipaul's Miguel Street would remember, is one way of bypassing censure and self-criticism. But the comic dimension is also precarious since it cannot, finally, prevent the hero from relapsing into madness: those whom the gods wish to destroy are first transformed into comedians and madmen. In one of the fables in Part II of The Wounded Sea the period of five years ('Five years have past' wrote Wordsworth) in an institution symbolises yet another banishment and typifies yet another possibility for the Fiji Indian - racial insanity. In this regard the hero's own affair with Joan is superimposed upon the fascination with things Indian, upon the 'Sitaness' of India, as it arose out of the fragment's reading of the pre-eminent text of the Hindus, the Ramayana . 'Our fate in Fiji', writes Nandan 'had echoes of the Ramayana: exile; suffering; separation; battles but no return' (p. 88). Yet this India too, through other forms of mediation, is never available to the Fiji Indian in its true, historic form. Its contradictions, its own multiplicities (linguistic, religious, cultural) are glossed over and replaced by its artificial projections, notably by Bombay Cinema. This Cinema projects a homogeneous India which is very much like the Fiji Indian fragment in that it is not fractured by linguistic, religious or caste divisions. The duplicities, the illusions of Bombay Cinema, reconstruct, for the Fiji Indians, a naive confirmation precisely of their own historical memory : Sita, the actress Nirupa Roy, the 'filmi' song 'ek ghar banaunga tere ghar ke samne'. In to this world enter the figures of Joan, the Indian expatriate, the lawyer, the politician, the priest, the magistrate, Birbal, Gautam, Ratu Reddy all of whom struggle to find a ground for their existence in a world no longer available to them in its simple colonial form. The Fiji Indian postcolonial must continue to live uneasily in a climate where the label of 'migrant race' will be periodically directed against them. As recently as 14 August 1991, Ratu Mara demonstrated the effectiveness of this label when he emphasised the need for a 'migrant race' to accept , more or less uncritically, a subservient political role in the new postcolonial world order.
Out of this conjunction emerges Nandan's fictional autobiographical pieces which represent the essentially tragic world of the Fiji Indians. Its comic dimension is a social reality since it is an unconscious survival mechanism. Since tragedy is always around the corner, comedy alone can triumph over (even if momentarily) the immense rootlessness of the fragment. Satendra Nandan's tales explore a fragment society searching for concordance and a centre. Though the centre is never found, the pathos of the search continues to be played out through the comic mode: Mr Krishna Datt, another Labor minister in the Bavadra Government and the 'character' who snores heavily in the fourth part of The Wounded Sea (he has his own version of the events narrated by Nandan at this juncture) told me how comedy (of the Fiji-Indian variety) sustained them during those terrible days of political incarceration in Borron House. Behind the immense laughter and generosity of the Fiji Indian lies a trauma of almost Popol Vuh proportions. 'The Day of the Colonel' made that trauma a condition of being since the myths which were constructed to ward off certain insanity were destroyed forever. Like the tale of the Ancient Mariner, the act of writing, the act of telling, can only gesture helplessly towards the precarious unity of word and deed lost during the original banishment. For the twice-banished 'race' of the Indian diaspora generally, Satendra Nandan's writing is a cure for the return of the repressed.
[This is a slightly revised version of a speech made at the launching of Satendra Nandan's The Wounded Sea (Sydney: Simon and Schuster, 1991) in Fremantle on March 6, 1991].
New: 30 December, 1996 | Now: 11 April, 2015