Embracing Uncertainty in the English Classroom

My reading of a text - the one that I hedge and couch and posit in the classroom, the one that I use as the ‘way into a text’  - is not the one that matters. 

We position ourselves, as teachers, as the sole authorities on the texts that we teach. Which makes sense after years in the classroom and the familiarity that one gets to have with a text when making units of work. A large stepping stone on the road to independent interpretation is helping students first get comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty with a text but also that their reading of it matters. I think it’s OK to be honest with students - we don’t have all the answers and we certainly don’t know what a writer actually intended - all we can do is make educated guesses with the information we have, which is then framed in an essay that meets various external requirements and is written in timed conditions. 

This is a special battle in the English classroom because, unlike the vast majority of subjects students encounter across a normal curriculum, which are rooted in factual ‘certainties’, ours is not.  The easy route is often the didactic, ‘this is the way’ approach. Students learn the teacher’s interpretation of a text  - we front load the content and this is then, in a worst case scenario, parroted back in essays where students struggle to remember what we said in the order that makes sense to address the demands of the question. What happens when we do this? Little deep thinking happens. The student has not engaged with the text beyond the superficial.

As English teachers, how do we move away from our own certainties and recognise that we are not the sole authority on a text - especially when we begin teaching a new text or at the beginning of an academic year? We sometimes struggle to recognise that we are used to, as English teachers, the ambiguities of texts whereas students deal with the factual certainties of other subjects. Explicitly teaching what an interpretation is, how this is different from concrete fact but aided by textual evidence and analysis. Modelling thinking aloud but also modelling uncertainty. 

We can’t remove the uncertainty from studies in literature but teaching students to sit comfortably with ambiguity is a life skill in itself. Our resources and writing aims to support this and build in deliberate opportunities to embrace uncertainty in the English classroom.