The search for meaningful learning in the teaching of literature using popular culture: the cinematographic production.

Abstract

The teaching of literature in regular basic education in the last two decades has been a source of anxiety for the teachers who teach the subject. It should be noted that the teaching of literature or literary texts in Spanish or other languages translated into Spanish, are not inserted in a terminology as such: "literature", but as an area of "Communication", which includes two elements: (a) Spanish linguistics and (b) literature. In this line, the regulatory body of education in Peru, MINEDU, publishes on its web page the National Curriculum for Regular Basic Education, which offers a series of competencies that the area of Communication must achieve in the teaching-learning process: (a) communicate orally in their mother tongue; (b) read different types of texts in their mother tongue; and (c) write different types of texts in their mother tongue. Thus, teachers must generate in their teaching a series of motivating and transdisciplinary elements that allow them to achieve the last two competencies. However, this task includes reading texts that cover the history of Western literature, from Greco-Latin, medieval, Renaissance, neoclassical, romantic, realist, avant-garde, Spanish generations, Peruvian literature from its oral production to some writers who have published up to the beginning of the 21st century.

To carry out this titanic task, the teacher must create strategies and fragment texts with the purpose of getting the student to acquire not only the competence required by MINEDU, but also to know part of Western history and culture in literary production. However, the present generations, consumers of texts and in discourses completely different from the paper books we know, such as Wattpad, Kindle, Google Play Books, TikTok, YouTube, Audible, among others, widen the gap between what the teacher tries to teach and what the student knows, consumes, and desires in record time.

This work revolves around the construction of motivational strategies within a learning session in the teaching of classic literary texts that are part of the universal history of other arts, such as cinema, and that its adaptation and dissemination have also become classics in their field, since they have taken literature as raw material. So, we will analyze how to teach through (a) Shrek and The last of us to the Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote; (b) with The Lion King to Hamlet; The myth of Theseus and Ariadne through The Hunger Games; (c) Monster Inc and Rick and Morty to interpret Borges, (d) District 9 to unravel The Metamorphosis and finally (e) The origin to understand Life is a dream.

The methodology used for this work is qualitative through observation, note taking and interviews of the behavior of 3rd and 5th year high school students in relation to these strategies and their applications. The results of the study show that the motivation and comparison of the elements of popular culture, specifically cinema, lead students to an awakening of their curiosity for knowledge and direct them towards the development of critical thinking, since they end up generating comparisons with modern movies based on comics.