Stimulating Educational Contexts For Optimising The Reception Of Litterary Written Messages

Learning as experience in formal, non-formal, informal contexts

The approach to learning as a lived experience involves "focusing on the intersection between cognitive, social and emotional learning,"an experience dependent both on "the context in which learning takes place and the possibility of inserting learning in broader contexts of life ", the specifics of the field, the characteristics of the learner ( Ciolan & Stîngu, 2015). It is about facilitating people's learning and transformation processes in different contexts with different methods ( Ciolan, 2018), to identify the stimulating valences of the three forms / hypostases of education (formal, informal and informal).

Receiving written messages from literary texts

Focused on highlighting moral, emotional, aesthetic, behavioural aspects, etc. from the literary texts, the effort to optimize the reception, understanding, and internalisation of the written messages contained in the literary works goes beyond the boundaries between formal-nonformal-informal. It becomes necessary to identify and create relevant and stimulating learning opportunities both within the institutionalized school, library and theatre, and within the non-institutionalized family.

Data collectionmethods

We decided to proceed by action research, carried out in two stages ( Bocoş, 2017): the diagnostic stage: identifying and analysing problems, formulating hypotheses and the therapeutic stage: hypothesis testing in an experiment directed toward change, optimization.

Verification of the proposed hypothesis: Valorisation of formal, non-formal and informal contexts in the teaching and learning of the subject Romanian Language and Literature on the level of primary education will lead to the optimization of the reception of the written messages from the literary texts required an experimental case with a pre-test/post-test type case ( Labăr, 2008). The sample consisted of 18 fourth graders. They underwent, under the guidance of third year students from the Primary and Pre-School Education Pedagogy Program, a stimulating educational program, designed (in collaboration) by the coordinators and mentors of the Pedagogical Practice. The pupils have benefited from the organization of learning in a supportive environment, favourable to individual development and manifestation of creativity and originality, by focusing on interactive strategies and extracurricular activities. Along with the cognitive meanings of messages in literary texts, strong emphasis was placed on moral-aesthetic lessons learned by children.

The methods of data collection correspond to the requirements of the experimental research: the observation allows to capture attitudinal and behavioural aspects; the pedagogical test is used to quantify cognitive aspects; the focus group aims to identify the opinion of classroom teachers and students on the results of the implemented program.

The experimental design required the following steps:

The pre-test stage. The activity took place exclusively in the classroom, combining the lecture and interactive methods such as: exercise, independent reading, conversation, explanation, starburst, the cube method, brainstorming, role play, the idea tree, the quadrant method, the quintet, the "I know / I want to know / I have learned” method. Pretesting consisted in applying the pedagogical test and making observations.

• The experimental stage: the activity was carried out in various learning contexts:

  • In the formal environment of the classroom, by introducing various didactic strategies specific to the LLR study: dramatization, the story pyramid, comic books, graphic illustration of ideas in a text etc.

  • In the non-formal milieu of the library (meetings with writers, book lending, reading sessions) and theatre (with socio-educational animation, watching shows, stag in go literary works by the children etc.).

  • In the informal context offered by the family and the media (the purchase, together with the children, of books or electronic supports for literary texts, book loans among pupils, reading night or family film watching etc.).

• The post-test stage. The pedagogical test was applied in order to identify the effects of the implemented program. In order to support the quantitative data obtained, two qualitative methods were introduced in the post-test: the observation method and the focus group.

Methods of data analysis and presentation

In the present research, the methods of statistical-mathematical processing and graphical presentation of the data are the determination of the central trend and the introduction of the results in synthetic tables. The determination of the central tendency , the calculation of the basic statistical indicator for the quantitative variables: the mean ( Labăr, 2008) was realised for the indicators through which the cognitive aspects were investigated (critical thinking, curiosity, personal solutions, observation, analysis and understanding of some ideas) and attitudinal-behavioural (free will, cooperation, intense relationship, interest and attraction for reading). The data are presented in the form of diagrams, graphs, tables ( Androniceanu, 2017). The synthetic results tables include the classification or ordering of groups of common elements: frequency and media in our case.

Quantitative analysis of the data obtained in the pre-and post-test stages

Table 1 summarizes the results obtained by students in both stages of the experimental action:

These results are illustrated graphically in Figure 01 .

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Qualitative analysis of the data in the post-test stage

The qualitative data provided in the post-test by the participants of the focus group support the quantitative analysis, grasping aspects of subtlety: opinions, personal thoughts, proposals of teachers and students related to the working method forwarded. Both the advantages and the drawbacks of such an approach to LLR subject training were revealed in Table 02 .