The Importance of English Bildungsromane in Dutch Secondary Education

Abstract

Dutch education has been putting more and more emphasis on students’ sense of citizenship and so-called 21st-century skills. Although the aspects of self-awareness and aspirations may fall under the header of a student’s sense of their place in the community and the attainment goals in the Netherlands seem to acknowledge this by mentioning that these aspects need to be taught in a cross-curricular way, not a trace of these attainment goals, or how to reach them, can be found in their equivalents for English, at least nothing about this has been specified in the attainment goals set for the lower and the higher forms (SLO, 2016, p.12; p.9; College voor Toetsen en Examens, 2015, p.28). This research argues that Bildungsromane, and Young Adult literature, can help teachers of the higher forms of Dutch secondary education 1) develop their students’ sense of citizenship, 2) enhance their students’ personal development and 3) develop their students’ 21st-century skills and puts forward a small corpus of assignments that are readily usable. To design the assignments, it was necessary to find out 1) what the functions of literature and Bildungsromane were, 2) which genre is more useful for this purpose, Young Adult or the Bildungsroman and 3) what assignments about citizenship should focus on. It was found that the functions of Bildungsromane indeed have to do with personal development. Moreover, although YA-novels can also be used, there are still benefits to using Bildungsromane. After designing nine draft assignments, ten teachers gave their opinion about them and fifteen students, between the ages of 17 and 19 years old, in their final year of pre-university secondary education gave their opinion about one of them. This was done by means of a questionnaire. Moreover, one teacher was interviewed after having filled in the questionnaire. The results from the questionnaires and the interview were used to give the assignments their final form.