ABSTRACT
Teachers of English undertake in lessons an exploration of text, encouraging students to enrich those texts and themselves by bringing to them their own individual experiences and interpretations. Reading is art that generates art, and thought that generates thought and, most importantly, experience that generates experience. Literature helps us all to feel that here is someone who knows what it is like to be me. Our words shape our ideas and alter how we see our world and voice our insights. Our perceptions and our communications are all expressed through our language. It’s too safe for students to spend much of their time in just one world; it’s our job to make them take a look at other worlds. To introduce them to the possibilities and excitement of alternative existences. This chapter revels in the possibilities of a curiosity-driven classroom, and offers considerable evidence from research that beyond intelligence and conscientiousness, curiosity is the third pillar of academic achievement, and the journey from messiness to mastery is entirely feasible. Our aim as English teachers is to begin to provide complex texts which challenge and as a result invite a level of dialogue that encourages that feeling that writer and reader are somehow in it together.
