Students as Self-assessors: Learning Experiences of Literature Teaching in Secondary Schools: Tanja Janssen and Gert Rijlaarsdam

What are the effects of literature teaching? What do students actually learn from it? These are difficult questions, we admit, but nevertheless questions that deserve attempts at an answer. Literature has always been a serious, sacrosanct part of the curriculum of secondary education. In the Netherlands literature takes up about a third of all time spent on mother tongue teaching in secondary schools.1 The educational practice varies widely, because schools and individual teachers have as yet the freedom to determine the contents of the curriculum themselves (Janssen and Rijlaarsdam, 1995).