Crossing Disciplines—Transferring Knowledge in the Reading Classroom
Keywords:
Autobiographies, Psychology, PedagogicalAbstract
This paper aims to underline the importance of teaching autobiographies as a pedagogical resource to achieve content comprehension by making learners connect their prior knowledge to the experiences of the autobiographer. The study is underpinned by the schema theory, which signifies that, “every act of comprehension involves one’s knowledge of the world” (Anderson et al. 1977). We propose that comprehension of contents entail more than mere linguistic knowledge of the learners. Rather, understanding of the text involves the ability to connect the text to one’s own prior knowledge and experiences. Furthermore, drawing on Shirley Williams’ autobiography ‘Climbing the Bookshelves’, we conclude that teaching autobiographies to readers not only serves easy encoding of the ideas, but also enables readers to explore how the autobiographers coped with various challenges at different stages of their lives. Our proposed instructional approach moves slightly beyond the schema theory as it provides readers the opportunities to utilize their prior knowledge of psychology to understand the autobiography, and make them link prior subject knowledge in psychology to the new knowledge arising from the autobiography.
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