This paper presents early findings from a government-funded Danish project on improving the teaching of literature in lower secondary education in Denmark. The findings are from a systematic review and a mapping of current curriculum and practice which are to later inform interventions in the teaching of literature based on principles of inquiry-based course design. The theory of inquiry-based teaching is indebted to the work of John Dewey and Louise Rosenblatt (Dewey 2005 [1934]; Rosenblatt 1938; see also Faust, 2011). Dewey’s work, of course, explicitly and centrally focused on education as democratic practice but also on the aesthetic as ‘a record … of the life of a civilization, a means for promoting its development' (Dewey, 2005). Rosenblatt’s implicitly democratic transactional theory of the literary/aesthetic experience joins Dewey in linking education, democracy and the aesthetic to help theorise an inquiry-based design for the teaching of literature. Such a design sees a central role for literature in the education of a ‘researchly disposed’ (Lingard & Renshaw) public. Our mapping of practice is based on triangulating analyses of interviews with systematic analyses of learning resources (Gissel & Skovmand, 2016), and ethnographic field work (Christensen, 2014). Through the study’s systematic review and mapping of practice, we ask significant questions around: • what characterises an inquiry-based approach to the teaching of literature and to what extent is the teaching of literature in Denmark currently inquiry-based? • how could such an approach inform interventions in practice in Danish secondary education and principles of inquiry-based course designs? Data suggest that the teaching of literature is currently dominated by a non-inquiry-based approach amongst teachers. When prompted, teachers express uncertainty as to what an inquiry-based approach means in practice. Teachers emphasise text-and-transmission oriented approaches informed by New Criticism and Reader-response theory, all of which imply quite different orientations toward developing a critically oriented or researchly disposed public.

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