In 2006 Norway got a new curriculum from year 1 to year 13. For the first time the curriculum does not give any definition of a literary canon in the subject Norwegian. While the former curriculum from 1997 had long lists of authors for each grade, the new curriculum has given the teacher a great opportunity to choose what to read in the class, at all levels.  This implies that the single teacher’s attitude towards literature and authors will form the classrooms practice.

However, aims from the curriculum implies that the teachers are familiar with the cultural heritage, both classical works of literature from Norwegian and from other cultures, and that they are able to choose among a large variety of texts from today and from the past in order to present different themes. This may seem as a paradox, as the curriculum does not include an explicit literary canon. Other European countries, e.g. Denmark, Vinje (2005), has chosen the opposite direction, introducing a literary canon. This is a vital question in many countries.

In order to be qualified teachers in literature, who can teach literature from past and present, and who can stimulate children’s reading, we expect our students to read books from a greater variety of genres and authors than the average Norwegian adult reader.

Our study is descriptive and we want knowledge about what teacher students read.

Research question:

What characterizes the literary taste of a group of Norwegian teacher students?

Theoretical framework:

According to Robert Escarpit (1971), literature is a product produced and distributed commercially, thus following the law of offer and demand. In this way, teacher students, as all readers, are consumers. As consumers, they participate in one or several cycles, with various titles authors and genres. Lars Furulund (1970) underlines that when it comes to literature,  the school system belongs to the noncommercial cycle. This is an important point to consider in discussing the results of this project, by evaluating teacher student’s taste in relation to the commercial and the noncommercial cycle. Our results, however,  seem to indicate that the commercial cycle to some extent influences the use of literature in schools today.

The project is based on Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture (Bourdieu, 1993; Bourdieu &Wacquant, 1993; Bourdieu, 2002). This implies a relational research position in the project. In Distinksjoner – en soiologisk kritikk av dømmekraften (2002), Bourdieu discusses cultural preferences and cultural consumption in France in the 1970s. Here, he presents his ontological and epistemological research position, warning against what he describes as the substantialistic way of thinking and writing: “It considers activities and preferences typical for certain individuals or groups in a given society at a given time as substantial qualities, given once and for all in a kind of biological or (and this is no better) cultural essence” (Bourdieu, 2002, p.5). In studying teacher student’s literary taste as a kind of distinction, our fundament is a relational understanding.

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