Reading to Learn in Danish literature classrooms: Late modern literature for children and the R2L-pedagogy. Complex children’s literature taught with the Reading to Learn-pedagogy – theoretical challenges and classroom experiences.

So-called late modern literature written for children has been characterized as being complex, ambiguous and all in all just as aesthetically valuable as the literature written for adult and by adults. By complex, Kampp (2002) means that children’s literature in late modernity present their readers with unpredictable and complex narrative structures, hybrid genres and often also the absence of an authoritative narrator who takes the readers by the hand as the story unfolds. Just like literature for adults, late modern children’s books also make use of metafiction and intertextuality, hence children’s literature in late modernity demands a reader with a broad and flexible semiotic repertoire and it demands a pedagogy that creates spaces for and a language to talk about these complex and sophisticated features in an inclusive way. In fact, Danish mother tongue teachers are expected to draw upon a variety of literary theories when they teach literary analysis in school (Danish Ministry of Education, 2009). So what happens when the predominantly structural approach to reading and writing texts offered by genre pedagogy in general and the reading to learn pedagogy in particular (Rose & Martin 2012) encounters late-modern children’s books in Danish literature classrooms? This paper presents and discusses examples of work with reading to learn from Danish classrooms carried out in a year 4 and year 5 class.