Motivation for Working with this Series

With the incredible popularity of the series, and the topic power relations in mind, it seems relevant to question the impact the series has on the readers and viewers. How much do they actually notice about the game being played out in front of them?

I knew that many of the students in my school were fascinated by the series and it was actually one of the students who first recommended the books to me in 2011. Though many of them expressed their fascination for the plot and characters, none of them mentioned power specifically. I wondered if this had anything to do with age and experience. I anticipated that the younger they were the less aware they would be of the subtle messages. Were they capable of recognising attempts at manipulation, either on the screen or in real life?

This is why I wanted to research the effect of the series on upper secondary school students, as firstly because they are probably among the youngest watchers and readers of the series and secondly since I had easy access to this group in my job as teacher. Since I could not look into everything of interest, I decided on what made the strongest impression on me and also what I considered they would know little about in the first place. I could have explored aspects of gender in the series, but this had already been done. Additionally, Norway is celebrating the hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage this year; the students had of course heard a lot about this and were most likely already tired of the topic, boys as well as girls. Lastly, since I am devoted to the idea of holistic teaching, or teaching which acknowledges more than one subject at a time, I wanted to focus on a topic I knew could be found in the curriculum of other subjects. I wanted something that would be relevant beyond the subject English. Power was therefore a relevant choice.

As a further motivation, Game of Thrones (GOT) is interesting to me as a teacher, exactly because it is popular. The series provides so many students with the same frame of reference, just like the character Harry Potter: the books and films now serve as a common reference that may be used in situations in which you need an example that many students may relate to.

However, the novels that still seem to own the strongest ground in the classroom, are classics and literature that is considered quality literature by scholars, rather than those novels that students are pouring over in their spare time, like Martin’s series A Song of Ice and Fire and the TV-series Game of Thrones.

Research that recognises the importance of the pleasures of reading has become more common over the years, and so the view of what kind of literature one should select for the students has been challenged. In The Power of Reading, Stephen Krashen presents research that shows the positive effect on vocabulary and reading rate that reading popular literature has, as compared to the reading of assigned literature (52). In addition, Krashen refers to how the students in the study were prejudiced towards assigned reading, anticipating that it would be boring, yet they were avid readers in their spare time. Bringing the already preferred literature into the classroom may be one way of working with popular literature and still be able to evading the aspect of assigned reading.

Taking this into account, it is obvious that there has been a move towards acknowledging popular culture as useful to the teaching of English. Nevertheless, what seems to have been overlooked in the Norwegian context is the combination of popular culture and the national

Core Curriculum: Can popular culture be exploited to better integrate the Core Curriculum in the teaching of English?

Martin’s books and the HBO TV-series are really more than just a bit of “fantasy”. The focus of the series seems to be on power relationships and intrigues, how to relate to other people, and on the motivation and ambitions of individuals. Many of the signals and symbols of power are hidden. You have a feeling of who is more powerful, but you may not have given the reason or background for this power careful thought. In consequence, since these books and the series are so popular, I think that they influence the students a lot more than other books or series would, in terms of racism, gender roles, human rights and how we generally relate to other people.

Michel Foucault argued in The History of Sexuality, that power is everywhere and it comes from everywhere (93). Later Foucault specified that power is “a way in which some act on others” (340), which means it is a part of all our relationships to other human beings. For this reason we have a natural responsibility to ensure that when we do act, we do so according to a certain set of moral guidelines or values acceptable to ourselves and those around us. This aspect is recognised by Immanuel Kant in his categorical imperative (64-65). Kant contradicts the self-indulgent advice given to the Prince in Niccolò Machiavelli’s work, The Prince from 1513, here crudely summed up: if you have to choose, it is better and safer for a ruler to be feared than loved (73) and that one should not worry too much about morality, as long as one maintains political power (78).

This is why I have decided to focus on some of the hidden messages or the power structures in GOT hoping that the students will develop awareness of such influence, and that through using literature and film, the students can become better at disclosing these power structures in their own lives. After all, they are on the threshold of adult life, and will have discovered that power relationships have changed in comparison to when they were younger. It is essential to know when you are being manipulated, and to know that when people treat you a certain way it does not necessarily have anything to do with you personally, it may equally well be that you are just a pawn in a game, useful to an end.

The motivation for my thesis is as follows: In addition to increasing my students’ awareness of power struggles and power relationships, and thus making them pilots in their own lives, I consider it as one of my tasks as teacher to inspire the students to read on their own, and

outside school. To achieve this, students must be subjected to a variety of genres and topics, since it is difficult to tell what will trigger a student’s interest.