“Real Adventures Must Be Sought Abroad”: Swedish Students Encounter Dublin and the Dubliners

I am a high-school teacher of English at the Vallentuna Gymnasium (high school), located in the outskirts of Stockholm, Sweden, and have the privilege of walking in James Joyce’s footsteps every two years or so, accompanied and guided by my students, who embrace the words of Dubliners: “I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad” (D 21). Through the writings of Joyce, I ask my students to try to see as he did and to write a summary of their experiences in the city in the style of a story from Dubliners, thus asking them to view the city through his eyes and reflect on a life lived so long ago. These short stories are then compiled into a book—like Dubliners—and circulated among family, friends, and colleagues all over the world.

Irish history and literature run like a common thread through the entire English 7 course at my school, which is analogous to the C1 level, presented by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) and offered to our seniors in higher-education preparatory programs. The Swedish Curriculum for the Upper Secondary School clearly requires that “schools must help students to develop an identity that can be related to and encompass not only what is specifically Swedish, but also that which is Nordic, European, and ultimately global.” When I graduated from Uppsala University, my colleagues and I chose a motto: Non scholae sed vitae discimus—“we learn for life not for school.” We knew that, for our future students to “learn for life,” we must teach for life, using our surrounding world as our main resource.

In order to do so, I constantly return to literature. Inspired by Joyce’s Dubliners, which in 1914 introduced Dublin and its contemporary inhabitants to a world stage, we, as teacher and students, come together to write our own version of the stories. Prior to our trip, I provide samples of a variety of Irish writers along with a synopsis of crucial parts of Irish history. Exploring literary Dublin gives the students a unique opportunity to translate knowledge into practice as they meet, and usually fall in love with, Dublin and the Dubliners. While still in our classroom setting in Sweden, we encounter the legacy of Joyce through his short stories and poems. Reading, however, is not the only tool to understanding—writing and the ability to think and draw conclusions are equally important and valued, and this is a large part of the students’ assignment on their return to Stockholm.

In Dubliners, the ninth story, “Counterparts,” revolves around Farrington who is exasperated by his job of duplicating documents and letters. As an educator, I cannot help thinking that this is how many students feel about their education—that they are expected to absorb knowledge from a book or an online source without reflective and creative thinking that can challenge their minds. Our study of Joyce and travels to Ireland provide a refutation of this kind of rote learning. In the Dublin of 2016, like the Dublin of 1914, “[s]chool and home seem to recede from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane” (D 23).When there are no classroom walls but an entire city of writers and their narratives, communication changes; more questions are asked without the pressure of answers; and there is the validation of knowledge that is experienced, touched, smelled, tasted, heard, processed, shared, and claimed. We do all of this in Dublin, surrounded by a million Dubliners and Joyce’s whispering voice: “Shut your eyes and see” (U 3.09). I know there are students who sometimes refer to Joyce’s writing as “ancient,” but as they shift from being readers of the 1914 Dubliners and become writers about the 2016 Dubliners, everything changes. At the end of our journey, I am convinced that my students will see the purpose of being authors of the past in order to become recorders...