Here's what we don't want: students who sigh and groan at a list of (mostly white, male-authored) texts that reflect only a small slice of the American identity. More important than reading any one canonical text or scoring well on any one standardized test is being deeply engaged with a range of self-selected novels. This doesn't mean purging the classroom of Hawthorne, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, but it does mean, adding voices like Rupi Kaur, Wes Moore, and Nic Stone. We want our students to grapple with what it means to have a mental illness in Neal Shusterman's Challenger Deep and to dialogue about the intersection of race and violence in Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give. We want them to be challenged and moved as they find and lose themselves in these pages; to come away with understandings they didn't have prior to lifting the front cover.
Rather than the surface handful of texts, students get during a typical English class, this wider range will allow for better opportunity for breadth and depth of study of the American experience in literature. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns us against the "danger of a single story," in which complex identities and issues are whittled down to a singular narrative privileging the voices of an elite few. America is not a single story. America is countless stories, and we want our students to have access to the full range of these stories. By filling our classroom library shelves with all of these stories, we are opening the doors to an America not always experienced within the confines of the English curriculum. By filling these gaps in our collection, we are honoring students' unique backgrounds and interests and telling them that we see them, that their stories (and that THEY) matter.
About my class
Here's what we don't want: students who sigh and groan at a list of (mostly white, male-authored) texts that reflect only a small slice of the American identity. More important than reading any one canonical text or scoring well on any one standardized test is being deeply engaged with a range of self-selected novels. This doesn't mean purging the classroom of Hawthorne, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, but it does mean, adding voices like Rupi Kaur, Wes Moore, and Nic Stone. We want our students to grapple with what it means to have a mental illness in Neal Shusterman's Challenger Deep and to dialogue about the intersection of race and violence in Angie Thomas' The Hate U Give. We want them to be challenged and moved as they find and lose themselves in these pages; to come away with understandings they didn't have prior to lifting the front cover.
Rather than the surface handful of texts, students get during a typical English class, this wider range will allow for better opportunity for breadth and depth of study of the American experience in literature. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warns us against the "danger of a single story," in which complex identities and issues are whittled down to a singular narrative privileging the voices of an elite few. America is not a single story. America is countless stories, and we want our students to have access to the full range of these stories. By filling our classroom library shelves with all of these stories, we are opening the doors to an America not always experienced within the confines of the English curriculum. By filling these gaps in our collection, we are honoring students' unique backgrounds and interests and telling them that we see them, that their stories (and that THEY) matter.
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