A Case for Teaching Literature in the Secondary School

Why Reading Fiction Matters in an Age of Scientific Objectivity and Standardization

Janet Alsup

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317585039
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Taking a close look at the forces that affect English education in schools—at the ways literature, cognitive science, the privileging of the STEM disciplines, and current educational policies are connected—this timely book counters with a strong argument for the importance of continuing to teach literature in middle and secondary classrooms. The case is made through critical examination of the ongoing "culture wars" between the humanities and the sciences, recent research in cognitive literary studies demonstrating the power of narrative reading, and an analysis of educational trends that have marginalized literature teaching in the U.S., including standards-based and scripted curricula. The book is distinctive in presenting both a synthesis of arguments for literary study in the middle and high school and sample lesson plans from practicing teachers exemplifying how literature can positively influence adolescents' intellectual, emotional, and social selves.

1

INTRODUCTION

The Need to Make the Case for Teaching Literature

As an English education professor in a university known for science, engineering, and agriculture, some days can be pretty demoralizing. It seems that daily I read in university communiqués some new praise of the so-called STEM or STEAM (“A” being agriculture, not the arts) disciplines, side-by-side with some subtle, or even overt, denigrating of my own. And not only does the verbal praise keep drifting the way of STEM and STEAM, so do the monetary prizes. In fact, a series of new initiatives at my university is designed to put more money, energy, and faculty hours toward the science and technology disciplines, while there is little mention of the liberal arts. When questions are asked about the place of the liberal arts at the university, the response is that we are important supporters of the STEM students and faculty, as we can help them communicate more effectively about science and technology. There’s little acknowledgement that knowledge made, found, and explored in the humanities can add anything, on its own, to human knowledge or culture. There’s little recognition that the humanities have any independent, contemporary relevance to human life.

Twenty years ago when I became a high school teacher I never imagined that I’d be exploring the question, why teach literature? I never thought the day would come when I would be compelled to write a book defending the inclusion of literature in the high school and middle school curriculum and, by association, the importance of adolescents engaging in literary experience. But today there is increasing evidence that literature is being valued less and less by policy-makers and administrators making decisions about what is taught in public middle and high schools, despite a recent National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) report that literary reading is “on the rise” among adult Americans, particularly young adults between the ages of 18 and 24, reversing a two-decade downward spiral in reading (Reading on the Rise, 2008). While the reasons for this upswing are unclear—I might argue that the surge in popularity of young adult novels might have something to do with it—it is evidence that even in the so-called digital age young people are choosing to read.

Describing and explaining the epistemological, philosophical, and economic battles between the humanities and the natural sciences has been attempted before (a quick review of research will bring up such names as Dewey, Kuhn, Nussbaum, and Bérubé). It’s an intimidating group of scholars to be following, to say the least. So why do I wish to add my thoughts to the mix?

What this book offers is a conversation about secondary school language arts and literature instruction and the literary experience. I argue, through the lenses of philosophy, cognitive science, literary studies, and educational policy studies, for the reading and teaching of literature in the middle and high school. Finally, I provide specific classroom applications for the teaching of literature that are consistent with these theories. In sum, the purpose of this book is to add to the current conversation about the place of the humanities in general, and literature teaching more particularly, in contemporary secondary education and to argue that the study of literature has an important place in our schools, and, by extension, in our lives.

Since the time of the ancient Greeks, the questions “What is worthy knowledge?” and, by association, “What is the definition of truth?” have been debated. In fact, questions such as “What is science?”, “What is nature?”, “What is beauty? truth? art? and even, “the meaning of life?” have all been explored since the beginning of real human thought—since the first human primates were able to think abstractly and imaginatively as well as concretely and literally. As soon as the human brain was able to move beyond “How do I live through this day?” to “How do I make my existence more complete?”, we have been grappling with the questions, “Which complete is more complete?” and “Which way of knowing is the most worthy or worthwhile?”. As Varki and Brower (2013) write:

The one thing that does seem to separate us from other animals is that we are capable of going beyond self-awareness of our own personhood to having a full theory of mind (i.e., full awareness of the self-awareness and personhood of others).

(p. 39)

However, ironically, it took the industrial revolution, and the supposed modernization of society, to reduce the level of such questioning to a simplistic either-or dichotomy. It was in the 19th century that Western scholars began to create divisions among bodies of knowledge and the consequent disjuncture between so-called humanistic and scientific knowledge (Wallerstein and Lee, 2004, p. 3). It was also during this time that literature became a school subject (Langer, 2014, p. 161). For the record, the ancient Greeks did not see a clear distinction, much less a battle, between the humanities (i.e., literature, art, aesthetics) and the natural sciences (i.e., biology, chemistry, knowledge that can be discovered empirically); they, in fact, saw them as acting together, as interdependent types of knowledge, each affecting and enriching the other. It seems that simplistic dualism is a relatively recent phenomenon, as the separation of academic and scholarly study into categories, what we call disciplines, is still the norm today and arguably often leads to competition among those disciplines—for both prestige and resources. In a famous lecture in 1959, British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow described for the first time the epistemological conflict between the sciences and the humanities. He was the first to call these two types of knowledge “cultures” and the first to argue that their division was harming society. Interestingly, in his time, he saw the humanities as unfairly valued and rewarded at the expense of the natural and practical sciences. How times have changed.

So how did the sciences and related understandings of objectivism, empiricism, and truth vault to the top of the valued knowledge chart in the 21st century? How did it become the case that politicians, policy-makers, and corporate execs (and school administrators) use numbers and statistics, what they might call objective knowledge, to make arguments that affect people and social institutions, such as health care, food quality, and, our main topic here, education? As David Hollinger argues in a review in The Chronicle of Higher Education (2013), today’s culture wars between the sciences and humanities are as much about the intellectual and political, content of scholars’ work as they are about abstract definitions of truth or knowledge. In the 1980s and ’90s it became a relatively common critique of humanities professors that they were too politically correct and too entrenched in left-wing sentiment to do rigorous, evidence-based research (see Bloom, 1987 and, for a rebuttal to Bloom, Bérubé, 2006). Such arguments increasingly positioned humanities scholars as subjective and engaged in research to advance personal/political agendas rather than to advance human thought or teach students valuable information.

However, scientific data may not always be the best way to make decisions that affect people. Daniel Sarewitz of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at Arizona State University studies how policy decisions based on scientific research can affect human problems—sometimes adversely. In “Liberalism’s Modest Proposals, Or the Tyranny of Scientific Rationality,” Sarewitz (2012) criticizes “scientific rationality unchecked by experience, empathy, and moral grounding” and argues against the “false belief that right action can be extracted from a set of scientific facts” (unpaged). Instead, he posits that we must seek a balance between science and humanism—pay equal attention to both scientific fact and informed human experience.

Regardless of such arguments, hard facts and data have become the preferred way to understand education in the US. We’ve probably all seen the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) charts comparing the knowledge of students in the US with those in other countries. The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) measures 15-year-olds’ performance in reading, math, and science every three years and compares these measures across nations. After doing some research, I found an NCES document stating that in 2009, “the average reading literacy score in the United States was lower than the average score in 6 of the 33 other OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, higher than the average score in 13 of the other OECD countries, and not measurably different from the average score in 14 of the OECD countries” (http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=1). While this seems to place us in a pretty solid position at first glance, many political pundits use variations of this information (changing comparison countries, for example) to argue that US public education is failing. For example, in a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article, alarmingly called “The Real Reason America’s Schools Stink,” author Charles Kenny writes, “the US ranks behind sixteen other economies including Poland, Estonia and South Korea in terms of student literacy—the ability to read, integrate and evaluate texts” (2012, unpaged). Since the article does not have a works cited or references page, I can’t really tell where these numbers came from or how they were calculated. But they certainly sound bad, and they seem like evidence for drastic change. Regardless, the numbers are presented as objective truth.

As I was writing this chapter, the 2012 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) scores were announced, again showing that the US “performed below average in mathematics” and “performance in reading and science are both closer to the OECD average” (www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/PISA-2012-results-US.pdf). Since the US has a much more diverse (and in many cases, larger) population than many of the countries on the OECD list, such as Japan, Portugal or Luxembourg, one might think this assessment not too alarming. However, many news outlets reported on the crisis purportedly revealed by these scores. For example, Education Secretary Arne Duncan in a Washington Post article called the scores a “brutal truth” that “must serve as a wake-up call” for the country (Lyndsey, 2013). Diane Ravitch did a thorough oppositional reading of the scores in her blog post of December 3, 2012. In part she writes:

If they mean anything at all, the PISA scores show the failure of the past dozen years of public policy in the United States. The billions invested in testing, test prep, and accountability have not raised test scores or our nation’s relative standing on the league tables.

(http://dianeravitch.net/2013/12/03/my-view-of-the-pisa-scores/)

She goes on to question why we should care about the test scores anyway, as they only measure rote learning and not imagination, creativity, and the ability to innovate.

Setting aside the literal difficulties of figuring out where such numbers come from or how they are calculated, the numbers are themselves an oversimplification that cannot reflect the true reality of complex social, cultural and behavior issues at work in an American school. As Gaukroger (2012) writes:

It is not so much that quantification—in this case, the reduction of things to raw numbers, to statistical regularities, so that everything can be put on the same level and compared—becomes tantamount to objectivity. It is not even so much that such objectivity now becomes a tool for micro-management. Rather it becomes a form of control that allows complete abdication of responsibility.

(p. 74)

This evolution in what is considered valued knowledge and valid approaches to seeking and finding knowledge is affecting not only state and national social and educational policy, but also what happens at the local, public school level. In English language arts classes around the nation, standards and curricula are becoming more rigid and discussions of teacher and school accountability are rampant, resulting in changes in the very nature of how English teachers define their jobs. One specific result is that literary study, namely the study of fictional texts, drama and poetry, is decreasing (or at best remaining constant), and the focus on nonfictional, informational texts is increasing. Increasingly, reading and writing informational texts that are “complex” is replacing narrative writing and reading because, the argument goes, such texts better prepare students for life after high school. The recently created Common Core State Standards (CCSS), now adopted by 44 states, emphasize the teaching of so-called informational or nonfiction texts, especially in secondary school English, and make a strong argument that all texts that are taught should be “complex” according to their definition. The standards define text complexity as “the inherent difficulty of reading and comprehending a text combined with consideration of reader and task variables” (CCSS, 2012a). The standards go on to provide a three-part measurement for text complexity that takes into consideration qualitative, quantitative, and reader/task considerations (CCSS, 2012c, Supplemental Information for Appendix A, p. 4). I wrote in a recent commentary that appeared in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy about this new way of defining classroom-worthy texts:

Such ways of measuring the complexity of literature and the literary experience for readers is certainly new for English teachers, and some teachers and administrators are viewing this method as a devaluing of traditional fiction, particularly longer novels which take significant class time to read. Some secondary educators are deciding that reading long fictional works may not be the best use of time if student experience with multiple, interdisciplinary, “complex texts” is the goal, particularly for middle and high school readers who are urged in the CCSS to read more nonfiction than fiction

(CCSS, 2012d, Revised Publishers’ Criteria, Grades 3–12, p. 5 Alsup, 2013, pp. 181–182)

No matter what one thinks of the new definition of what makes a text worthy, it is hard to argue that such a formula for measuring text complexity is far removed from many of the ways English teachers, professors, and even prolific readers of literary texts currently think about the value of a text or how they would explain a reader’s experience with literature. It seems many miles from Louise Rosenblatt’s (1938/1995, 1978) discussion of the transaction between the reader’s experience and the words on the page. Like so many things in US education today, this process for analyzing text complexity reduces the quality of the literary experience to a triangular formula that can be determined through objective analysis, rather than a “to-and-fro spiraling” (Rosenblatt, 1938/1995, p. xvi) between the reader and the words on the page. Rosenblatt’s assertion that no critical interpretation of a text can happen without a prior, aesthetic, lived-through personal experience with it, seems to have been reduced to one part of the text complexity triad, called “reader/text considerations.” Lexile scores based on counting sentence and word lengths are given equal importance in the CCSS. The experience of reading has become virtually dehumanized.

So why do we have to make a case for teaching literature? Why does it matter? I argue at a time when the humanities seem to be losing the culture war, when the standardization and objectification of the educational and literary experience of our youth is rampant. English teachers and English teacher educators must keep discussions about the power of literature to positively affect the lives of young people at the forefront. We should argue that all worthwhile knowledge isn’t objective, that all things worth learning cannot be relegated to, or assessed by, a formula. If we wish our young students to become citizens of the world who can make ethical decisions about the many scientific discoveries, ecological challenges, and human tragedies coming across the newspapers daily, we must nurture and preserve their opportunities to experience narrative worlds, as characterized by Richard Gerrig in 1993. And perhaps more specifically related to the daily lives of adolescents, the literary experience, intimately connected to the building of empathy, may be an essential part of slowing the spread of such social problems as bullying, school violence, and rampant uncivil discourse. Reading literature is perhaps now more important than ever in an age of dehumanizing and fleeting images, decontextualized policy making, and mass shootings that speak to a lack of empathy in our culture at large.

In the rest of this chapter, I provide a brief overview of some of the major foundational concepts explored in the book. First, I discuss what I mean by the digital age, or the age in which we are living now, in the year 2013. Second, I provide a brief historical overview of the cultural conflict between the sciences and the humanities that began in the 19th century and continues today. Third, I explore a related philosophical concept essential to understanding how contemporary knowledge and truth are understood by Americans and American policy-makers: the twin notions of objectivity and subjectivity. Finally, in the remainder of the bo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction The Need to Make the Case for Teaching Literature
• Part 1 What Literature Can Do
• Part II Challenges to Literary Study
• Part III Reviving the Secondary School Literary Experience
• Appendix A Developing and moving beyond the ego
• Appendix B Developing and moving beyond the ego
• Contributors
• Index