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Teaching to Exceed in the English Language Arts
A Justice, Inquiry, and Action Approach for 6-12 Classrooms
Richard Beach, Ashley S. Boyd, Allen Webb, Amanda Haertling Thein
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eBook - ePub
Teaching to Exceed in the English Language Arts
A Justice, Inquiry, and Action Approach for 6-12 Classrooms
Richard Beach, Ashley S. Boyd, Allen Webb, Amanda Haertling Thein
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About This Book
Timely, thoughtful, and comprehensive, this text directly supports pre-service and in-service teachers in developing curriculum and instruction that both addresses and exceeds the requirements of English language arts standards. It demonstrates how the Common Core State Standards as well as other local and national standards' highest and best intentions for student success can be implemented from a critical, culturally relevant perspective firmly grounded in current literacy learning theory and research.
The third edition frames ELA instruction around adopting a justice, inquiry, and action approach that supports students in their schools and community contexts. Offering new ways to respond to current issues and events, the text provides specific examples of teachers employing the justice, inquiry, and action curriculum framework to promote critical engagement and learning. Chapters cover common problems and challenges, alternative models, and theories of language arts teaching. The framework, knowledge, and guidance in this book shows how ELA standards can not only be addressed but also surpassed through engaging instruction to foster truly diverse and inclusive classrooms.
The third edition provides new material on:
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- adopting a justice, inquiry, and action approach to enhance student engagement and critical thinking
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- planning instruction to effectively implement standards in the classroom
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- teaching literary and informational texts, with a focus on authors of color
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- integrating drama activities into literature
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- teaching informational, explanatory, argumentative, and narrative writing
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- supporting bilingual/ELL students
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- using digital tools and apps to respond to and create digital texts
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- addressing how larger contextual and political factors shape instruction
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- fostering preservice teacher development
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Section II Implementing and Exceeding the ELA State Standards
4 Teaching Literature
DOI: 10.4324/9781003177364-6
When we wrote the first edition of this book, the Common Core State Standards were just rolling out, and teachers were nervous about the state of literary fiction in the English language arts curriculum. The standards include a substantial focus on teaching informational texts, and early interpretations of the standards had English teachers worried that non-fiction would replace fiction in the curriculum. And, although it’s since become clear that the standards ask for an increase in informational texts across all core subjects rather than concentrating the increase in English classrooms, the call for an increase in informational texts led some to wonder—does reading literature in the English classroom still matter?
In this chapter, we will argue that, yes, reading literature not only matters but is central to teaching English—perhaps now more than ever. Literary texts have a vital role in critical inquiry. Literature stimulates our students’ imaginations, raising whole hosts of questions about human and social relations, history, politics, and culture. Literature engages students in complex and critical thinking about the most pressing problems we face in our world today. And, literature asks students to consider—through the study of character—the deeply human ways people respond to such issues, given their histories, experiences, and identities in specific social, cultural, and historical contexts. Literature can be combined with non-fiction and other kinds of texts to inquire into justice-related themes. Finally, literature can be the basis of social action, serving as a springboard to motivate students to better their communities and society.
PHILOSOPHIES ON TEACHING LITERATURE
There have been quite a few philosophies on how and why we should teach literature over the years. Those philosophies align pretty closely with the curriculum frameworks for teaching English that we outlined in Chapter 1. As we ask you to think about the value of teaching literature, we think it’s helpful to share a quick discussion of a few of these philosophies to consider the various ways that standards and standardization might encourage you to take up particular philosophies and how you might respond.
New Criticism
When English first came to be understood as an academic discipline, it was guided by the philosophy and practice of New Criticism—an approach that focused on the study of literature as a scientific, technical, and objective endeavor (Wimsatt & Beardsley, 1949). The goal of New Critical approaches to reading and teaching literature was (and is) for students to make focused, close reading of literary texts, especially poetry, often emphasizing literary devices (e.g., figurative language, symbolism) and poetic forms to determine the meaning the author “intended” the reader to take from the text.
Key to this approach is the idea that the text is static; the text and its meaning don’t change over time and can be pinpointed through close textual analysis. New Critical approaches to teaching literature are certainly still with us today. We see them in standards documents that emphasize close reading and require students to provide textual evidence in their responses to literature. And, in literature anthologies, you’ll find questions based on close reading associated with inferring certain predetermined “correct” answers. Standardized tests may involve close reading of passages and questions that are “text dependent,” that supposedly don’t draw on larger contexts or student background knowledge.
Reader response theory
In response and contrast to New Criticism, reader response theory (e.g., Rosenblatt, 1995) provided an entirely new philosophy for thinking about how readers make sense of literature. At the risk of simplifying a substantial and complex body of theory, we’ll highlight a few key concepts from reader response theory. First, the author is thought of as the starting place for a text, but not the endpoint. Literature is written in a particular time and place by a particular person, but literature means new things as times change and language changes. Second, when a new reader reads a piece of literature, its meaning changes. That's because every reader has their own social and cultural history that interacts with their reading of the text. In short, meaning is made through a transaction of text, a reader, and a social and cultural context.
Teachers, educational scholars, textbook companies, and writers of standards have taken up reader response theory in a number of ways—some more useful than others, and some downright problematic. For instance, at one point, reader response theory was associated with “personal growth” approaches to teaching English that focused on students’ identity development through the teaching of literature (Dixon, 1975). This approach can be seen in textbook units focused on, for instance, “Coming of Age.” While this might sound like a useful approach, it tends to promote developmental and biological approaches to identity development that suggest that all young adults experience similar physical, psychological, and social crises on the way to becoming adults (Lesko, 2012). This approach assumes a sameness that discounts the diversity of lived experiences that youth bring to our classrooms.
Another way that reader response theory has been taken up is in instruction that asks students to connect their personal experiences to those of characters in literature. This approach is often seen in textbook questions meant to generate student engagement with unfamiliar texts—for instance, “Have you ever had to make a big decision? How did you make the decision, and what were its consequences?” Again, this sounds, on the surface, like a useful approach. However, it can become problematic when students are encouraged to connect with characters with whom they share little in common and, as a result, over-identify with characters experiencing oppression and racism. Similarly, it can also become limiting if not enough attention is devoted to historical context for the sake of universalism if students are not challenged to learn the politics and ideologies that shape a text.
To be sure, the justice, inquiry, and action approach we support is grounded in the fundamental tenets of reader response theory. But critical inquiry aims to help students understand that their responses to literature are rooted in social and cultural beliefs, practices, and dispositions. Adopting a critical inquiry stance invites them to reflect on how the meaning they construct with a text is shaped by their experiences with families and communities, as well as race, class, gender, nationality, religion, and so many other social categories. Students may also infer how their experiences reading a given text are shaped by norms operating in a specific classroom, school, and historical moment.
With all of this in mind, a justice, inquiry, and action approach to teaching literature suggests that reading literature matters because it engages students in careful and critical thinking about their own perspectives, those of their peers, and those represented in characters and situations in texts.
Such engagement helps students understand that a range of perspectives exists on complex problems and issues—perspectives that are grounded in peoples’ social, cultural, and historical experiences. Moreover, such engagement helps students consider a wider range of perspectives, sometimes even questioning or reconsidering their perspectives. Acquiring these critical inquiry skills gained through reading literature is crucially important, now more than ever, as our students become adults faced with problems like racism; socioeconomic inequality; tensions over immigration policy, climate change, and the influence of social media; and public health crises.
Critical Inquiry
When employing a critical inquiry approach, students can apply critical perspectives that focus on the historical, institutional, and cultural perspectives to literary texts (Appleman, 2015). For example, responding to To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee, 1988—first published in 1960 and set in the early 1930s) requires defining the norms of Whiteness that operated in the segregated South and that created racial and class hierarchies. Examining the author’s background and history can also lead to uncovering how the novel perpetuates a White savior narrative (Macaluso, 2017).
Because students generally lack the background knowledge needed to define these texts’ historical and cultural contexts, they may benefit from readings or studying artifacts related to the worlds being portrayed in the works. For example, from engaging with Pride and Prejudice (Austen, 2009) and reading about the class hierarchy in early 19th century England, students gain an understanding that Elizabeth Bennett’s family is simply middle class as opposed to the upper-class families represented by Darcy’s family. As a result, the females in the Bennett family need to find husbands to ensure their financial future, something that does not concern the females in wealthier families who will simply inherit wealth.
Understanding these cultural contexts informs youth's ability to sympathize with characters and more deeply discern their motivations. It also allows them to evaluate the text, protagonists, and even authors from a more informed stance, both in the historical era in which they occurred and within their own.
In addition to applying historical and cultural perspectives, you may have students employ additional perspectives on literature that aid their understanding and analysis (Beach et al., 2021; Appleman, 2015). Engaging these perspectives can encourage students to embrace the critical inquiry approach and unpack narratives for how they create and/or reproduce power, reflect dominant historical narratives, or even expose their own positionalities. These perspectives prompt a deeper analysis and foster intentional connections to the world.
Numerous perspectives can be employed for any literary interpretation, including those typically associated with literary criticism (Appleman, 2014; 2015). We extend each, however, to note how you can employ them for critical purposes:
A biographical perspective focuses on how the author’s life experiences may have influenced their writing, assuming that those experiences actually shaped their writing. While biographical perspectives have been around for a long time, as women's literature and literature by people of color have become more important, biographical approaches have taken on new relevance.
A psychological or psychoanalytic perspective focuses on how characters’ psychological motives, needs, desires, or past experiences shape their actions—for example, the need for parental love or sexual fulfillment. Expanding this perspective to consider protagonists’ mental health and potential struggles can he relevant to many texts in fostering understanding and empathy.
A gender perspective examines the portrayal of gender roles in texts and how readings uphold the gender binary. Closely related, applying a feminist lens critiques how sexist or patriarchal gender discourses position both women and men in limited ways.
A class or Marxist perspective focuses on how socioeconomic class differences shape characters’ beliefs and actions. This stance also examines how social class appears in a text as a system that oppresses some and privileges others.
A deconstructivist/poststructuralist perspective examines how binary language categories, for example, “good” versus “evil,” or “male” versus “female,” are themselves problematic for conceptualizing experience. It allows readers to examine the social construction of groups, objects, or experiences.
A postcolonial perspective critiques the imposition of colonial, often Western, discourses that position colonized people as the passive “Other” who need to be controlled and taught Christianity, “civilization,” “capitalism,” or “democracy.”
BROADER CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES AND ADAPTATIONS FOR LITERARY ANALYSIS
More recently, scholars have offered methods for critiquing literature that broadly engage students’ critical dispositions around power and privilege and facilitate insights across a number of categories. Those posited specifically for analyzing canonical literature include Critical Literature Pedagogy (Borsheim-Black et al., 2014) which is an approach that involves “reading with and against a text,” (p. 124, emphasis in original). Reading with a text denotes traditional analysis of theme, plot, and characters while reading against involves “reading between the lines to expose and interrupt embedded, dominant narratives, power dynamics, and perceived normalcy espoused by and hidden within the text, including its inclusion in school curricula” (p. 125).
This paradigm goes beyond reader response by asking students to “examine the ideologies of texts” (p. 130) and to transfer their understandings from textual...