Making Curriculum Pop

ARTICLE: Rethinking the Literary Canon for Today’s Learners

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Permalink Reply by Dan on September 16, 2018 at 4:16pm

While I do like to use student choice in many aspects of my teaching, this article operates from a market based perspective that has numerous downsides, especially for English study. First, the article equates "what I like" with "what is good." Scottish Philosopher David Hume rightly distinguished between these two notions. The difference is that "what is good" has a universal implication that "what I like" does not.  Such a judgment of what is "good" is very important as it forms the basis of ethical judgment as well as judgment of the beautiful. To equate "what I like" with "what is good" has ramifications. 

The article makes this assertion about "what I like" as "what is good" because of the market. Simply put, the market does not distinguish between the two. The best example is that used by Nicholas Brown in "Close Reading and the Market." Brown describes an interview with "Avatar" director, James Cameron. Cameron was asked why the 'Navi' females have a chest like humans, even though they are marsupial mammals. Cameron responded right away by explaining that he knew he was making a movie for humans and that humans like female chests. Thus, he knew from the beginning that his 'Navi' women would have female chests, even if it didn't make any sort of sense biologically.

The point is that it becomes impossible to close read 'Avatar' for meaningful choices if everything reduces to some prediction of what the market wants. The only thing you can close read would become -- the market. This is not to say that a student should not be given choice in her reading, but we as English teachers need to protect the notion that meaning does not derive from "what I like" or from the market. Whenever we do make that assertion, it is only saying the close reading a book is a waste of time because characters, setting, formal qualities of the work -- all break down to choices which attempted to predict the market and would therefore have no other meaning. 

Trevor Noah's book, while a worthy read in itself, is being pitched by an education consulting firm using the argument that Trevor Noah is someone who currently has market value. Suggesting students choose this book is no different than another common practice of presenting students with reading lists from Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. The suggestion is that these people understand what the market wants. And since that's all a book can mean, go with a book that may clue you in to what the market wants today.

Unfortunately, this move evacuates the possibility of a book having any other meaning.

Permalink Reply by Ryan Goble on September 16, 2018 at 8:13pm

Dan just a brief reply. I don't think just one thing is going on here (e.g. purely market based / consultant thinking). That does not mean your argument is wrong per se, just that there are multiple ways to interpret the article and their suggestions - just as there are many more ways to read Avatar then the one you suggested. See the seminal work of Louise M. Rosenblatt Literature as Exploration and /or any work by of one of the founders of Cultural Studies Stuart Hall as a reference.

A fundamental dichotomy most English teachers must grapple with is the old "what should kids read?" vs. "what will make them like reading?" binary - but this may be a false dichotomy. These need not be mutually exclusive and answers to these questions can expand, shift and constrict over time. Certainly the canon has value. That said, if you assign only "classics" - say a list like Beloved, pick a Shakespeare, Tale of Two Cities, Mockingbird etc. - we know a percentage of students will never truly engage with any of these texts and simply uses Spark Notes (comically dubbed 'fake reading' by Kelly Gallagher)? What kind of teaching have we done then? I'm not suggesting we ignore the canon, a lot of it is awesome, but I would argue the first job of any teacher in any subject is to get students to WANT to engage with said skills and content. See this NCTE article by Dale Allander, a passage:

The curriculum guides at this grade level generally require students to read, and teachers to teach, such canonical texts as The Odyssey, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Romeo and Juliet. This canon is curricular and pedagogical because literary texts are often accompanied by or driven by a long-standing favorite or popular instructional unit. To digress a moment, consider how many of us still teach Romeo and Juliet alongside West Side Story. I subverted (or expanded) this canon in part by beginning the Romeo and Juliet unit with an exploration of the music of Marvin Gaye.
 
We listened to a number of songs and analyzed the lyrics for metaphor, use of clichés, and complexity. We listened to the relationships between the music and the lyrics. We settled on several broad themes situated in a historic and African American cultural context with the help of a short profile on Gaye written by Cornel West. Next, we screened Mira Nair’s film starring Denzel Washington, Mississippi Masala, where an African American man from the South falls in love with a young East Indian woman from Uganda who is living in exile with her parents. We took the film through the same process of analysis, noting historic, personal, and inter/ intracultural influences on expressions of love, romance, and relationships. We also compared and contrasted the content of Gaye’s music with Nair’s film.Finally, we turned to Shakespeare, decentered but not dethroned. Final projects for this unit included music compilations with accompanying liner notes and full bibliographic references. The final media project ensured that students acted as producers and consumers of media.

That is a practical way of thinking about something that a substantive body of affective neuroscience seems to bear out - students engage with their hearts before their minds.

See this excerpt from Mary Helen Immordino-Yang's forthcoming book, Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implic....

Also by way of a really big study - Jihyun Lee’s (2014) research echoes Immordino-Yang’s thesis as it relates to traditional measures of student achievement. Lee examined the PISA reading test scores and surveys of almost 70,000 students from 13 countries. Her study found:

striking similarities across all 13 countries in their “best” predictor of reading achievement—either enjoyment of reading or utilization of reading strategies to efficiently summarize the text. Enjoyment of reading in particular was a strong predictor [for success at reading] at both individual and country levels. This study concludes that what motivates human learning is invariant across countries with vastly different educational, cultural, and language systems. (p. 365)

Of course, formal instruction in how to read is important, but enjoyment of reading may be an even larger factor.  Schools that want students to perform better on tests or become better readers and life-long learners likely need to seriously consider engagement and enjoyment.

WORK CITED (That I didn't have a link for):

Lee, J. (2014). Universal factors of student achievement in high-performing Eastern and Western countries. Journal of Educational Psychology, 106(2), 364-374.

Permalink Reply by Ryan Goble on September 16, 2018 at 9:10pm

Plus, if our job is to create citizens that are life-long readers - we can probably do a bit better 

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