Tell Me Who You Are: Windows and mirrors for our students and ourselves

Thinking of the works we read with our students as “windows and mirrors” has become a popular way of conceptualizing why and how we diversify our curricula, thanks to Emily Style who named the concept in 1988. In “Curriculum as Window and Mirror,” she wrote:

… [S]tudents’ educational diet is not balanced if they see themselves in the mirror all the time. Likewise, democracy’s school curriculum is unbalanced if a black student sits in school, year after year, forced to look through the window upon the (validated) experiences of white others while seldom, if ever, having the central mirror held up to the particularities of her or his own experience. Such racial imbalance is harmful as well to white students whose seeing of humanity’s different realities is also profoundly obscured.

Through the work of individual teachers, teachers working collaboratively with colleagues, groups like DisruptTexts and ProjectLit, and professional organizations like NCTE, our curricula are becoming more diverse. In addition, we continue to ask ourselves how we use texts in our classrooms, given the disparate teaching contexts each of us faces, the students we are teaching, and the events of the world swirling around us. 

While we turn to works of fiction and their characters to humanize past, present, and visions of the future, our students still can struggle to connect with stories about times, places, and people that are far off from their own experience or to realize that fictional stories are derived from the experiences of real people. 

As we have found, informational texts can help students connect fiction back to and enrich their understanding of the real world. We experienced this when discussing Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun with Susan’s sophomores. Until we shared with them excerpts from a report by the City of Chicago on acts of violence and harassment toward African-American families who had moved into previously white housing developments in the 1950s and 1960s, many of them believed Hansberry’s play was just a made-up story.

Style’s article is helpful again in understanding this:

In considering how the curriculum functions, it is essential to note the connection between eyesight and insight. … no student acquires knowledge in the abstract; learning is always personal. Furthermore, learning never takes place in a vacuum; it is always contextual.

The remarkable array of voices collected by Winona Guo and Priya Vulchi in their 2019 collection, Tell Me Who You Are: Sharing Our Stories of Race, Culture, & Identity, can provide just such personal context for a wide range of works, both fiction and nonfiction. Following their graduation from high school(!), Guo and Vulchi traveled the United States, starting in Anchorage, Alaska, in July 2017, and completing their journey in Charlottesville, Virginia, in February 2018. Along the way, they interviewed more than 500 people and recorded their stories in their own words. Bound together, these stories, each with a photograph of its teller, present a beautiful encyclopedia of the people of the United States, featuring unique experiences, histories, and perspectives that many readers – both adults and students – will not have heard before and/or will recognize themselves in.

Particular excerpts readily lend themselves to connections with texts frequently taught in ELA classrooms. Butler, a man from Montgomery, Alabama, tells the story of his mother, Aurelia Browder, who was the lead plaintiff in the federal court case that overturned Plessy v. Ferguson and legally ended desegregation. This story would provide valuable context for students reading Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice; while Guo and Vulchi’s interview with present-day students at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, provides powerful connections with Melba Pattillo Beals’ memoir Warriors Don’t Cry. 

Louise from Seattle tells of being interned with her family, and all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, just six months before she was supposed to graduate from high school. While she shares her experience of the concentration camps, she also talks about her life afterward and how she feels about being an American now. Louise’s story is an obvious complement to Farewell to Manzanar. The story of Claudette, a rising chef from Chula Vista, California, meanwhile, provides a real-life role-model similar to the heroine of Elizabeth Acevedo’s With the Fire on High.

Tell Me Who You Are provides a wealth of windows and mirrors that allow readers to see aspects of ourselves in others and to see how each of our identities shapes our views and experiences of the world. Each story is short, usually 2-3 pages, so it can be easily accessed once a week or so, allowing students to meet new people and consider their way of living in the world. This collection is also a very human and accessible illustration of intersectionality, a concept Guo and Vulchi return to frequently as they narrate their journey as two young BIPOC women talking to people all around the United States. (The website of CHOOSE, the racial literacy organization they founded, also provides a rich array of resources, including profiles of teachers and K-12 lesson plans across all disciplines.)

Finally, as we began writing this, we shared in the widespread tributes to Beverly Clearly, who passed away this week, at the age of 104. In her honor, let us continue to give our students opportunities to read stories they can see themselves in, to encourage them to “embrace their too much-ness,” and to write the books that they want to read. And let’s continue to create the ELA classrooms we and our students need and want.

Using informational text (and technology!) to help our students make sense of this strange time

Many of us are feeling fairly Zoomed out these days, but there are still those worthwhile virtual meet-ups that rejuvenate our spirits and spark new ideas. Our conversation this week about using informational texts to help our students and ourselves make sense of this strange time was definitely one of those worthy gatherings.

Our conversation focused on four primary themes/takeaways: 1) focusing on purpose and relevance; 2) fostering student engagement; 3) keeping things simple; and 4) being mindful about the difference between online and offline reading.

We started our conversation by talking about a documentary, “Most Dangerous Ways to School: Nicaragua,” that one of our participants was using with her 9^th grade English students. Susan asked the teacher how she planned to assess student engagement while they watched the documentary. She said she had already received some informal responses from students about the video, but she was still thinking about what kind of writing to ask the students to produce after viewing. Susan asked what she wanted students to come away with after watching the video. The teacher responded that she wanted them to gain a greater perspective about the kinds of hardships some students around the world face in just getting to school everyday and possibly to compare those conditions to their own, either during the coronavirus quarantine or in general. Susan agreed that a comparative personal narrative, perhaps drawing upon 2-3 specific details from the video made sense. She stressed that during this time it is especially important to focus on purpose and relevance and to streamline assignments and assessments based on what is most essential as we close out this strange school year.

Susan also asked the teacher if she planned to use any tools like edPuzzle or Flipgrid that would facilitate student responses to and engagement with the video. This is where we were especially grateful that our friend Michele Haiken had joined us. She explained the different uses of the two tools: edPuzzle works well with short videos and embeds questions during the videos, while FlipGrid gives students the opportunity to respond via video.

Susan shared an edPuzzle Audrey had created for their unit on consent connected to Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Speak. The edPuzzle featured several multiple-choice questions embedded in the short, animated video about understanding consent.

Michele then shared her screen to show us how she recently used Flipgrid to get students to respond to a multimedia unit she had built around The Diary of Anne Frank , which included 1) reading book, 2) reading or seeing the play, 3), taking a virtual tour of the Secret Annex (through the Anne Frank Museum), and possibly perusing related material on Google Arts and Culture. Her prompt for all this was quite simple: How can we take inspiration from Anne Frank during this time of isolation?

Michele also talked about using a weekly video to lay out instructions and goals for the week. And she is using Anchor to record herself reading aloud for students in a private podcast, a nice tool that brings her presence into her students’ worlds while also ensuring all students at least auditory access to the text.

Audrey then shared how she has used Perusall, a social annotation tool, to foster engagement among her college students as they navigate reading in isolation without as much classroom support. With Perusall, the instructor can add specific questions for response or the students can simply annotate on their own. The nice aspect of this tool is that it allows students to participate in a community conversation as they are reading. They can indicate questions (and upvote questions they share) and they can respond to or upvote responses they find useful. Responses can also include images and links. There’s even a computer-generated grading tool, so that instructors can assign a score to the annotation work, and easy analytics to note who is responding frequently and substantively.

Despite our excitement about the many tools available, especially right now, we all agreed that keeping things simple is the best course of action for both our students and ourselves. For Michele, this means using the same four tools. For Susan, this meant going back to GoogleDocs to create a guided reading template for a recent New York Times editorial about leadership in a crisis (which you are welcome to copy and use!) that could be shared with students so that they could add responses to the reading prompts and/or annotations via comment, which their classmates could also see and add to (similar to what Audrey did with Perusall).

Susan also mentioned a conversation she had recently with a teacher about a Using Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby unit. She explained that she encouraged the teacher to think about her purpose, given the rapidly approaching end of the school year, and streamline the unit according to her instructional goals. For instance, instead of having the whole class read both articles in the unit, she could assign one to half the class and have them read and discuss it in a breakout room on Zoom or GoogleMeet and then have them present their article to the class.

Michele, however, cautioned that we need to be mindful about the difference between reading in print and online and that we need to tailor our expectations for reading during remote learning. She advocated presenting smaller chunks of reading and streamlining reading assignments overall.

In response, Audrey echoed Michele (and the Anne Frank unit) in noting the importance of giving students a variety of choices and not (inadvertently or otherwise) shutting down options students might want to pursue about a topic, whether it be producing a creative response or following up on a particular aspect of a subject, through links or multimedia.

As should be evident from the above, we had a great time during this inspiring and energizing conversation. Our only regret is that we didn’t quite have enough people to do our beloved vocab skits, which we think would be easy and fun to do using the breakout rooms in Zoom. If you and a few of your colleagues and/or teacher friends would like to schedule such a conversation with us either before the end of the school year, or over the summer, please feel free to reach out to us at usinginfotext at gmail.com.

Stay well, everyone!

Let's Chat About Using Informational Text During Remote Learning and Beyond!

We hope this finds you and your students as well as can be during this strange time. As educators, the set of dynamics and concerns that we are normally in the midst of, especially as we near the finish of a school year, has shifted dramatically. As always we want to care for and support our students while also challenging them to expand their knowledge and develop their skills; however, this global pause brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic has caused us all to question what that means and what it looks like, or should look like, both now and whenever we might return to our non-virtual classrooms and school buildings.

As you likely have over the last several weeks, we have been trying out new tools that enable us to keep doing what we’ve done in the past, and some that have enabled new forms of interaction and learning. It’s great that so many tools and platforms are being offered for free to educators and students right now, but it also creates option anxiety, and who needs anything else to be anxious about right now?

What has grounded us professionally, as well as personally, in the last several weeks has been the virtual conversations we’ve had with colleagues near and far, to share strategies and common concerns, and of course, to offer moral support. So, we’d like to do the same with our Using Informational Text friends.

Informational text certainly has an important place in making sense of this time, and especially when used to help students make connections with literature that depicts other times, places, and peoples experiencing their own cataclysms and everyday lives. So, let’s get together and talk about how to do this work at this time and in whatever the future may hold for teaching and learning.

Please join us on one of the following dates/times (click on the link to register):

Wednesday, May 13, 7-8pm EDT

Thursday, May 14, 4-5pm EDT

Monday, May 18, 3-4pm EDT

Click on the link(s) above to RSVP for your preferred date/time; you will receive the Zoom invitation upon approval of your registration.

Our approach to using informational text has always been about building relevance and engagement. So, the underlying question of our discussion will be: What makes sense now? What is our purpose? We will share ideas about text pairings in our current climate, including strategies for leading a whole-class or small group discussion of a reading via videoconference and ideas for how to use informational text, including media links, to foster engagement and community.

We’d also be happy to join you and your students via whatever remote platform works for you to read and discuss an informational text with you. This moment is particularly conducive to remote guest appearances! Let us know what and when might work for you. Reach out to us via Twitter @usinginfotext or email.

What You Said About Using YA Fiction in the ELA Classroom

Back in August, we asked English teachers in our personal learning and social media networks for their thoughts on how, when, and why they use young adult fiction in their curriculum, particularly novels that feature or focus on sensitive topics. We were excited about the opportunities that these texts provide for students to think about sensitive issues. But we also were wondering about how we help students wrestle with the depictions of challenging experiences, particularly if these texts are assigned as summer reading, leaving students to read and digest these texts on their own. Below, we share the responses to our blog posts and online survey.

For us, this inquiry was sparked by discussions Susan had with a few parents of students new to her school about the sexual content in a couple of the summer reading choices (Looking for Alaska by John Green and Tyrell by Coe Booth). And the challenges involved in incorporating such valuable but complex texts into our curriculum were particularly underscored for us while we were collaborating this summer on an informational text set on Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak. One anonymous response made us feel like we were not alone in our concerns: “Thank you for addressing this! I wrestle with the same issue, and have been working with my colleagues to figure out how to create space for students to process what they have read over the summer in a meaningful and collaborative way once they are back in school.”

According to the responses we received to our survey, 60 percent of the teachers who responded said they teach two or more YA books per year. Most respondents (80%) said they assign YA fiction as choice reading, but whole-class reading was a close second (70%), followed by summer reading (60%). In terms of which YA novels respondents teach, responses ranged from a list of 10 titles to “waiting on approval to incorporate Long Way Downby Jason Reynolds next year.” The full list of titles was surprisingly wide-ranging, with only All American Boys, Speak, Looking for Alaska, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian appearing more than once.

Among the benefits of incorporating YA novels into the ELA curriculum cited by survey respondents were that YA novels are “engaging,” “more relatable,” have “easier language,” and are “written to appeal to students’ age group.” One teacher said that the connections students make with YA plots and characters “open the door not only to excitement about reading (and writing about literature), but also to innovative thinking about the texts,” while another argued that students can become engaged with writing that addresses topics that interest and challenge them, and that they themselves and their issues reflected in the novels.

The difficulties respondents cited included the perception that YA novels “lack literary merit,” and the desire to “balance entertainment with providing works that challenge students’ thinking.” Teachers also noted concerns about profanity and the desire of many school administrators and parents to “shield their children from the explicit nature of many of the [YA] books.”

One respondent wrote: “while I don't have a ‘fear’ of discussing difficult/sensitive topics in the classroom, the difficulty can be facilitating an appropriate and respectful conversation among students when addressing the topics in a YA novel.” Another said, “They are a springboard for discussions of deeper themes and issues. They allow students to experience risky situations vicariously, critically analyzing choices and effects. Students get to see themselves in literature which is validating.”

Overall, teachers encouraged others to take the YA leap and “do it.” A couple suggested pairing the YA novel with a classic text, short stories, or informational text. Others stressed preparation: reading the entire book first and being ready to answer questions from both students and concerned adults. One urged teachers to “let students dictate the direction of the conversation. Teachers anticipate the issues students want to discuss, and even get anxious over things the novel might bring up for students. Every class is different and will focus on different things.”

In terms of the specific issue of assigning YA novels that focus or touch on sensitive topics (i.e., sex, suicide, violence, etc.) as summer reading, teachers emphasized the importance of knowing your audience, including both parents and students. A couple suggested introducing the topics before the end of the school year, if possible, or providing a packet of readings and resources to support both students and parents in discussing the books together. Several cautioned teachers to assign such books only as a choice. Some advocated providing descriptive blurbs about the books to parents without “redflagging” potentially sensitive content. Others said providing an explicit warning about particular content was a good idea.

Several stressed the importance, however, of creating space and time in the classroom for discussing any sensitive topics that appear in summer reading books to help students contextualize them in terms of their own lives, their communities, and society as a whole. As @MissNikkiIn5th wrote: “I teach fifth graders but feel that we need to give kids enough support to fully digest a text with a sensitive topic. They need to be able to ask questions, discuss, etc.” 

Sixty percent of the respondents to our survey said they had been challenged about assigning YA novels, by parents, administrators, etc. Topics cited as the basis for those challenges ranged from sex and violence to cigarette smoking.

We were impressed, though not surprised, by teachers’ principled and courageous responses to such challenges. For example, one teacher wrote: “We have a district policy modeled after NCTE's guidelines. All challenges were handled between me and the parent - the kids all read the books. Why? 1. I pre-teach many important issues. 2. I explain my rationale for teaching the book and the merits of exposing students to the topics/ideas in spite of the objectionable scenes/content.”

Another respondent cited the ALA policy on book challenges: “The whole text needs to be looked at instead of objecting based on something taken out of context, and parents can weigh in on what is appropriate for their individual child, but not necessarily for a whole class. The only time this didn't work was with Thirteen Reasons Why. When the Netflix series came out, it was pulled from our school library even though students had been reading it for a decade. The show is problematic, but I thought we would have done a better job of helping students process [the issues surrounding the show] if we had kept the lines of dialogue about the book and show open.”

One teacher offered some interesting reflections on being personally challenged by parents: “I have personally been challenged by 2 parents. My administration has also been challenged. One setting was a back to school night and the parents actually broke out into discussion as to why the books (Tyrelland Kendra) were good for discussion with their kids. Another time a parent said her daughter was a very young 13 and was mortified by the content. She suggested a note be added to the summer reading packet indicating explicit sexual situations. I thought that was a great idea and I complied.” (Note: Teachers considering such a red-flag might want to review NCTE guidelines.)

According to the majority of responses, conversations between teachers and parents, sometime proactively initiated by the teacher, usually resolved any concerns, and sometimes even led to students and parents reading a book together. Sometimes principals supported their teachers, while others changed the book; and sometimes teachers themselves opted to provide an alternate text.

So, for now, here are our takeaways:

1. Many of our colleagues agree that YA literature is compelling and engaging. Teachers worried about the literary merit concern (one we don’t particularly share) can pair YA literature with more canonical texts.

2. Using YA literature effectively requires context and opportunities for conversation. Again, pairings, including short fiction, poetry, or informational texts, can be useful in providing that context and helping to shape those conversations. (Please share your ideas for doing so in the comments below.) Set your students up for success with summer reading by bookending that independent reading with classroom conversations.

3. Work with parents, colleagues, and administrators to develop and utilize a thoughtful and consistent strategy to justify and explain your choices of YA literature. And employ the resources of NCTE and ALA as critical backup!

Our biggest takeaway is this: Our gratitude to be part of a thoughtful and brave community of ELA teachers determined to use YA literature to help their students become better readers, writers, and thinkers in a complex and challenging world!

LIST OF YA NOVELS TAUGHT BY SURVEY RESPONDENTS

All American Boys
Code Orange

Crossing Ebeneezer

Flush

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

How It Went Down

In Sight of Stars

Inside Out and Back Again

Jumped In

Kendra

Looking for Alaska

Maniac Magee

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

Monster

My Brother Sam Is Dead

Oliver

Persepolis

Piecing Me Together

Speak

Still Life With Tornado

Tangerine

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
The Afterlife of Holly Chase

The Book Thief

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

The Cay

The Chocolate War

The Hate U Give

The Outsiders

The Usual Rules

They Both Die at the End

Tuck Everlasting

Tyrell

Seeking Input and Sharing Resources

We hope you've enjoyed some well-earned time to relax and recharge this summer that's sparked new ideas for the upcoming school year. We are enjoying working on some new projects, one of which we'd like your input on. More on that in a moment, but first, some resources to help your planning for the new year:

• Using Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby features classroom-ready text sets that support critical, timely conversations around race, immigration, and inequality in connection with Fitzgerald's novel. These readings, accompanied by vocabulary activities and reading and writing/discussion prompts, support student inquiry into questions like "Why Should We Care About Economic Inequality?" and "What Is Tom Worried About--Is Civilization 'Going to Pieces'?" Check out our blog for ideas on how to put present-day issues in dialogue with Gatsby.

• Our volume on To Kill a Mockingbird presents text sets that examine the relationship between Calpurnia and Scout, question whether Atticus is a hero, and help your students to think critically about (and to even "read against") canonical works like Mockingbird.

• If you are teaching A Raisin in the Sun, our second volume will help you underscore the enduring relevance of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark play with ready-to-use text sets on housing discrimination past and present, the violence surrounding housing desegregation, and more.

• Looking for ways to collaborate with your content-area colleagues around literacy? Check out Connecting Across Disciplines: Collaborating with Informational Text. This volume offers practical strategies for initiating cross-disciplinary collaboration and developing students’ disciplinary literacy skills, as well as a sample unit based on a science article and an excerpt from Lord of the Flies.

While we love finding engaging connections with the canonical works we teach, we are also huge fans of a lot of the young adult fiction that teachers are increasingly incorporating into their curricula. So, we've been working on a new text set centered around one of the most beloved YA novels -- more on that soon! In the meantime, we've been thinking about how/when/why we do assign YA novels in our ELA classes -- especially those that touch upon some of the challenging and sensitive issues that students often face. And we'd love to get your input, so please check out our previous post  and/or complete this short survey.

Finally, if you’d like hands-on training in our approach to using informational text, contact us about scheduling a professional development session in your school or district. We offer half-day and full-day workshops for both English and/or content-area teachers. If you are in NJ, we hope to see you at NJCTE in September and please join us at NJEA in November. Otherwise, we hope to see you at NCTE in Baltimore!

We hope our resources help you create rewarding learning experiences for you and your students. If you use any of our materials, please send us your feedback. We would also greatly appreciate it if you would post a review on Goodreads or Amazon. Thank you again for your interest -- and everything you do for your students!

Why and How Do You YA?

While summer reading for us often includes tackling at least one or two pedagogically oriented texts (Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain for Susan; Teaching Naked for Audrey), it also means inhaling several young adult novels that we’ve been itching to read since a colleague or student suggested it weeks or months earlier. (Consumed by us so far: With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo, Allegedly by Tiffany D. Jackson, Odd One Out by Nic Stone, Still Life With Tornado by A.S. King, The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater, Darius the Great Is Not Okay by Adib Khorram, and On the Come Up by Angie Thomas (finally!).)

Though we dive into these YA novels for our own pleasure without apology, of course we also do so with at least part of our brains considering how/where/whether we might incorporate any of them into our own instruction, add them to our classroom libraries, or just keep them in mind for the right student or colleague to recommend them to. 

At the same time, Susan, in her role as curriculum and instruction supervisor at her school, has been engaging in her annual round of conversations with parents who raise concerns about some of the YA novels (Looking for Alaska by John Green and Tyrell by Coe Booth, in particular) that have been assigned as choices for summer reading. And while she fully supports her English teachers in their choices and believes that these novels give students the opportunity to think about challenging and sensitive issues and experiences that they may soon encounter, she has also been wondering about the fact that teachers often assign these books for summer reading, leaving students on their own to read them and wrestle with depictions of experiences and issues they may not be prepared for, sometimes with no follow-up discussion when the school year starts.

So we’re torn: We think it’s important to expose students to books that give them the opportunity to engage with and think about experiences and issues they might not have encountered themselves in a fictional space. But assigning these engaging and relevant YA books as independent summer reading might be just as problematic, although in a different way, than sending students off on their own to read The Great Gatsby or Their Eyes Were Watching God. However, we also are acutely aware – as we are currently working on an informational text set focused on Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson -- of how challenging it can be to teach and discuss these books in class.

And so we’d love to hear your thoughts – please feel free to add your comments below and/or complete this brief survey about your experiences with YA literature. We’ll report back on all the great wisdom you’ve shared in an upcoming post!

Guest blog: The Merging of Media in the English Classroom -- A Summertime Reflection

Today, we welcome a guest blog from New Jersey English and journalism teacher Stacy Gerst:

Admittedly, the curriculum for the British literature course I teach follows an incredibly scripted framework: a chronological, historical approach to the traditional literary works that serve as the building blocks of the traditional literary canon. The problem? I’m not working with the “traditional” students that my predecessors had in mind when crafting this curriculum. And the department is not ready to update it yet. Consequently, the struggle is “more-than-real” as my colleagues and I try to overcome the roadblocks that exist in our relentless pursuit of the profession’s elusive Holy Grail: student engagement. 

From its origins in the Anglo-Saxon period, works from historic gems such as The Exeter Book lack appeal to the average student who struggles to connect to literature in meaningful ways. The lamentations of the poem speakers, often mourning their cold, difficult existence at sea and the daunting conditions that threaten survival, often fall on deaf ears. Put off by the external trappings of Anglo-Saxon life, many students close themselves off to engagement and stop short of exploring some of the broader concepts that transcend time or space, such as the impact that exile has on the human condition. 

Back in 2015, I came across a story on my USA Today app that caught my attention with the following headline: “More than a decade after release, they all come back.” The multi-chapter story, written by Kevin Johnson, follows the plight of Silvestre Sergovia and the impact that solitary confinement has on him and other prisoners. Since 2015, political attitudes toward this practice has shifted greatly, especially when the Obama administration took a firm stance against its use with juveniles. Awareness has served as a catalyst for positive change. This was obviously an issue that mattered, but how could I integrate this into my instruction in a meaningful and relevant way?

It is at this juncture of pedagogical dilemma and innovative thinking that I could apply the theory and work that Fisch and Chenelle laid out in Connecting Across Disciplines: Collaborating with Informational Text (2016). During a session led by the pair at the NJCTE Fall 2018 conference, they challenged attendees to rethink their approach to the canon and revitalize it for contemporary audiences by linking them to relevant informational texts. The key to this lies in the use of non-fiction, an element that advocates of practical learning as well as the Common Core hold in highest regard (and rightly so!). 

After studying “The Seafarer,” “The Wanderer,” and “The Wife’s Lament” from our textbook, I assigned the Johnson article to students along with several straightforward reading comprehension questions. The article lent itself well to this because 1.) it was long enough to challenge their stamina and 2.) was complex enough that they had to do more than just skim. This is increasingly an issue with my students; very few, if any, fully read a text when they can take a shortcut. I attribute this in part to the efficiency of search engines to “cache” information in articles for them or using Ctrl + F (Windows) or ⌘ Command + F (Mac). (Of course, the impact of technology, media, and screen stimuli on attention spans play a role, but that’s a blog post for another day.) 

But how could I lead students to make the thematic connection between the two? I posed the following to students for a more extended written reflection:

In the conclusion to the piece, Kevin Johnson writes, “Segovia, meanwhile, believes he has the strength to defeat the demons of isolation and make it to the other side, where he intends to remain this time.”

Explain how “the demons of isolation” affect both Segovia and the speakers of the Anglo-Saxon exile poetry. Use textual evidence from the article and the poems to back up your claims.

I needed the comprehension questions to get my students to this point. The class discussion that followed revealed the dilemma that many students felt regarding crime, punishment, the criminal justice system, and the conditions inside US prisons. Several acknowledged that it was not as clear-cut as they once thought it was. 

One student response offered a personal anecdote: his uncle spent several years in prison, and his personality had changed profoundly as a result. “He isn’t the same person.”  Regrettably, the change was not in the vein of “He realized his issues, worked on them, and came out better.” Instead, his uncle was incredibly distant, struggled to connect to family, and didn’t function very well in his community. As the rest of the class listened to this, I could observe a greater sense of empathy in their responses to this raw (and rare) moment of exposure. Here was their friend, who trusted the group enough to share this intimate story about a person he cared about, who was impacted by this issue, who was impacted by exile, the same feeling explored by the Anglo-Saxon poets many years before. 

Lessons such as these are the ones that leave a lasting impact on students when they leave our classrooms. 

Based on the success I experienced with Chenelle and Fisch’s approach, I was inspired to integrate another literary work, Les Miserables, to expand upon this theme and social issue. Although the work was French, I felt confident that no one would argue with exposing students to another established canonical work. For the sake of time and student engagement, I used the 1998 film, directed by Billie August, and, on the whole, my classes found the story riveting, emotional, and captivating (just as readers and audiences have for years). But again: how could I integrate informational text and content to engage students and connect them to relevant social issues? 

One of the pivotal questions explored in Hugo’s story is whether or not “reform is a discredited fantasy” as Javert claims in the film. Here again, my news media consumption worked to my advantage when a 2017 news article about Shaka Senghor came to mind.  Sengor (whose 2017 memoir Writing My Wrongs: Live and Redemption in an American Prison I have since read and recommend) explores prison life and the parole system in a way that parallels Valjean’s experience in Les Miserables. I created comprehension questions for students to answer in response to the news article as well as Sengor’s 2014 TED Talk titled, “Why your worst deeds don’t define you.” The integration of both informational text and video media was especially effective for instruction. 

Just as before, the goal was to have students make connections between multiple works. I include a few examples below:

• One similarity between Victor Hugo’s character Jean Valjean and Shaka Senghor is that both experienced a “transformative” moment. Discuss what it was for each of them and what impact it had on them.

• While Valjean was able to redeem himself for his past misdeeds, Fantine was not. Hugo uses this to highlight another social issue: the treatment of women at this time. In what ways was she “held hostage to her past”? 

• According to Senghor, in the article, how do laws regarding parole make it challenging for released prisoners to start over? How was this true for Valjean in Les Miserables?

I will continue on this journey to create a more engaging curriculum that connects those in my classroom to contemporary issues while getting exposure to the classics. This, perhaps, is the most practical approach I’ve encountered so far and thank Susan and Audrey for sharing their findings and ideas with others in our profession.

Is it time to replace Mockingbird?

In response to a Tweet by teacher Jacqueline Stallworth (@thebigseablog) about why she stopped teaching TKAM, Laurie Halse Anderson recently asked her Twitter followers, “Are you still teaching To Kill a Mockingbird? Why?” The result has been a vibrant, energetic discussion. We encourage students and teachers of TKAM to read and think about these critical issues (as teachers in Duluth, Minn., have been doing so recently), and we want to celebrate the fact that many of us are claiming space in our schools and/or via social media to think carefully about the complex issue of what we think students should read and why. For us, this is an exciting, important discussion with no simple answers.

That said, we have a few points to add on this topic.

The most important thing, we think, when considering what texts should and shouldn’t be taught in the classroom is the ultimate goal: We want students to read. If they don’t read, nothing else really matters. And no one should underestimate the challenge of getting students today to read. We love/hate Penny Kittle’s video, “Why Students Don’t Read What Is Assigned in Class.” As teachers, we work hard to engage our students with the texts we are teaching, but there is no shame in admitting that this is one of the biggest challenges English educators face. Each of us as teachers brings different skill sets to this challenge. Each of us finds different texts exciting and relevant. Just as importantly, each student, each class of students, and each moment in the classroom can render one text the perfect text to teach and another text a heavy lift.

Next in importance to the issue of getting students to actually do the reading, we think, is the challenge of getting students to be thoughtful, critical readers, who can understand and articulate why reading matters and what’s important about a text. We’ve written and talked about Audrey’s first year-college students’ memory of their high school experience with Gatsby, for example. Her students had vague recollections of symbols, the green light, and rich people. Some remembered the idea of the American Dream. Few could articulate an idea of why Fitzgerald’s text matters or why it’s worth reading. 

If students can’t articulate what matters about a text, does it really make a difference whether they pass their eyes over the pages? Or remember that the green light was a symbol of something? Or that the text somehow connected with some vague idea about the American Dream?

Of course, it’s hard for a teenager or early college student to articulate why a text matters. But surely that’s one of our critical tasks in the classroom. 

Having paid respect to the challenges of getting students to read and to read critically, we can turn to the questions: Is it time for TKAM to be replaced? Has the time come to update this text?

Perhaps. Aaron Sorkin has tried an update of sorts in his new Broadway production, which, among other things, underscores the links between the current American and international climate of white supremacy and the historically-specific racism of Bob Ewell, Maycomb, and the 30s KKK. Like Spike Lee in BlacKKKlansman, Sorkin uses TKAM to connect the past and the present and to remind us of our ugly history and its many-tentacled connections to today.

Sorkin struggles, however, to do more to give voice to the African-American perspective in TKAM. He tries some tweaks, but ultimately, the focus and perspective in his play, as in Lee’s novel, belong to Scout and Atticus, not Calpurnia and Tom Robinson.

Whatever else it may be and whatever it may do in terms of interrogating issues of race and justice, TKAM is not a novel written from an African-American perspective. It does not offer students the opportunity to read a narrative that represents the viewpoint of an African-American writer or character. And surely we can agree that our students deserve to see many different perspectives, written by a range of different writers, in the texts they read. That’s one argument for replacing TKAM. There are many, many wonderful rich and complex texts by authors of color out there, and students deserve to see a variety of texts and authors in the curriculum and the classroom. 

That said, we can’t wait for a revision of TKAM from the perspective of Zeebo, Calpurnia’s son, or Lula, the African-American woman who objects to Scout and Jem’s presence in the church, or perhaps one of Tom’s children. Young writers out there, get going!

Such a re-writing would be particularly important because TKAM is such an important text in American cultural history. That may not be reason enough for it still to be taught, but TKAM’s cultural capital makes it a particularly useful text for students to be able to think critically about. For some of us, the ability to navigate and think critically about this text is one reason to still teach it. In fact, it is a valuable opportunity to teach students how to “read against” a canonical text.

How do we get students to do that work of thinking critically about TKAM? How do we ensure we are teaching this complex and problematic text well? For us, paired texts are the key.

In Using Informational Text to Teach TKAM, we offer selections to make it easier for students to do this kind of work. A brief reading on entails, for example, unpacks the class politics of Maycomb, allowing students to understand the complex caste system within Maycomb, and why the Ewell’s poverty is different from the Cunningham’s. Excerpts from memoirs by the Scottsboro boys allow readers to think critically about Scout’s youthful and clueless perception and representation of the near-lynching of Tom. Consideration of Chief Justice Earl Warren’s decision in Loving v. Virginia contextualizes Dolphus Raymond’s drunken subterfuge and reminds us that both in the 30s when the novel was set and in 1960, when the novel was published, interracial marriage was criminal in some areas of the U.S. We also include pieces by Stephen Jones and David Margolick that raise questions about Atticus’s heroism and the continued challenges for lawyers of representing politically unpopular clients.

Important, critical work can be done in the classroom with TKAM.

The publication of Go Set a Watchman created even more possibilities for engaging pairings. We have a piece, to be published in Mockingbird Grows Up: Re-Reading Harper Lee Since Watchman, edited by Jonathan S. Cullick and Cheli Reutter (U of Tennessee P, 2020), centered around Calpurnia and the representation of black women, particularly nannies. Our lesson opens with a photograph, titled “Quaker Oats’s Aunt Jemima,” which depicts the seemingly loving relationship between an older black nanny and her young white charge and aligns with young Scout’s untroubled view of a nurturing Calpurnia. We then add to the discussion an excerpt from “Interview: A Perspective on the 1930s,” which offers a discussion among three now-elderly white women who, like Scout, grew up with black nannies in the 1930s South, which allows students to see the women’s blindspots about the loving, “wonderful” black people with whom they interacted. Next, we add an interview with Dorothy Bolden, an African-American woman who worked as a domestic in the 1930s South and subsequently founded the National Domestic Workers Union, in an audio excerpt, archived at the Voices of Labor Oral History Project on the Georgia State University Library website. In her own powerful and challenging language, Bolden describes the narrow “chalk line” African-Americans had to walk to earn low wages in the limited employment options available to them. Bolden’s focus is not on the attachment between white children and their black caregivers but instead on the “system” of domestic labor in which those caregivers were respected -- but only within the house -- paid poorly, and forced to walk a fine line of acquiescence and silence. 

When we then turn to the relationship between Scout and Calpurnia, students have built an informative context in which to consider the relationship between Scout and Calpurnia. They are now ready to examine the key moments foregrounding that complex relationship, including Calpurnia’s “double life” and “command of two languages” at church in Mockingbird and the hostile, remote Calpurnia in Watchman who stiffly assumes “company manners” and rejects the now-adult Jean Louise.

Should TKAM still be taught? There’s no easy answer here. But what’s critically important is that we keep asking the question – about TKAM and about all the texts we teach. Which texts should we teach and why? The answers surely should change, from time to time, place to place, classroom to classroom, and teacher to teacher.

Ultimately, what matters most is that we have and continue to have these sorts of discussions about the books, like TKAM, that we teach.

Finding purpose and politics in Gatsby at PCTELA18

It was very early and very dark when we began our journey to Harrisburg, PA, to present at the Pennsylvania Council of Teachers of English annual conference, #PCTELA18. Audrey had been to the national affiliate meeting for NCTE, where leaders of all the affiliates gather and share ideas and resources, and met some of the dynamic PCTELA board members, and we were very excited to get to hear the amazing A.S. King speak, so we knew it would be worth the trip.

It sounded good at the time, but when we had to get up at 4am and drive through NJ and PA in the dark, we began to question why we were doing this! As always, we started to feel energized as we arrived at the conference and left feeling inspired and ready to take on the world (if a little tired). Isn’t that what’s so great about NCTE and the affiliates – how they harness and focus our energies and remind us of the amazing community of educators to which we belong.

We presented our latest incarnation of our work, entitled for this forum, Gatsby: 1925 or 2018?

We opened our presentation with our newest favorite tech tool, Mentimeter. We asked our audience the following: When you think of Gatsby, what words come to mind? Mentimeter did the rest, in real time; how awesome!

We chuckled over “overrated,” bemoaned the “green light” (Audrey’s bugaboo), and noted the presence of “economic inequality,” “privilege,” and “wealth.”

From there, and invoking the conference theme, “The Stories of Our Lives,” we launched into our discussion of how The Great Gatsby, a text written and set in the 1920s and taught regularly in many, many English classrooms, can be taught as a topical, relevant text that interrogates fundamental issues -- past, present, and future -- about our culture and beliefs. We explored key issues in Gatsby – white supremacy and nationalism, the difficulties of economic mobility, economic inequality, anti-Semitism, and the social psychology of privilege and entitlement – and tried to unpack how to use this canonical text to create space for difficult, critical conversations.

For us, it was fascinating to talk pedagogy with PCTELA members who self-identified as people teaching in the big red state of PA. For both of us, teaching in urban Northern New Jersey, the politics are enormously different. The energy and engagement in the room was palpable; several people interjected mid-session with questions and comments (a presenter’s greatest delight!). 

We thought some of the concerns our audience raised and our views on them worth sharing, as we know that teachers across the country, particularly in the redder pockets of our nation, are grappling with how to navigate a tricky political landscape while still ensuring that our classrooms are spaces for:

1. critical thinking about big issues that matter (and not just the green light!);

2. students to think through and contextualize the drama of our particular moment through the context of literature;

3. difficult conversations.

For example, one person at PCTELA asked us whether we were worried about injecting politics into the classroom when, for example, we focus on the white nationalism and economic inequality in Gatsby. Another asked whether we include opposing viewpoints. Still another asked about whether we worried that students would just give us back what we want to hear. These are legitimate, challenging concerns that are worth careful consideration.

Our strategy is two-fold.

First, we try to think about our work as focused on extracting the politics out of the text(s), rather than injecting our politics. Of course, we focus on things we care about. And so our extraction, our focus, is of necessity going to change based on time and place. Trump, Kavanaugh, Roseanne (some of the connections that have recently caught our attention) produce our interest in how the text navigates white nationalism, fear of non-white immigrants, white male privilege, and the anger and entitlement of those in positions of power.

Reading Gatsby in 2018 is and should be different from reading Gatsby in 1950. Isn’t that, after all, the beauty of literature? Audrey likes to think that if anything makes a text worthy of canonical status, it is that text’s capacity to generate conversation and merit scrutiny in different times and places. (But then again, that may be a function of the reader and an altogether different conversation.) 

That said, no one in 2018 can underestimate the trepidation teachers (and students too) feel about these difficult conversations. Yet, as one of our PCTELA audience members asserted, based on his experience teaching at a wealthy, all-male private school with what he described as a mostly Republican student body, young people are eager to talk about these things. If we open the door and ground our discussion in Gatsby and companion texts like excerpts from Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, (inspiration for Fitzgerald’s Goddard), or social psychologist Paul Piff’s “Does Money Make You Mean,” an engaging TED Talk about behavioral experiments involving games of monopoly, driving habits, and more, we create space for dialogue in our classroom. 

We don’t have to be explicit in discussing Trump or Kavanaugh; for a variety of reasons, we may not be comfortable doing so. But we can frame our discussions of Gatsby and extract the politics from Fitzgerald’s text, so that students have the space and language to think and talk about the big issues that they are seeing all around them. That’s our hope based on our experience, albeit in a very different environment.

After our talk, we had the amazing privilege to hear contemporary young adult author A.S. King address PCTELA. Wow! Her remarks about the importance of young adult literature resonated so strongly with us. King talked about how she couldn’t connect with the four novels (!) she was assigned in the entirety of her high school experience. The Scarlett Letter, she noted, seemed to contain all sorts of issues that should have been meaningful to her, but the Puritans, she admitted, “were a real buzz-kill.” And so she skipped Hawthorne.

S.E. Hinton was another story, for King. (And later, unaccountably, The Satanic Verses.)

Her broader point was that contemporary young adult literature has such an important place in our curriculum, particularly as it keeps young readers reading. King noted sardonically those gatekeepers who say that they don’t believe in contemporary young adult literature and retorted, “it’s not like fairies; it exists.” Indeed. And the passion that so many young readers have for this literature only serves to underscore the importance of our finding ways to make ALL the texts we teach meaningful, relevant, and purposeful for our students. 

Our work is cut out for us, especially for those who teach in schools where the curriculum is still dominated by mostly canonical and somewhat inaccessible texts, like Gatsby. But as we tried to show in our presentation, it is precisely Gatsby’s staid canonicity that makes it so full of insurgent and subversive possibilities. This is the work we love, and that so many English teachers do so creatively, ambitiously, and thoughtfully.

So, all in all, an inspiring and impressive PCTELA conference. We left invigorated, and on the way home stopped in Hershey for a tour of Chocolate World (Susan’s first time). Sweet!

The Atlantic: How Gatsby explains Trump

If you have been following our work on Gatsby, you know we are interested in the ways in which Fitzgerald’s novel is eerily resonant with many of the issues we are facing at this moment: anti-Semitism, anti-immigrant sentiment and general xenophobia, economic inequality, white nationalist anxiety, and more. Time and again we are intrigued and amazed at the ways in which Fitzgerald’s 1925 text anticipates and reflects the issues of our current historical moment (which may be to say that these issues continue to appear and reappear across time).

In any case, we were thrilled to read Rosa Inocencio Smith’s recent, brilliant piece in The Atlantic, which addresses many of the issues with which we have been grappling. In “How The Great Gatsby Explains Trump,” Smith reads the novel as “a surprisingly apt primer on the [current] president of the United States.”

In her accessible and engagingly written (and highly teachable) article, Smith explores both the superficial and deep connections between Tom Buchanan and Trump and argues that Gatsby, as a story about power under threat, can be read as a “warning” of how power “can render truth irrelevant.”

As Smith details, all the main characters in Gatsby, not just Tom, use their wealth and power to assert a kind of deceitful privilege in the world. Jordan cheats at golf. Nick buys a financial practice to start a new life, leaving the Midwest and a “tangle” of a relationship behind. Daisy, with her “voice full of money,” rarely, as Smith notes, “says anything she means.” As Nick notes, it’s almost as if Daisy and Tom belong to a “distinguished secret society,” in which power, not truth, is the real currency.

For Smith, the key warning in Gatsby is not simply Tom’s “carelessness about truth and consequences,” but the ways in which that carelessness infects and is mirrored in so many of the other characters in the novel. Tom, then, like Trump, exposes the “gaps in America’s ideal of itself – the ugly currents of its power, the limits of its possibilities.” The disconnect in Gatsby between truth and power is underscored in the injustice of the novel’s closing: Nick can only shake Tom’s hand and muse that “There was nothing I could say except the one unutterable fact that it wasn’t true.”

Closely linked to Smith’s discussion of power and privilege in Gatsby and Trump is a fascinating discussion by Paul Krugman in The New York Times, “The Angry White Male Caucus.” Krugman argues that Trump’s and Brett Kavanaugh’s white male anger represents a “sort of high-end resentment, the anger of highly-privileged people who nonetheless feel that they aren’t privileged enough or that their privileges might be eroded by social change.” Doesn’t this toxic mix of privilege and anger also sound like Tom, a man of immense wealth who is unaccountably worried about the colored races taking over the world and who, in the course of the novel, comes to face his worst nightmare when he discovers that Mr. Nobody from Nowhere is sleeping with his wife?

Krugman places Kavanaugh’s (and Trump’s white male anger) squarely in the context of privilege, arguing that both men exemplify the “hard-partying sons of privilege who counted on their connections to insulate them from any consequences from their actions, up to and including behavior toward women.” Krugman suggests that that this kind of privilege is in fact under siege in the increasingly diverse United States and that “nothing makes a man accustomed to privilege angrier than the prospect of losing some of that privilege, especially … the suggestion that people like him are subject to the same rules as the rest of us.”

Of course, Gatsby makes clear that Tom is not subject to the same rules as the rest of us. Gatsby, in the end, does not represent any threat to Tom; even the prize, Daisy, returns to her rightful position with Mr. Somebody. The status quo is maintained, albeit unsettlingly, within Gatsby, although the novel registers both the threat to and the rage of its Trumpian Tom.

Those of us who teach in places where candid and open discussion of the current political scene is possible are lucky to be able to teach Gatsby in a moment where its relevance can infuse our teaching with the kind of purpose that is so critical in the classroom. The connections between Gatsby and Trump underscore for us and our students why this text matters and how it enables critically important conversations. Smith’s article, for example, illustrates exactly how pertinent and revealing careful literary analysis can be beyond the English classroom.

For those of us for whom such explicit discussions would be more dangerous (and we know that ours is a difficult moment for academic freedom), it is worth remembering the vital work of opening up space in the classroom for conversations vis-à-vis the very traditional and canonical Gatsby about power, truth, privilege and xenophobia. Even when we don’t link these issues explicitly with Trump or Kavanaugh as part of our classroom conversations, our thoughtful attention to the issues of power and its abuses in Gatsby can serve as a catalyst, provoking and allowing students to make their own connections in their writing or in their private conversations outside the classroom.

And while it may seem risky to engage in such difficult discussions in our classrooms, as we discussed with the dedicated teachers we met at the NJCTE Fall Conference last weekend, it is far scarier to allow our students to leave our classrooms without having the opportunity to learn how to engage in the kinds of  thoughtful, critical conversations that our democracy hinges upon. If you share the same concerns and happen to be in Pennsylvania on October 19, please join us at PCTELA to continue this conversation.

Another source for Gatsby's "this man Goddard"

If you’ve been following our work on Gatsby, you are probably already well aware of how often we write about Lothrop Stoddard, whose ideas are parroted by Fitzgerald’s Tom Buchanan as the work of “this man Goddard.”

Goddard was Lothrop Stoddard, who wrote about the threat of the “colored races” to the white world and white world supremacy. In his 1920 text, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, which Tom mis-cites as “The Rise of The Colored Empires,” Stoddard warns of the “influx of undesirable elements” and the devastation of “our race-heritage” because America has not been “reserved for the descendants of the picked Nordics of colonial times.” Tom rephrases Stoddard’s ideas: “if we don’t look out, the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. . . . It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

Stoddard’s text is in public domain and accessible online, but critical, relevant excerpts are available in a classroom-ready format, accompanied by discussion and writing prompts and other teaching materials, in our recent volume, Using Informational Text to Teach The Great Gatsby.

We find the Stoddard text critical and compelling, not just in terms of understanding Gatsby but also in relation to the heightened rhetoric around immigration and nativism that has emerged under the Trump presidency. Using Stoddard excerpts, in connection with a discussion of Tom’s discussion of the “Goddard,” allows an entry-point for these historically-specific ideas about white nationalism in the classroom (with or without explicit connection to the contemporary Trump context).

Imagine our surprise and intellectual delight to discover there is even more to be made of Fitzgerald’s “Goddard.”

It turns out, as we learned recently from a delightful blog from Museum Hack (a great organization that you should check out if you don’t already know about them), that there was also a prominent Goddard in the early 20th century who, like Lothrop Stoddard, was focused on the dangers of immigrants. Henry H. Goddard, a psychologist, was an intelligence researcher, who coined the term “moron” in order to categorize with more scientific precision those he considered cognitively disabled. Hmm. (Note – “moron” is no longer a scientifically precise or acceptable medical term.)

In 1913, Goddard conducted tests of immigrants at Ellis Island. He studied Italians, Jews, Hungarians, and Russians. His findings, “Mental Tests and the Immigrant,” published in a journal called The Journal of Delinquency and accessible online, outline the tests he performed and his conclusions: “that half of such a group of immigrants [is] feeble-minded.” While noting the seeming impossibility of his findings, he explains that this group “is of a decidedly different character from the earlier immigration … we are now getting the poorest of each race.”

And the poorest of each race are more likely to be feeble-minded? Apparently.

For Goddard, the question is how best to treat these immigrants. He concludes: “Morons as a class, if taken early and trained carefully and so kept from becoming vicious and criminal, could be successfully employed if the employer understands them . . . .”

Still, Goddard worries about the children of these morons, who will, as he concedes, be Americans. And so he ponders, “Shall we exclude the moron immigrants because they are likely to have moron children who will become troublesome citizens?”

As Joella Straley writes on National Public Radio’s Code Switch, the year after Goddard presented his findings, deportation numbers for “feeble-mindedness” doubled.

We have yet to uncover any evidence that Fitzgerald was aware of Henry H. Goddard and his eugenicist work, but the re-naming of Stoddard as Goddard is surely no coincidence.

Regardless, a brief perusal of a few paragraphs of Goddard’s work, such as an excerpt from “Mental Tests and the Immigrant,” can serve to underscore the anti-immigrant xenophobia of the world of Gatsby and the ways in which Tom (and Nick’s) racism and anti-Semitism form part of a broader landscape of nativism. An excerpt from Henry Goddard, then, could be easily put into dialogue with Gatsby and, using the discussion and writing prompts and multimedia links provided in our unit on Stoddard, even more deeply complicate ours and our students’ understanding of Fitzgerald’s novel. 

Revamp your Lord of the Flies unit with Prasad's Damselfly

If you are teaching William Golding’s Lord of the Flies this year, consider including Chandra Prasad’s debut YA novel Damselfly as one of the texts in your unit. Yes, we usually talk about using informational text to teach literature, but at the heart of our work is putting texts in dialogue and asking what voices or perspectives are missing from canonical works and common interpretations of them.

In our volume on cross-disciplinary collaboration, we present a unit based on an excerpt from William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and a New York Times science article on the study of aggression in male fruit flies. Our goal with that unit is to support students in using scientific knowledge to critically evaluate what Golding depicts in his novel and to develop their understanding of aggression and violence in the present day.

That said, like many other readers, we have some issues with Lord of the Flies, particularly its exclusive focus on very privileged white English boys. Indeed, when we wrote about the abovementioned texts in a piece for the New York Times Learning Network, we included links to additional pieces on bullying and aggression among girls that teachers and students could use to expand their discussion of such timely themes.

Prasad’s Damselfly is an engaging present-day take on Golding’s premise, particularly because it eschews the easy artifice of switching the gender of a single-sex group of teens stranded on a remote island in the Pacific to female (as an upcoming and already widely criticized film adaptation of Lord of the Flies – written and directed by two men – is planned to do – and as Libba Bray’s YA novel Beauty Queens more imaginatively has done).

Instead Damselfly intersects with and updates Golding’s plot, presenting a mixed-gender, mixed-race, yet still privileged 21^st-century group of American teenagers, the members of an elite private school’s fencing team, who had been on their way to a tournament in Japan when their plane crashed. After washing up on various parts of the island (implied to be the same island Golding’s boys crashed on), the survivors work together to build and acquire what they need to survive, but the social dynamics of their previous life and threats from an unseen fellow inhabitant of the island start to unravel their initially united resolve.  

Prasad’s novel is in some ways more engaging than Golding’s because she complicates the relationships between the teens by providing more backstory about them, particularly the Indian-American narrator Samantha and her best friend Mel, who is white. While Samantha attends the elite Drake Rosemont and even plays on its fencing team, she does so only via a scholarship she won partly to help diversify the school’s student body, after applying to the boarding school to escape the dysfunction and abuse at home that she hides even from Mel.

While readers might expect a battle of the sexes to be the primary source of conflict among the group, the most significant tensions fall along lines of race and class. That said, timeless teenage anxieties over popularity, peer pressure, and attractiveness are definitely at play in the conflicts that underscore this engaging novel. But one of the most affecting aspects of Damselfly is an update Prasad makes to the Lord of the Flies character Simon in Anne Marie whose survival struggle on the island is also dramatically complicated by mental illness.

As these power struggles play out, Prasad’s characters express ideas and opinions about each other that will provide ample fuel for students’ discussions about race, gender, class, disability, and how these identities and differences factor into the dynamics of their own families and communities, as well as our society as a whole.

Teachers could incorporate Damselfly into a Lord of the Flies unit in a variety of ways. Excerpts from corresponding parts of each novel could be placed in direct dialogue with each other. Or, after a teacher-led study of Lord of the Flies, groups of students could take the lead in teaching Damselfly, Beauty Queens or one of the film adaptations of Golding’s novel and then critically comparing each version.

Adding something into our curriculum often sparks anxiety about having enough time. But creating a cluster of texts around a canonical work that you love or that you are required to teach can reinvigorate both teacher and student interest in a novel like Lord of the Flies and create a rich learning experience about timely themes that warrants and produces extended discussion and exploration.