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One of my colleagues was speaking today about a recent PL session she attended (remotely, of course). It addressed reader engagement in teenagers, and strategies to address the age-old problem of students who don't/won't read the class novel.
This of course is pertinent to my interests, as they say, so I asked her if the session addressed text selection.
Nope. Not at all, apparently. Nada. Nothing.
There were exemplar class texts discussed though.
Of Mice and Men, and The Outsiders.
Nope. Not at all, apparently. Nada. Nothing.
There were exemplar class texts discussed though.
Of Mice and Men, and The Outsiders.
Friends, we need to talk about our book rooms. We need to talk about text selection. We need to stop asking why kids aren't engaging when we aren't asking ourselves questions about what (and why) we are teaching.
We need to stop making the students' response the problem as long as we're not willing to consider that the actual problem might be the relentless, unexamined replication of a canon that was already old and stale when I started teaching 30+ years ago.
I feel like I've been saying this since I started teaching in 1986. (Spoiler alert: I have been.) But here we go again:
There has never in the history of high school English teaching been a greater availability of incredible texts that kids absolutely will engage with.
There has never in the history of high school English teaching been a greater availability of incredible texts that kids absolutely will engage with.
In those 30+ years, YA literature has taken off like the clappers, and Australian YA lit is highly respected all around the world. It is diverse, in every sense of the word, contemporary, and relevant to our own students' context. #LoveOzYA
So why are we still behaving as if the only way we can engage lower ability and reluctant reader kids is with a book about boy gangs in Oklahoma an easy decade before their parents were even born?
And if we're teaching Of Mice and Men because "it's a classic", well, says who? What's with this fetishisation of the American canon when we have our own classics we could be teaching?
And don't even get me started on the highly gendered, hetero-normative, ableist and white/western nature of these choices.
It's like we're generations of mother ducks, wanting to imprint on our students the books we were taught, in some never-ending cascade of student disengagement and disdain for the thing we, as English teachers, surely must most want to pass on:
A love of reading and the attendant benefits of as many people as possible having books in their lives.
I'm not saying Your Favourite is a bad book, even if Your Favourite is Problematic (which it almost certainly is). I'm not saying no-one should read them any more. And I do know that the reasons why kids don't want to read the class novel are more complex than just our choices.
But our choices are critical to changing their attitudes towards reading, and they are also pretty much the only thing in this scenario that we can change.
It's time to get out of our comfort zone, to challenge our thinking (and reading), to ask ourselves every. single. day. Why? Why this book? Why that poem? What am I trying to achieve here?
Is the text the end in itself, or the means to many, many ends: academic, cultural, emotional, social?
And if it's the latter, then which books will actually get our students there, instead of teachers and students staring at each other over this great chasm of refusalâon both our parts?
TL:DRâif your students don't want to read the class novel, maybe the problem is the novel, not the kids.
