Student knowledge and beliefs about literacy and literature are necessarily a reflection of their teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about literacy and literature.
I teach first-year writing at the university level; much of my work is helping students unlearn and reconsider that knowledge and those beliefs they brings from K-12 education.
Teacher posts on social media are often windows into the misconceptions those students bring to college. I recently fretted for a few days after seeing Advanced Placement teachers refer to book-length nonfiction as “novels,” which triggered a recurring situation when I ask students what novels they read in high school.
The answers often include The Crucible and Shakespeare as well as more recently Between the World and Me—prompting me to note that none of those are novels. Students have mis-learned to call any book assigned and studied in school a “novel,” the seeds of having weak or even flawed understanding of genre (see also here), medium, and mode in reading and writing.
Before I could spend any time on that social media post, however, I came across this:
I agree with both challenges here, but think Anger’s post is way more than a “bad take.” Here are a couple reasons why before a fuller discussion of how to center students in novel and play study.
First, I have little experience that assigning a single novel/play for all students to study under the guidance of the teacher is somehow mostly absent from high school literature classes.
Second, whole class study of novels and plays centers the teacher’s authority (the teacher guides the students through the work and then assesses students on that teacher’s framing of the work) and acquisition of knowledge about a singular work (essentially trivia).
Dropping the whole-class study of assigned novels/plays is not only a needed shift in literature study with students, but also a better approach to fostering student autonomy and healthier beliefs and deeper knowledge about literacy and literature.
One instructional and assessment shift is fostering students’ skills at text analysis instead of knowledge acquisition about a specific text. Traditionally, we assign The Scarlet Letter, walk students through the novel page-by-page, and then test students on knowledge they have retained about that novel.
Instead, we should be giving students multiple experiences interrogating texts and then putting them in new text situations to assess their ability to analyze texts. For example, we can do whole-class instruction on a short text by Hawthorne as preparation for having students analyze a text by Hawthorne students haven’t read before.
The key is not knowing facts about Hawthorne’s canonical novel, but fostering their ability to analyze a text better because they are familiar with that author and have context for anticipating those new texts.
The assigned whole-class novel/play is appealing, I think, because it allows greater control of instruction and, again, centers authority in the teacher and the work being studied. None of that, however, is fostering the sort of autonomy, knowledge, and beliefs students need, and deserve.
In the late 1990s when I was teaching high school AP Literature, I made the switch from assigning whole class novels and plays to complete student choice in the major works my students studied in preparation for the AP Literature exam.
I documented that first experience in English Journal because I learned some key lessons the hard way.
First, this shift requires purposeful and direct instruction that supports students’ ability to choose novels and plays. My students taught me that over a decade of being assigned what to read had failed them as skilled or even eager consumers of works.
Teachers disproportionately do way too much for students (see also the problem with rubrics and writing prompts) and inculcate compliance over agency and autonomy.
Finally, let’s consider how making the shift away from whole-class assigned novels and plays can be navigated by teachers despite the valid challenges that poses.
Novel/play knowledge and instructional strategies are often the two most pressing concerns for teachers accustomed to traditional novel/play study.
Yes, I have had students choose novels/plays I had not read (but often read eventually because students chose them) but that in no way hindered my ability to offer instruction or assess their work. In fact, when students are allowed to be the authority on a text, they often are more fully engaged in both reading and understanding the work.
Next, allowing students tethered choice in texts can fit into traditional practices.
The primary structure of novel/play study grounded in student choice and agency is that I designed thematic units within which students chose their works (tethered choice).
For example, one unit was Black writers and the lives of Black Americans. Students had to choose and justify a novel within that theme (we focused on works that helped prepare them for the AP exam, for example, but in any class the purpose must be established for studying the work—understanding American literature or preparation for college, etc.).
Next, for each work the student chooses, they had to build a resource folder on that work by doing searches in the library; these resource folders had literary analysis and author material that supported the student’s study but also gave me access to knowledge if I had not read the work.
Now, I think this is the key for teachers concerned about how to conduct instruction.
We still had whole-class discussions around the thematic element, but each student was invited to share their journey through their chosen text. All students, then, were encouraged to connect and contrast as the discussions unfolded.
For example, one student would note the use of flying motifs drawn from African mythology in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, prompting other students to share the use of flying motifs in other works.
These organic connections were much more engaging than when I orchestrated page-by-page analysis of a shared novel or play.
These class discussions were embedded in reading workshop structures that allowed students time in class to read and research as well as conference with me and other students (especially when students chose the same work).
Using these approaches, students read more, were more deeply engaged, and gained much healthier beliefs and richer knowledge.
As teachers, we must constantly interrogate when our commitments are grounded in retaining power and authority versus fostering the autonomy and agency of our students as well as the integrity of our fields of literacy and literature.
Despite social media protestations, I doubt whole-class novel/play study has disappeared from high school literature classes, but I also certain that making the shift away from that and toward student agency would be one of the best developments for those students.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 