What do you MEAN you would rather teach some book I’ve never even heard of instead of The Scarlet Letter!?!?! (Knowledge Relativism)

The question of “what literature is the best to teach to which age group framed with which standards” is one that will always boggle my mind, if not completely escape me.  Shoot, you can even simplify this to “what literature is best to teach” and it still seems, to me, like a near impossible to answer question.  Yes, I will be staying as far away from the position of curriculum director as possible; although I have decided to “face my fear”, as it were, and be a part of the curriculum review team next year in my district (gulp).  Still, as we have moved through chapter 7 of New Learning, I have found myself drawn to the sections revolving around the literary canon and other methods for selecting and utilizing worthwhile texts into a classroom environment (if not a curriculum).  

In my department, there has been an ongoing skirmish of sorts over the past few years about using non-traditional texts in the classroom.  We have a few teachers who are very passionate on both sides of the issue, and I have found myself merely dipping my toes in the water, as it were, with trying out some non-traditional (sort of) literature in my classroom on a limited basis.  My point here is that I am very limited in terms of the amount of practical classroom experience that I have had, and I haven’t always felt totally comfortable jumping in to the argument with gusto.  But I would like to connect this argument to the Learning by Design approach, so here goes.

My classes are American and British literature, and the curriculum is chock-full of the classics–Hawthorne, Dickinson, Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Wharton, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Hemingway; Chaucer, Shakespeare, Orwell, etc. etc. etc.  So after three years of teaching this, and several years of experiencing the canon from a student’s perspective, I feel pretty well versed in this type of English experience.  And for the most part, I have found that students will either largely embrace or largely reject whatever piece of literature we are reading–there aren’t really a lot of lukewarm feelings about Macbeth or The Great Gatsby (unless we are just talking personality! :] ).  My method of judgment is this: not just are students reading, but are they actually engaging in the subsequent class discussions and activities?  If even the subject and themes that the novels bring up result in disinterest, then I would count that as a rejection.  

Now, do I know that the same wouldn’t be true with other more modern, youth-oriented, audience-oriented (and whatever other adjectives) pieces of literature?  Not necessarily; and please understand that there is no scientific method behind this blog post.  But this is where the connection to Learning by Design comes in.  What I have found is that the “Experiencing the known” method of constructing knowledge is an absolutely critical one.  The rest of the unit can be crisp, clean, well-thought out and engaging, but it won’t be quite as good unless students are hooked early on and made to think that they should care about what it is they are experiencing.  And this can be the power of “breaking away” from the canon, as painful as that may be for some educators.  Whether it be through instructor selected literature or student selected individual reading, I hope to be able to work some different experiences into my classroom–just so that students have the possibility of building another “repertoire”.  

I would especially love to hear back from anyone that has a student choice unit built into one of their classes!