Renita Schmidt, "Challenging Textbooks: Servants, Not Masters of Our Classrooms"

I wanted to bring up the issue of textbooks in the classroom because it's something that didn't come up in our class very much, but is definitely an issue that everyone will have to deal with in field experiences and your future teaching positions.

I am not sure if I was explicitly taught that using textbooks is bad, or if that was an implicit message, but I definitely had the impression when I began teaching that my job was to choose a variety of texts related to a unit theme for students to read.  Sometimes this can get kind of hairy when your district, like many do, has complex procedures for approving anything students read.  This can also get hairy if you don't get formal approval and a parent has a serious problem with a text.

Schmidt takes the party line on textbooks: teachers know what students need better than an anonymous textbook editor, so each teacher should choose appropriate texts for his or her students.  Instruction should never center around a textbook.  Schmidt [predictably] cites Dewey, Freire, and Foucault.  She endorses Dewey's idea of linking educative experiences based on student interest/questions/experiences, and refers to Freire's banking metaphor (like Freire, Schmidt pushes back against "teaching as transmission").  She also calls on Foucault for lessons in uncovering the hidden power that textbooks have: using textbooks is an expectation, a norm, an implicit "right way" to teach, and part of the "business of schooling" (David Tyack's phrase).  Schmidt also connects this textbook orthodoxy with current policy efforts to standardize curriculum to achieve universal literacy, higher test scores, etc.  She makes the point that as students are not alike, neither should our curriculum be a "one-size-fits-all" approach just to satisfy the control and need for accountability of someone at the top.  She also criticizes textbooks for often including only excerpts of works of literature, and prescribing a set order of skills, as well as promoting one authoritative, static interpretation of a text through the pre-made discussion questions and assignments.

I see a few different things going on here, and I find that even though I do what Schmidt is calling for, I don't wholeheartedly agree with her.  Remember P. David Pearson's article on the reading wars?  Schmidt, like most English educators at the college level, thoroughly subscribes to the philosophies that Pearson associates with whole language: authentic texts and tasks (as opposed to excerpts gathered in a textbook), teacher autonomy and professionalism, and interdisciplinary units drawing on a variety of text types.  These are all embedded within philosophies of progressive pedagogy (Dewey), teaching for social justice (critical theory, i.e. Freire), sociocultural theories of knowledge (Vygotsky, Bruner), and poststructuralism (Foucault, and a focus on bringing implicit power structures to light.)  Frankly, I'm almost a little bit surprised that English Journal published this because it's not exactly new information or a different point of view in our field! 

I don't disagree with Smith, and my attitude is definitely similar to one of Schmidt's epigraphs (the source for the title): "The modern textbook is an invaluable servant, but an intolerable master for a competent teacher."  I always sort of felt that I was "above" using a textbook, because wasn't that just for lazy teachers?  That's not really fair, however.  While plodding through a textbook chapter by chapter and using all of the textbook resources is completely antithetical to the core beliefs of all of English education, and I agree with Smith there, I can't say that textbooks are evil, or that teachers who use textbooks are bad teachers.  That can't be true.  I depart from Smith (I think) in saying that there is nothing wrong with using some texts that happen to be found in textbooks.  There is an affective dimension to this worth mentioning, however,  Students associate textbooks with boring stuff!  If they are used to not using a textbook, they often moan and groan and assume that whatever is in the textbook will be dry, so that is something that the teacher has to think about how to overcome.

Schmidt, Renita.  (2011).  "Challenging Textbooks: Servants, Not Masters of Our Classrooms."  English Journal.  100: 3, p. 92-96.

Louis Martinez, "Making Connections with the Boys Who Struggle in Your Classroom"

I choose this English Journal article because "making connections with boys who struggle in my classroom" was one of my most intractable problems as a teacher - especially as a female teacher who never struggled in school.  I think it's difficult for many teachers, however, because it really gets to the heart of how to make someone care about something they are not inclined to care about, don't see a value in, or have had bad experiences in in the past.  I know that my most frustrating experiences as a teacher were working with students who, no matter what I tried, still seemed totally impervious to my efforts, totally unwilling to even try to do their best work (or any work at all, sometimes), totally unwilling to read anything.  This article also relates to my last post about students not reading assigned texts.  I used to have independent reading days every other Friday, and despite my own classroom library, access to the school library, and despite how I modeled book passion of my own in talking about my reading habits, sharing what I was reading, reading with students while they were reading...there were always some middle school boys who would just pretend to read a magazine every week, for forty minutes.  Why would they do this?  Or, they would fight over the copy of Ripley's Believe It or Not, and The Guinness Book of World Records (boys also really seem to like Calvin and Hobbes)...which was ok for one day, but wasn't taking them any closer to getting their independent reading requirements finished when they would do that every reading day.

Martinez opens his article with an anecdote about a male student, Jayson, who moved to his class who didn't engage at first, or come prepared with a notebook.  Martinez gives him a notebook, which seems to provoke an initial change in Jayson's behavior.  Martinez then connects his action with what he has learned from some teacher research he had just (conveniently) finished conducting in his classroom, hoping to gain insight to the question "Why do some boys read in my class, while others will not?"  Good question!!  Martinez implements reading conferences (like Atwell) during independent reading time, which happens daily for 15-20 minutes, and says something intriguing that he doesn't really follow up on: "I began to understand the pressures and problems that often made reading not only a chose but - for some boys - also an impossibility."

Martinez says that the reading conferences were extremely valuable.  They helped him to build rapport with his students and bring in reading materials related to their interests (I know that when I got some skateboarding magazines for a few students that would never read but loved skateboarding, it worked (sort of - some reading happened, whereas no reading happened before, and then of course the same kid tried to read the same skateboarding magazine like seven times instead of moving on to something else...))  He also learned the boys often prefer book series that have action and humor, but that there is no one "magic book" that every kid likes.   (The findings were pretty slim; the largest section talks about the mechanics of how he did reading conferences - he did a brief check-in with every student where he recorded what they were reading, and then a longer conference with about three students per day.)

Martinez concludes by saying that relationships are the single factor that can make it or break it in a classroom (I agree - students do a lot for you when they know that you truly care about them and think they can succeed).  He hints at the meaning of his previous statement about the pressures that boys feel related to reading.  He says that there is a "masculine facade" for both him and his male students and seems to indicate that this is at odds with reading (it's not really clear).  Maybe being seen as enjoying reading isn't "cool," or maybe some male students just don't connect as easily with a teacher without a systained invitation from that teacher.  Regardless, connecting with students about what they are reading, or might like to read, made a major impact in Martinez's class, and I definitely experienced some similar things in my classroom.

Martinez, Louis.  (2010).  "Making Connections with the Boys Who Struggle in Your Classroom."  English Journal.  100:2, p. 121-124.

William J. Broz, "Not Reading: The 800 Pound Mockingbird in the Classroom"

This article, in the most recent issue of English Journal (May 2011), talks about an issue that rarely appears in print, although it probably occurs in almost everyone's classroom: students who do not read whatever text they are supposed to be reading!  (Thus the mixed metaphor of the title.  Not reading is the proverbial "elephant in the room," but becomes the "mockingbird in the room" because William Broz is writing about how he assigned To Kill a Mockingbird to his college students, and he knows that some just won't read it!!)

Hilariously, he says he actually uses that book because he invariably finds that many of his students didn't read it the first time around when they were in high school (Broz asks them to admit it honestly).  In response, he exhorts them with the main point of his piece: "If students do not read the assigned texts, nothing important is happening in your literature classroom" (italics are his).  Then, most astounding, is his observation that despite this lecture, 20% of these future English teachers will actually fake it a second time.  In Broz's words, "Not reading is such a strong mode of operation that at least two students will attempt to write reading response journals, student-generated discussion items, and short literary essays based on reading SparkNotes and other Internet chapter summaries they find among the 2.5 million Google hits on To Kill a Mockingbird."  Wow.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, for sure. 

Much of Broz's article is devoted to strategies to encourage reading, rather than faked reading.  He shared that his first solution was to advise students to just not assign the "old chestnuts" that will have been written about ad nauseum on the internet, but later he realized that students not reading has much more to do with what teachers ask students to do.  If teachers "use study guides, comprehension quizzes, pseudo whole-class “discussions” that serve mainly to summarize and interpret the reading, and similar enabling strategies, we send the message to students that no engaged reading or individual interpretation of the text is necessary and that not reading the text is just fine." 

So what does Bros believe teachers should do instead?
*ask interpretive questions (rather than comprehension) that can not easily be answered by sparknotes.
*use reader response journals (and/or discussions of reactions to text).  They are unique and personal, and cannot be easily faked, as opposed to test questions on character, plot, or the definitive meaning of a symbol.
*use YA, high-interest literature for whole class reading at the beginning of year.  Encourage students to read what interests them, even if not particularly highbrow
*use student-generated "discussion items" and frequent discussions during reading, not just after reading
*use natural consequences - if students have not arrived prepared to discuss the day's reading, than they need to spend class time reading until they can participate with the group

Broz also has some DON'Ts:
*don't spend time in class going over what students should have already read to compensate for them not having read (I italicized this last bit because in at least two schools that I have worked in, teachers would frequently have students listen to the book on audio tapes, and then would have to spend time summarizing - especially in middle school.  I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it is bad to enable students when they aren't reading.)
*don't use the film version unless there is a really good reason too
*don't make tests/quizzes "right answer games" that test comprehension or memorization of a particular interpretation

I guess I can never be 100% positive, but I never got the impression that students were secretly not reading in my class.  They were accountable to their peers when we did literature circles, and we would often listen to the audiotapes of books we read as a class.  Independent reading used to be faked on a rampant basis, so I tried doing book blogs instead of just a reading log, which did seem to help for the most part.  (Sometimes students copied and pasted summaries of their book, but in most cases I think they did actually read them.)  I will write in my next post about some of the most frustrating cases though, which are the disaffected boys who aren't interested in reading much of anything in any genre, no matter how open you make the requirements.

Broz, W. J.  (2011) "Not Reading: The 800 Pound Mockingbird in the Classroom."  English Journal.  100: 5.

*Note: I did look through several years of English Education and downloaded some articles that intrigued me, but I saw very few articles that I felt were directly related to adolescent literature/literacy.  These last three articles I am posting about are all from English Journal.

"The Reading Wars," P. David Pearson

Jason suggested doing a post on the different perspectives in reading education, which immediately made me think about P. David Pearson.  Last semester, I read an article that he coauthored with Alan Schoenfeld, "The Reading and Math Wars" (and highlighted basically the entire thing), but I suspected that he had an article only on reading that would be better for this purpose (which he does).  I also went to go hear his distinguished lecture at AERA, "The History of Reading Comprehension."  Plus, he was the discussant at one of David Gamson and David Baker's sessions, and he asked to borrow my program to look something up (!!).  Clearly, we are like bffs.  So I will use his "The Readings Wars" article and the crumpled, handwritten notes I took on a Sheraton notepad during his lecture to write this post.  :o)

First of all, you guys should all read this article.  It is AWESOME - in its breadth, depth, and insight.  I think that you have probably heard of the whole language vs. phonics debate in reading??  I actually have vague memories of hearing about this debate even as a middle school student.  Perhaps the most important thing to know about these terms is that they represent huge and enduring debates in education, much bigger than literacy instruction alone.  From the terms themselves, you might think ok, these are two approaches to teaching reading: Phonics focuses on teaching kids letter sounds and how to put them together (breaking words down); whole language focuses on teaching students how to recognize entire words.  No.  That might be a rough definition, but it is not what they mean.  

Whole language, for example, is a term that has come to represent many progressive teaching techniques.  Pearson calls it the “reading field’s foray into constructivist pedagogy,” but also associates it with other progressive approaches, like "process writing, literature-based reading, and integrated curriculum," which Pearson describes as whole language's "intellectual cousins" (220).  The “guiding principles” of whole language are “authenticity (in texts, tasks, and tests) and curricular integration (across reading, writing, speaking, and listening) and between the language arts and other curricular areas” (216).  The “whole language” approach to reading instruction stemmed from changes in ideas about how people learn.  Advances in technology allowed researchers to better understand the inner workings of the brain, the “cognitive revolution” in psychology.  In addition, there was a growing emphasis on sociocultural theories of learning, which emphasized how meaning comes from an individual transacting with their environment and with other people.  (Think about the reader-response activities we did in class, and how we also shared those personal transactions with the text with each other.) 

In contrast, phonics (more than just knowing letter sounds) represents a decontextualized approach to reading, in which it is assumed that if students understand and practice the pure mechanics of the reading process, they will be able to read well.  The emphasis is on the mechanical skills of reading – understanding letter sounds and how they blend together, repeated testing of students’ reading speed (the technical terms are decoding and fluency). As you might imagine, a systematic approach to decoding letter sounds lends itself much easily to worksheets, scripted curricula, and other deprofessionalizing modes of teaching.  Whole language sees the “language arts” as a set of connected modes of thinking; phonics sees reading and writing as two separate phenomena.

Pearson speculated in 1989 that he did not see whole language as having much traction in the policy community, not because he didn’t think it was a good idea, but because its tenets did not square with a policy maker’s worldview.  Whole language is based on interpretive theories of knowledge – that external reality doesn’t exist outside of our own experience of it.  It also emphasizes the professionalism and autonomy of the individual teacher, which makes it almost impossible to “scale up.”  Pearson did not think that such complex answers would have a place with policy-makers who want simple solutions.  Pearson did see whole language as having a large effect on publishing companies, however, significantly changing the structure of basal readers and leading to more thematically linked book sets.  In spite of these changes, the phonics movement has been ascendant since about the mid-1990s.  One reason for this is policy changes at the federal level that value quantitative, experimental research in education across the board.  (Much research supporting whole language was qualitative.)  When applied to reading, this research has used very capital-S “Scientific” methods to demonstrate the importance of phonemic awareness and actual instruction in phonics (225).  Whole language research was largely shut out of the conversation because it did not fit the government’s guidelines of rigorous scientific research (228). 

Pearson points out important caveats made in even the most pro-phonics federal reading reports, though, that allow for a balanced approach. Pearson himself advocates for a combination of both approaches, and I trust his assessment.  His work may provide an answer to those reading specialists who feel confused by their coursework coming from two divergent perspectives.  Perhaps his confidence that effective teachers do both will help to assuage their cognitive dissonance.

**I wrote a pretty good amount about this article, but probably still didn’t do it justice.  Like I said, I definitely recommend reading this one in its entirety!

Pearson, P. D.  (2004).  “The Reading Wars.”  Educational Policy.  Vol. 18, Issue 216.  p. 216-252.

Dark and Scary YA Lit Debate

I am not going to write a full post about this, but wanted to link to a recent debate (well, a recent iteration of a long-standing debate) about the "appropriateness" of YA lit for its intended audience.  There was a Wall Street Journal article by Meghan Gurdon last week that I mentioned to a few of you before class started the other day, called "Darkness Too Visible."  The article claimed that young adult literature today is "Darker than when you were a child, my dear," full of "Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only sparingly outlined a generation ago, [which] are now spelled out in stomach-clenching detail."  Looking back to the history of YA lit review articles I blogged about earlier, I can say that this just isn't true.  Those "new realism" novels of the 1970s were full of drugs and pregnancy, and subject to the same outcry.  There has been quite an outcry to this article, some of which I have linked to below:

Mary Elizabeth Williams's response at slate.com: "Oh jeez, do we really have to have to have this argument again?...Critics like Gurdon are forever holding the dregs of the present up against the best of the past, which is an unfair and highly loaded argument."

Liz B., librarian and blogger at School Library Journal, responds: "There's dark things in them there books!"

"The Book Whisperer" Donalyn Miller, blogger at Ed Week: "Ms. Gurdon thoughtfully provides a suggested list of more appropriate YA titles for young readers. In keeping with the antiquated stance of the article, she divides the list into sections for "Young Men" and "Young Women" including 4 titles that were written more than 38 years ago."

Linda Holmes, NPR blogger: "While the WSJ piece refers to the YA fiction view of the world as a funhouse mirror, I fear that what's distorted is the vision of being a teenager that suggests kids don't know pathologies like suicide or abuse unless they read about them in books.  Do you remember being 15?"

Understanding Islam Through Young Adult Literature

This blog post will cover two articles from recent issues of the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, both dealing with helping students understand Islam.  This is an issue close to my heart.  I spent a month in Egypt in 2009 with other teachers, learning more about Egypt, Islam, and the ways that we often misunderstand many aspects of both Islam and the Middle East (such as the fact that Islam and the Middle East are NOT synonymous).  The first article, "Negotiating Understanding Through the Young Adult Literature of Muslim Cultures,"  by Allison Baer and Jacqueline Glasgow, focuses on using fiction to understand culture, whereas the second, "Critical Literacy: Using Nonfiction to Learn About Islam," by Stephen Phelps, obviously talks about how to use nonfiction to learn more factual information about Islam and dispel myths from realities. 

The authors of both articles point out that there is a definite need for more general knowledge about Islam, and I agree.  Many people do not know much about Islam, and don't have a desire to, easily associating Islam with terrorism.  Such a knee-jerk reaction does not do justice to the incredibly variety of people who identify as Muslims, or to the many different variations of Islam practiced around the world (to put it in more familiar terms, there is quite a range of beliefs between Unitarians, Quakers, Southern Baptists, snake-handling churches, and Catholics, even though they all identify as some branch of Christianity.  It's impossible to say what Christianity definitively is based on the beliefs of any one of these denominations, but many people do this about Islam!  "All Muslims are…” or “Oh, those Selafis…” etc.)   It may not even be possible for future generations of Americans to have the luxury of ignorance about Islam and the Middle East, however, as the world becomes even more globally-connected and the Muslim population in America and outside continues to grow.  Baer and Glasgow (and Phelps too) point out a number of myths and surprising facts in the beginning of their articles.  Worldwide, Muslims account for about 20-25% of the world's population (Christians are about 33%), and are a quickly-growing group within America.  (Interestingly, in America, 20% of Muslims are African American, and only 37% are of Arab descent (according to Phelps's sources).   Many people seem to use the words "Muslim" and "Arab" as interchangeably, but that is just not accurate.) 

Both articles use a critical theory framework.  They both defend the use of multicultural literature as a means to come to critical literacy, in which students are aware of the implicit power structure in their readings.  Phelps includes the following four dimensions as part of critical literacy: "disrupting the commonplace," "interrogating multiple viewpoints," focusing on sociopolitical issues," and "taking action and promoting social justice" (192).  Baer and Glasgow say that texts should be chosen and discussed to "address issues of power and privilege in society" (they actually cite Sonia Nieto here, "Understanding Multicultural Education in a Sociopolitical Context" (2010)). I think that Baer and Glasgow would agree with Bogun Yoon (author of my last post) that that multicultural literature should not be used superficially, as some kind of cultural tokenism to trot out in food festivals or by simply having protagonists of many backgrounds.  The benefits of multicultural literature for Baer and Glasgow center around cultural understanding and validation of diverse student backgrounds.  For Phelps, though, even including texts from a variety of cultural perspectives is not enough (as Yoon showed with her analysis of the implicit immigrant assimilation messages).  Phelps takes more of a classic critical theory perspective, saying that teachers should raise questions about social justice with students, and potentially create action plans. 

After Baer and Glasgow’s rationale for teaching multicultural literature (including fiction related to Islam), they provide a list of such literature, and an in-depth description of several works.  They review several recent novels, like Does My Head Look Big in This? (Abdel-Fattah, 2007) and The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (Kahf, 2006).  The former is set in the US and the latter in Australia; both deal with issues of identity and fitting in (in this case, fitting into Western culture as a Muslim girl), a theme to which many teenagers can relate.  They also review several nonfiction memoirs, which notably, are both set in Afghanistan and tell the story of women whose rights were horribly curtailed.  (Note: again, let me emphasize that it is imperative that students do NOT read only a book like that and draw conclusions about Islam or the Middle East.)  The authors end by giving examples of instructional techniques they feel would go well with these books and this topic: the Socratic seminar and process drama (by process drama, they mean creating a scenario related to the book for students to act out, and gain empathy and understanding, like a court case or a presentation to the school board).

Phelps makes many of the same points – that multicultural literature and critical literacy are vital for students.  Unlike Baer and Glasgow though, Phelps is brutally honest about the potential challenges of talking about a controversial topic like Islam. He writes, “Practical classroom application of critical theory is not for the fainthearted” (193), and anticipates difficult discussions around the role of women in Islam, the church-state relationship, and Palestine (193) (definitely an issue about which so many Egyptians and others in the region care about passionately).  Phelps chose texts based on their relevance to the themes of being bicultural and being Muslim in America.  He reviews only nonfiction texts like Red, White, and Muslim: My Story of Belief (Hasan 2009). His main point is to complicate the easy associations students often make between Islam, Muslims, and various stereotypical concepts.  Phelps says, “Islam and a consideration of multiple viewpoints would encourage students to move beyond a ‘good Muslim/bad Muslim’ binary that demonizes any Muslim whose beliefs might diverge from dominant Western secular and political narratives” (197).

These two articles speak to each other quite well.  Of course, they are about similar topics and make similar points about the importance of learning about what it means to be Muslim.  Kind of funny though - Baer and Glasgow actually fall into some of the pitfalls that that Phelps identifies.  Baer and Glasgow include Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind (by Suzanne Fisher Staples) on their bibliography; Phelps points out the Shabanu is exactly the kind of Orientalist nonsense he is trying to fight against, with the novel's exotic sand, camels, tribes, and barbaric arranged marriages.  The authors of both articles, though, argue against "essentializing" an entire religion and/or region to a few key tropes.   I know that at my school we read Deborah Ellis's The Breadwinner.  Kids mostly liked the plot (girl in Afghanistan, dresses up like a boy to provide for her family since girls cannot walk around openly), but that one portrayal is hardly a comprehensive view of the region or the religion of Islam. 

Baer and Glasgow open their article with a quote from President Obama's 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim World, in which he remarked on the economic success of the 7 million American Muslims.  When I was in Egypt shortly after Obama's speech, people were overjoyed.  People would stop us on the street and say, "Ameriki?" or "You are from America?" and when we said yes, many people would just say, "Obama!"  Unfortunately, I do not believe that this is still the attitude two years later, with many policies unchanged despite overthrowing Mubarak.

Baer, A. L. and J. N. Glasgow.  (2010).  "Negotiating Understanding Through the Young Adult Literature of Muslim Cultures."  Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Vol. 54, No. 1 (September 2010), pp. 23-32.

Phelps, S.  (2010).  "Critical Literacy: Using Nonfiction to Learn About Islam."  Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy.  Vol. 54, No. 3 (November 2010), pp. 190–198.

Assimilation Ideology: Critically Examining Underlying Messages in Multicultural Literature (Bogum Yoon, Anne Simpson, Claudia Haag)

Most teachers would likely say that multicultural literature should be included in an English/Language Arts classroom.  Despite any kind of culture wars in the 1990s over a perceived excess of multiculturalism or political-correctness, it is my impression that educators generally accept that students today will live in a globally-connected world, and therefore need exposure to other cultures.   

Bogum Yoon opens the article with a personal narration of her experience reviewing many children's/YA books related to Korea.  Yoon, like many who advocate for including multicultural literature, believes such books should "promote cultural pluralism, rather than monoculturalism that focuses on assimilation to a dominant culture" (109).  She was troubled, however, when she began to notice a pattern of assimilation in the works she was reviewing.  She decided to take a more formal look at children's multicultural literature to see if this pattern persisted.  Yoon invited two [European] colleagues, Anne Simpson and Claudia Haag, to closely examine 12 works of multicultural literature from a middle school library.  (Although, I should note that they were all picture books.)

The researchers studied the books using two research questions as guides:
1. "What ideologies are embedded in the multicultural text?"
2. "How are the ideologies of assimilation or pluralism present?"
(***To clarify, assimilation here means that the books have an underlying the message that American immigrants can only be successful in America by adapting to dominant American culture and language, while losing aspects of their home culture and language.  Pluralism in this article means that all students, not just minorities or immigrant students, are taught to value others' cultures and languages, without assuming that assimilation is the only desirable outcome.)

The authors asked a local middle school librarian to choose 12 multicultural picture books at random.  The research design was basically for each of the three authors to work separately to classify the 12 books as pluralistic, assimilationist, or neutral/unclear.  Then, the three authors met to discuss and compare notes.  Four of the 12 books possessed a clear narrative of assimilation in the eyes of all three researchers.  Within these four books, the researchers identified two themes.  Two of the books featured characters who first resist the dominant culture, but ultimately assimilate.  The second theme was the good old American dream...that America is "the land of opportunity" (112). 

The authors detail the problematic aspects of the children's books at length, before ending the article with suggestions for teachers when choosing multicultural literature and reading it with students.  The authors recommend that teachers use two overall strategies.  First, choose children's picture books that do not promote unquestioning assimilation into dominant culture.  Alternatively, read the problematic books with students, but ask students questions to help them question the metanarrative of assimilation within the books. 

I thought I was going to love this article.  After all, the only constant through all of my academic work has been a desire to make implicit power structures or social forces...explicit.  Another way of saying this might be that I like to take the world as my text, find patterns, and tell people.  In the past, this has included everything from analyzing the evolution of fairy tale heroines in popular culture and their implications for young women, to looking at the underlying assumptions of the nature of patriotism in the Teaching American History federal grant program.  I even had my 8th grade students look at the immigrant experience in America and get different perspectives on just how much opportunity immigrants often have in "the land of opportunity."  Doing this kind of text analysis for messages about what it means to be American is right up my alley.

But...I actually found this article to be kind of annoying!  (I know, such a helpful comment.)  I think that the authors' overall idea was an important one; multicultural literature that has an underlying message of erasing a culture instead of appreciating it should be exposed.  However, what about the potential value of assimilation, even if simply from a survival perspective?  Or, the dismantling the master's house with the master's tools argument?  Immigrants should of course retain aspects of their home culture, but what good is that if they cannot survive within the system that we have?  If I moved to Barcelona, for example, I would not resist speaking Spanish just so that I could refuse to submit to the dominant culture. 

My overall point here is that the entire issue is very complicated, and I felt that the authors' portrayal of the issue was along the lines of assimilation = bad, pluralism = good.  The authors were from such a strong critical theory perspective, that I worried they were unable to see the issue with the complexity I think it deserves.  What is social justice?  Whose definition of justice?  How is justice defined? 

Yoon, B., Anne Simpson, and Claudia Haag.  (2010).  "Assimilation Ideology: Critically Examining Underlying Messages in Multicultural Literature."  Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Vol. 54, No. 2 (October 2010), pp. 109-118.

"The Best of Both Worlds": Rethinking the Merit of Graphic Novels, Sean P. Connors

Sean Connors writes in response to two commonly held assumptions about the use of graphic novels in secondary literature classrooms.  The first assumption is that the use of graphic novels is simply a "means to an end," usually as a bridge for reluctant or struggling readers to eventually come to "better" literature.  Connors feels that graphic novels are seldom seen as works of literary merit on their own terms.  The second assumption Connors writes against is the idea that all students will enjoy reading graphic novels.

Connors devotes some space to a historical overview of comics, and debates over their use in English classrooms, from the 1940s on.  Connors uses articles from English Journal in the 1940s to show how comics, even at that time, were seen as a way to bring struggling readers to more valid, literary texts.  Connors's overall argument is that many graphic novels are worthy of literary merit; although I agree with him, his evidence is rather slim.  He quotes three high school students who praise the genre.  Connors also says that "educators routinely cite [graphic novels'] ability to foster self-reflection, initiate social change, promote tolerance, and stimulate the imagination" (67) as rationales, but does not give any direct quotes or examples of this.

Connors's second point, which I had not previously considered, is that many students are aware of the stigma attached to graphic novels, manga, or comics.  Connors encountered quite a bit of resistance to the idea of teaching graphic novels among his university-level pre-service teachers; they thought that graphic novels were childish (because they had pictures), did not promote reading because there was little text, and did not promote "critical thinking" (each of the three students mentioned this as a drawback, but it is unclear exactly what they meant by critical thinking).  Even more interesting though, were the attitudes Connors encountered from high school students who loved to read graphic novels.  He found that those students were reluctant to read graphic novels openly because they felt an attached social stigma.

Connors ends with a call for professional journals like the ALAN Review to generally promote the use of graphic novels, discuss their unique pedagogical challenges, review new graphic novels, and cull the graphic novels of most literary merit for the ALAN readership.   

This article raises the question for me, "What exactly is literary merit?"  Connors points out that [some] graphic novels should be seen as works of literary merit in their own right, not just as a bridge to something better (Actually, Bucky Carter, who I mentioned in my previous post, has a book called Building Literacy Connections with Graphic Novels: Page by Page, Panel by Panel, that uses graphic novels in conjunction with "classic literature" rather than on their own).  So what should the qualifications be?  Connors says that not all graphic novels have literary merit, so what makes a text "worth" reading and talking/writing about with 120 students?  My own answer would be a combination of thematic depth with thoughtful formal characteristics.  Graphic novels are not my genre of expertise, but I can speak to this a little bit.  Art Spiegelman's Maus, for example, which I did read with my students, is quite complex, which I think makes it worth unpacking as a group.  The story of the author's father, a Holocaust survivor, Maus on one level is a story about what happened during the Holocaust.  On another level, it is about the ways in which a traumatic experience can affect a family for generations.  Maus is about a father-son relationship.  Maus is about memory and repression and moving on, or not.  Maus is about a sometimes unreliable and sometimes unsympathetic narrator.  Maus also has layers of complex visual symbolism that make it, I think, "worthy" of that kind of a formalist literary analysis.  Of course, there is the symbolism of the animals - the Jews are drawn as mice and the Nazis as cats.  This symbolic relationship is easy for middle school students to understand.  There is also a recurring image of a fly throughout the book, evoking everything from an annoyance, a pest, to flies buzzing over dead bodies (I always thought of Emily Dickinson's poem, "I heard a fly buzz when I died").  In addition, you can also draw students' attention to the size or shape of panels at various points, connecting what is being said to how it is drawn. 

Connors, S. P.  (2010).  "'The Best of Both Worlds': Rethinking the Literary Merit of Graphic Novels.  ALAN Review; Vol. 37, Issue 3; ProQuest Education Journals. pg. 65-70.

Familiar Aliens: Science Fiction as Social Commentary, Elaine J. O'Quinn and Heather Atwell

Very apropos to our current unit on Feed, O'Quinn and Atwell provide additional rationales for teaching the dystopian genre of "techno-science" (their term for novels like Feed and Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion, which are both stories of current technology amplified and used for evil purposes).  This article is from an issue of the ALAN Review devoted to exploring all kinds of digital media and "new literacies," graphic novels in particular.  It is actually guest edited by an acquaintance of mine, James Bucky Carter, who was getting his PhD in English education at UVA while I was there getting my Master's and teaching certification.  He is now an assistant professor at University of Texas-El Paso, has been hugely successful with his career, and is the go-to-guy for graphic novels and YA lit.  (I linked to his blog above.)

Anyway, O'Quinn and Atwell advocate for reading newer "techno-science" dystopias, either in addition to or instead of, older science fiction like Frankenstein or H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds.  The authors argue that these techno-science dystopias are more relevant to the daily realities of students today, who are immersed in a digital world.  If a teacher's goal is to help students question the world around them, including ethical dilemmas stemming from technology use, The House of the Scorpion and Feed are both excellent choices.

The authors devote quite a lot of space to summarizing The House of the Scorpion and Feed; since we are reading Feed, I will briefly summarize only The House of the Scorpions (by Nancy Farmer - it's awesome - you should read it), and then summarize the authors' recommendations for using each book.  
The House of the Scorpion is set in a no-man's land between Mexico and the US.  The governments of both countries have come to a sinister agreement to solve the problem of illegal immigration.  The US agrees to turn a blind eye to drug cultivation in the no-man's land, and to ignore drug smuggling into America, because Mexico agrees to manage its own border and prevent any of its citizens from crossing into the US.  The owners of the drug "plantations" in the no-man's land take those who are caught trying to cross the border, and turn them into zombies slaves (called eejits) to work on the drug plantations.  Like this wasn't nightmarish enough, the extremely wealthy can clone themselves to have an available source for organ transplants (this is very similar to the plot of the 2005 film The Island).  The book is told from the point of view of a young boy, who the reader later finds out, (SPOILER ALERT - highlight text to read), is the clone of the drug lord running the plantation.      There are quite a few social issues brought up by the book: immigration for one (I think there is an intended comparison to the plantation-slave system of the American South, as well as the implication that the use of Mexican farm labor in America can be compared to that system), and the relationship between the US and Mexico's drug war (I might point out that drug cultivation is dependent on a willing consumer market).  As O'Quinn and Atwell point out, the book also asks questions about cloning, the use of human embryos, and just what makes a human a human? 

Feed brings up some similar issues of the ethics of technology use in human bodies.  The slaves on the drug plantations of Nancy Farmer's book are turned into zombies by putting computer chips in their heads to control them; Titus's feed is not so different.  His behavior is certainly controlled by the feed, though not to the extent of the eejits.  The authors call Feed's genre "cyberpunk" and compare it to Bladerunner and The Matrix.  Thoughts on this categorization??  (I am not sure about it.)  Other issues raised by Feed which I am sure will come up are in our discussion are an excess of consumerism, treatment of the environment (and the impact of both of those things on other countries), and an over-reliance on technology.

The authors suggest pairing these novels with older dystopias like 1984 (1949) or Brave New World (1932) to consider how those authors' visions of the future have come true, or not, and to speculate about the problems our students will encounter in their lifetimes, as well as potential solutions.

Finally, the authors also suggest connecting to the many dystopian films raising many of the same issues.  For example, WALL-E, appropriate for any group, depicts humans as having utterly destroyed the Earth and departed to spaceships where they can drink super-sized sodas and watch TV all day while sitting down.  Avatar might be another example most students are familiar with.

In my own experience, I have found the dystopian genre to be one of my favorites for using with middle school students because it allows for the discussion of so many deep issues through text that is accessible to students.  I never even feel guilty about watching a film because the discussion is so rich and multilayered.  For example, Avatar at its heart is a story of colonization, which is relevant to all kinds of texts that aren't even in the sci-fi genre (Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart, Cry the Beloved Country are a few that come to mind right away - plus, did anyone else notice the major parallel to the Pocahontas story going on in Avatar??  Jake Sully, about to die, saved by the daughter of the chief, and the daughter takes him under her wing and they fall in love, which adds a whole other continent of colonization to the discussion).  When I read The Giver with my seventh grade students, we used it as an opportunity to think about the question, "Is utopia possible?"  They tried to make one - they were charged with deciding on an economic system, political system, religion, etc. that would maximize human happiness, and the conclusion that they all came to was that it was basically impossible to engineer a society where everyone was happy without severely curtailing individual rights, which defeated the whole purpose. 

To wrap it up here with some connections to history, I just skimmed through a biography of Louisa May Alcott - her father, Bronson Alcott, was a progressive educator who founded a vegan utopian society called Fruitlands in the 1840s in Massachusetts.  Real utopian movements throughout history are fascinating to read about and consider in light of futuristic societies in fiction, also serving as a source of social commentary.  Two other examples I can think of are M.T. Anderson's other novel (which I liked much better than Feed), The Astonishing Story of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (set in Revolutionary War America) and As Meat Loves Salt (which I actually lost patience with), set in the English Civil War.

O'Quinn, E.J. and Heather Atwell.  (2010).  "Familiar Aliens: Science Fiction as Social Commentary."  ALAN Review.  Volume 37, Issue 3.  ProQuest Education Journals. pg. 45-50.