Written by What:
Over the last few months my grade twelve students and I have been sharing various articles and essays that look at the study of literature and the role that English courses play in what is often referred to as “21st century curriculum” development. These articles are written by educators, English teachers, and administrators and have appeared in a number of mainstream newspapers. The subject of English curriculum and the place of the printed page have been hotly debated.
The message is the same and all too clear: literature has expired. It has reached the end of its shelf life. And “not with a bang but a whimper”. Time to wipe the shelves clean and make way for a new kind of curriculum. Education is to be replaced with schooling, literature with nonfiction, expressive, creative writing with ‘templated’ market analyses.
RIP literary imagination. You didn’t even get a eulogy.
Last September, The Star published, “Literature is the New Latin” written by Michael Reist, an English teacher of 30 years. In the article Reist contests that “We have entered the three-minute world. Anything that takes longer is just not worth it. This is the new attention span. The length of material students are required to read in school increases around the same time their use of screens increases. By Grade 7 or 8, the curriculum begins to include novel study, and high schools require the reading of significantly longer and more complex texts — or at least they used to.”
Last December, Joel Stein of Time Magazine published “How I Replaced Shakespeare”. In his article he highlights the dictate of the Common Core State Standards in the US: prepare students for the workforce. He quotes David Coleman, the new president of the College Board, and one of the chief creators of the Common Core: “As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a s— about what you feel or what you think… It is rare in a working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that I need a compelling account of your childhood.'”
Earlier that month, The Telegraph reported in “Catcher in the Rye dropped from US school curriculum” that the CCSS has approved a directive that will ensure that by the year 2014, 70% of what is taught in high school courses, will be non-fiction. This non-fiction will consist of “informational texts”, in an effort to ready students for college and the workforce. This new school curriculum will affect 46 of the 50 states.
According to The Telegraph, “Suggested non-fiction texts include Recommended Levels of Insulation by the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Invasive Plant Inventory, by California’s Invasive Plant Council. The new educational standards have the backing of the influential National Governors’ Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, and are being part-funded by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.”
In her article, “What English classes should look like in Common Core era” Carol Jago presents research from the 2010 Kaiser Family Media Study. For those who believe that students do not have time for reading in their over-structured, hectic schedules, Jago contests, “young people ages 8-18 consume on average 7 ½ hours of entertainment media per day: playing video games, watching television, and social networking. These are the same students who tell their teachers they don’t have time to read. Children have time. Unfortunately… they would simply prefer not to.”
Why:
In response to the allegations that literature is dead, that English classes offer very little of substance for students in their future workplaces, that the study of fiction is an outdated practice, and that when students are given a choice, they do not read fiction on their own, my grade twelve English students and I are conducting an experiment to see what happens when students are involved in the process of curriculum development. Over the next three months we will engage in conversations and debates about education, its focus in 21st century curriculum, and student accountability for personalized learning.
How:
We will continue to read articles and essays about the topic. We will discuss and debate, reflect and write. Students will blog about their thoughts and experiences with peers and faculty over the next few months. They will read fiction, write fiction, look at curriculum design and development, use pen and paper, laptops, blogs and video.
Student Predicted Outcomes:
Students believe they will show that 21st century curriculum is multi-facetted. They communicate through multiple platforms and with multiple literacies. The study of literature is essential for their learning. Education is not about job training. This site will be a place where I will share, record, and document our experiment.
We welcome your feedback and suggestions.
As an avid bibliophile I am constantly disheartened to think of the fate of the printed medium. There is something so sacred about cradling a hard or soft covered book in one’s hands that the sense of accomplishment is not the same when you’ve reached the end (aka 99%)of an e-book.
It is also quite saddening that valuable information is now blended, so to speak, into a broadly-marketed digestible gruel. Of course one could ‘Wiki’ Moby Dick and receive a plot synopsis written by God knows who as opposed to reading the actual tome. But then you would be missing out on all the small and undoubtedly wonderful moments that lie within the pages of its rich text. Queequeg’s bizarre fasting ritual, the prophet Elijah’s warnings to Ishmael (if I can call him that) that foreshadow the text, and so on.
The small moments in life are what make it bearable, the small moments in a text are what make it memorable which is why they demand a closer scrutiny. If the written word is a conversation between the reader and the author what then can be said about it’s truncated form?
This turning of the tide from “the page to the pixel” is no small matter and if it is not properly addressed soon, I fear the subsequent generations will be aware of things without ever really knowing anything.
Shelley,
I am looking forward to hearing your students’ voices as they investigate the place of literature in the 21st century. Biased that I am, I hope that they will see the incredible value reading and writing fiction has in the development of their minds and their own personal ethos.
I will leave you with the first verse from Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”:
“For three years, out of key with his time,
He strove to resuscitate the dead art
Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime”
In the old sense. Wrong from the start –”
The English classroom will not suffer Hugh’s fate.
I think that Reist’s point “high schools require the reading of significantly longer and more complex texts” is true. A lot of interesting reflection and study can be done with shorter, less complex books. Our grade 9 students are reading “Hunger Games” this year, replacing the “Tin Flute”.
I think it is a shame to replace fiction with only the non-fiction mentioned above. If non-fiction is to be used, I think more should be produced for the teen audience about their stories and things that are relevant to them.
Hi Shelley,
I am really interested in what you are doing. Beyond the obvious value of literature that I really cannot believe is being debated, I have done some reading on other aspects of the value of literature.
More than once I have come across research done by psychologists at the University of Toronto. They have conducted experiments to measure the impact of literature on empathy and personality. In one test, a control group of undergraduates read a short story by Chekhov and another group read a “police blotter”-style summary of the same story. Prior to and after the reading the students completed a variety of personality tests. Measurements suggested the literature group showed greater personality change. Keith Oatley is the lead on this particular one. Searching “Being Moved by Art” should deliver a PDF of the article in question.
I admire the project with your grade 12s, Shelley, and I’m sure there will be readers in the class who will insist on literary fiction being a part of the new curriculum because they already have been touched by great writing and know something of its power. May they have the upper hand in your initiative.
At the same time I am less sure of those who are politically, economically and materially motivated, often the ones who secure positions in education that give them the mandate to design curriculum. My guess is that few of them have ever been touched by literature and so they undervalue it. Just my guess, mind you, but someone, somewhere is pulling the plug on hundreds of years of brilliant writing and always contemporary insight.
So, someone, somewhere, has to reverse the “whimper” and create an earth-shaking bang to wake everyone up. But who will dare to do that in our bien pensant environment, where orthodoxy and submission to “authority” rule?
The fallout in all of this is that where once education, with all its faults, aimed to draw students out and challenge them to navigate the unfamiliar, our leaders now seem to aim to make students comfortable with what they already know. Not so much in the subjects they have to master to get a “hard” university place and a job, but certainly in the devalued humanities that might give them wisdom and self-knowledge for life.
That’s just the fallout.
The tragedy is that they may never be exposed to the highest form of communication that the language is capable of in its literary masters. Instead they will be served up the mind-numbing, cliché-ridden, formulaic, jargon-infested and utterly demotic dialect of education administrators, corporate executives, media populists, political charlatans, and the vast majority of social networkers.
Not to resist that plague of Mammon’s locusts is quite simply a sell-out. I applaud what you are doing and wish that it will go viral.
A recent release from the Globe, in case anyone doubted:
BOOKS
Globe slashes book section
BY SUSAN G. COLE
After drastically cutting back its books section last summer, the Globe and Mail is making yet more changes in the literature department. Editor Martin Levin and assistant editor Jack Kirchhoff will no longer serve in their posts, leaving the national newspaper without a literary editor.
In an interview with NOW Kirchhoff bemoaned the lack of ads “even during the busiest release season,” and warned that literary criticism in Canada is in crisis.
Levin echoed the sentiments, remarking that criticism has given way to celebrating the first scoop.
“It’s all about celebrity now and being the first one to come out with a review, as if the first review is definitive,” says Levin. “But a book review should be only an opening salvo, the beginning of a conversation.”
But except for specialty publications, there’s not much room for that.
“The literary venues are drying up, ” says Levin, “which is a problem when you consider how important they are to our cultural identity. I suppose that blogs will take over now, but they tend to appeal to people who are already in line with the blogger’s viewpoint.”
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© NOW 2013
I am really looking forward to hearing about what your class develops. This is a fascinating approach and project.
Really nice article good information sharing about education
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