"What Texts Were Taught in This Course?": What, How, and Why Middle-Schoolers Read at Long-View
What texts were taught in this course? We see this question, at this time of year, on some of the recommendation forms teachers are asked to fill out as part of Long-View learners' high-school applications. We also hear echoes of this question sometimes from parents, eager for their children to read the highest-quality books and confused that they are reading a recently published dystopian young-adult novel.
The implication is the same: the curriculum's rigor can be judged based on the worthiness of the titles on the "syllabus."
It's not an unreasonable assumption. Most of us born in the old millennium remember middle-school and high-school English classes structured around a pre-planned series of well-established books the whole class reads together. Many of us can look back and reminisce (whether fondly or otherwise), "Seventh grade was To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men, eighth grade was Lord of the Flies and Romeo and Juliet…"
Traditional curricula often place high value on awareness of and exposure to the classics. But even apart from the problems with the "canon" itself—most of all, the way it has always left out so many voices and perspectives—we see the goal differently at Long-View. In Mathematics and Science, "covering" new material is only the byproduct of classroom experiences in which children learn to think and investigate like a mathematician or scientist. Similarly, in Literacy, we view fictional texts less as the content in and of themselves and more as the vehicle for accessing learner-centered experiences which develop the particular skills and habits of mind that constitute the content. These include multiple forms of literary analysis; identifying, evaluating, and critiquing a central argument; spotting bias; building an argument based on textual evidence; emotionally understanding people and empathizing with their perspectives; and more. These skills can be practiced whether a child is reading Hamlet or The Hunger Games. So this approach frees up learners to choose the texts that excite them, cultivating agency, independence, and a lifelong love of reading at the same time.
But we like to think that the Literacy program at Long-View has a nuanced response to this question of "classics" vs. "choice" that continues to animate polarizing debates among literacy educators. Certain texts—via their complexity and subtlety, the topics and themes they explore, or their literary mastery—do create richer and deeper opportunities for critical engagement and the cultivation of aesthetic appreciation than others. And the more outstanding the author's craft, the more there is for a learner to glean as a writer as well.
That's why we as teachers help learners select compelling books that will also challenge them, increase their reading ability, and broaden their horizons. For the same reason, we anchor every Literacy unit—across genres and across bands—with exemplary and purposefully diverse read-aloud books that serve as mentor texts and case studies for the many high-level reading and writing skills we push our learners to practice. (Yes, we read aloud to middle-schoolers every day they have Literacy! And it's no secret that it's the part of the block they look forward to the most.) We also carefully curate bookshelves (whether physical or virtual) of high-interest, high-quality unit-specific books that learners can select from and then read, discuss, and analyze together in partnerships or book clubs.
Through this process, we've often seen learners begin to gravitate eagerly and of their own accord toward very sophisticated, classic texts as they move closer to graduating from Long-View. But no matter what they've read by the time they leave Long-View, we want them to walk into their first high-school English class knowing that it's how they read that matters: deeply, actively, critically, and with joy.
