This page was prepared by Audrey Mickahail at the Center for Electronic Projects in American Culture Studies (CEPACS), housed at Georgetown University, under the direction of Randy Bass, Department of English.
Volume 5
Date: Wed, 6 Jul 1994 17:14:13 -0400
Subject: JRNL: High School Canons (cont.)
I apologize for the hiatus in T-AMLIT postings: the Georgetown
connection to BITNIC was down for a few days.
RBass
I have been reading this strand with great interest for several reasons. First, I have recently been working with a group of teachers in a metro Atlanta school district that is trying to rethink what high school English should look like. While visiting many classrooms here this year as part of the methods course practicum and to supervise student teachers, I've been struck again and again by what I now sometimes call "the tyranny of the coverage model." Teachers seem to feel trapped into a march thru the anthology their district has chosen, and, as Tony P. suggests in his recent entry, most of these anthologies haven't changed much since we went to school many years ago. (I wrote a letter to Heath about a year ago asking if they'd considered a high school version of the college Heath-- wish that were in the works somewhere--but another part of me feels the anthology itself is part of the problem.)
I taught high school American lit for over a decade before returning to grad school at U of M recently. The best experiences I had as a high school teacher of American Lit were a) one year when I team-taught with a history teacher in an integrated block and b) a couple of years when I did a combination of shared readings and individualized ones, all focused around themes the kids and I selected together. In both cases, I was at a private school where teachers could change curriculum at will, since students bought their own books, and schedule changes were easier to negotiate than in most large school systems. However, I've been somewhat encouraged in the past few years to see more large systems beginning to consider the kind of open-ended choices they need to give teachers to change both instructional approaches and canon content, and I hope in the future to see even more.
To make HS teachers and administrators more comfortable with the idea of such changes--with the need to provide more of the kinds of chances Tony Petrosky talked about and to expand the traditional reading lists for greater ethnic and gender diversity--college English and American Studies folk need to get more actively involved in outreach activities--informal as well as formal. Lots of HS teachers are so busy trying to get thru the day with too many students that they know very little about changes in the discipline(s) at the college/u. level, and they go on teaching what they were taught (and what's still in too many anthologies). I went back to grad school myself because I knew I needed to expand my knowledge of "American Literature"--I had heard just enough vague trickle-down info to know I wasn't remotely current in the field anymore. I was so excited, once I got there, to find out about authors I never read, movements in literary crit. and cultural studies that needed to be incorporated in my pedagogy. I wish more HS teachers could have the opportunity I did, to return to school themselves, even if only for a summer institute, but even better for some kind of school-year sabbatical. I continued to teach HS American Lit while working on my doctorate, and here are some of the texts I studied in American Lit and American Culture courses at Michigan that my own HS students enjoyed reading:
Morrison's BELOVED, Chesnutt's THE MARROW OF TRADITION and THE CONJURE WOMAN, Kingston's WOMAN WARRIOR, Wright's BLACK BOY and NATIVE SON, Cisneros' THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET, DuBois' nonfiction, Sedgwick's HOPE LESLIE, C. P. Gilman's fiction and nonfiction, Dybek's CHILDHOOD AND OTHER MEMORIES, 19th cent. American women writers like Phelps, Child, and Brent/Jacobs, etc. etc. I also got the courage, after reading more about cultural studies while in grad school, to develop with a science teacher a high school elective course, which we team-taught to 9-12th graders, on "the literature of science": we read sci-fi and mainstream press writings about science and looked for blurred genres--one of the best American Lit teaching experiences I've ever had.
I guess if I could sum up my current thoughts on the HS canon of American Lit, I'd say this: we need to help more teachers feel more flexible about it, and, in particular, to help move HS Am Lit away from the goal of "covering" a list of traditional literary "works" to offering opportunites for developing a broader love of reading and writing and thinking critically about texts that have interesting things to say to us all about American culture--even to the extent of reconsidering "American."
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Volume 5
Number 2
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Date: Mon, 11 Jul 1994 16:54:43 -0400
Subject: JRNL: Canons & Anthologies
I would like to get a couple of more paragraphs in on the discussin of the high school canon. The recent posting on the problems of anthologies and teached education struck a cord with me. When I was teaching high school (back in the cut, as my kids say it), my sense of literature changed dramatically when I began to take masters courses in literature and read much more widely than I had done when I was an undergraduate. There are monies from the National Endowment for the Humanities available for courses in fiction and poety (and other topics) for summer institutes. I have heard many good things from teachers who have attended these courses. There's so much good fiction out there, and teachers have so little exposure to it and so little time to get into it when they do know about it. I always vote for books instead of anthologies. Always.
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Volume 5
Number 3
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Date: Wed, 13 Jul 1994 13:24:05 -0400
Subject: JRNL: Canons and Anthologies
I agree that when teachers can choose their own material and connect the pieces in ways that make it accessible and interesting, learning is so much better. We need more opportunities for NEH and NEH-like summer institutes. But we also need more time during the school year for interested teachers to read, study, and work together on the subject matter of their discipline! For me, the best thing that happened was going "back to school" like you to work in American Studies for my doctorate. I wish all high school teachers could have more similar opportunities for revisiting the content of literary studies--and have them without necessarily needing to enroll in a full-fledged graduate program.
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This page was prepared by Audrey Mickahail at the Center for Electronic Projects in American Culture Studies (CEPACS), housed at Georgetown University, under the direction of Randy Bass, Department of English.