Let's be honest, though. If we're doing this, then they become units/classes about post-colonial theory, feminism, or psychoanalysis--not literature--which is fine but let's at least be honest about it.
It's an approach to literature that affirms one worldview
I could teach my students a Calvinist Christian "lens" but I doubt many would be happy about it. Read character motivations, themes, and author's contentions against my faith through the idea of "total human depravity" but then I'm just self-affirming my beliefs.
@MsJasmineMN was right. I should have not used "no intellectual challenge." It's a poor use of words on my part. There's intellectual challenge reading as such but not ideological contention.
I could read an atheist narrative and still affirm my own theology.
Also, let it be known, I’m not a Calvinist. Free will for the win
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Modern teacher training programs:
- We made BLM friendship bracelets in our capstone course
- I was told to make my students activists
- Many of our readings dealt with CRT in schools
- Instead of papers, many graduate students wrote acrostic poems
- If we read a classic work with students, we were told to do so through a Marxist lens
- In a circle, we passed around a popsicle stick with googly eyes while discussing our feelings
- I had to affirm "everyone has their truth.
The one professor who pushed against this and actually taught us the nuts-and-bolts of teaching was slandered to students by other professors
So my biggest problem with the whole #DisruptTexts thing isn't their treatment of "the canon" (whatever that means) but their literary theory.
It turns every book into an echo chamber.
Traditional literary theory sees a book carrying a certain purpose, a message, engagement with certain themes and ideas.
T.S. Eliot believed that great authors introduced readers to ideas themselves, and we as readers are to engage with those ideas.
#DisruptTexts, however, relies upon what we'd call "critical" literary theory.
In this case, a book becomes an artifact and we read to interrogate and learn about the time/culture in which it was written. As Foucault would have it, reading becomes more like archeology.