Thread by @msmisrule

Some good things happened at school recently that have borne out my decades-long advocacy of selecting texts that meet the students’ needs, interests and abilities rather than falling back on The Canon and what we think is both Good For Them and in our comfort zone as teachers.

I share a pretty disengaged Year 10 class with my HT. We decided to teach @claire_zorn’s One Would Think the Deep this term, and it was such a great choice. When my HT read them the first couple of chapters in class, she said you could have heard the proverbial pin drop.

If you don’t know the book, it’s a multi-award-winning YA (#LoveOzYa) novel about grief and loss, masculinity and love, surfing, sex and scratching your way painfully toward adulthood.

My colleague is doing literacy-focused work with the class, while I am doing focused work on character and so on: the novel as an engaging narrative experience.

One of the boys in this class is just hanging on until he can start his apprenticeship.

He’s done very little work all year. On Friday, I ran a lesson where the kids had to select character strengths from a kind of well-being chart and apply them to three characters from the novel. Every one of them became really quickly absorbed. This boy didn’t do the work,

but instead spent the entire period reading the novel, entirely of his own accord. I asked him, are you enjoying it? Yes, he said, it’s really good.

If he leaves Year 10 having read one book that he really enjoyed and responded to, after years of avoiding any kind of work

in Subject English, if he now knows that books can be pleasurable and inspiring and engaging, then I am so bloody happy about that I can’t even begin to desvrine.

The other thing was that I wrote the Year 9 exam, which the kids did online because we were still in lockdown at that point. We do a science fiction unit of work with Year 9, which we need to assess in the exam.

For the reading task, I chose an extract from an SF story written by the great children’s author, Katherine Paterson (“The Last Dog”). And guess what, gentle reader? Across the board, the kids did really well.

I know, because I marked it. They understood the language, and the emotional “human experience” aspect of the text was pitched exactly at them. Because it was written for them.

We bang on about audience and purpose but we don’t then consider those things in our text selection.

So many of our kids are non-readers, and then we hit them in Year 8 with short stories written in the 1950s for an educated English readership (Roald Dahl), or Fahrenheit 451 in Year 9, Ursula LeGuin in English Studies #ffs and expect them, with zero reading stamina

and less than zero cultural or linguistic references to be able to read and respond meaningfully to them.

Here’s the thing: we have a wealth of literature written for young Australian readers what we could be giving our students to read, but instead we seem hell bent

on simply replicating the canon, because that’s what we were taught, and because we are now English teachers, were successful in our studies. We do this over and over again, ignoring student disengagement and crap outcomes.

For many of us, teaching in disadvantaged and/or remote communities, we are academically nothing like the kids we teach, and we are doing them a huge disservice by expecting them to go from zero to Kafka in one fell swoop.

So here’s my plea to@my fellow English teachers, borne out by the vindication of my recent experience in choosing texts that the students find meaningful and will respond to:

Challenge the canon.
Challenge your own comfort zone.
Put your students’ needs first.

Read widely and learn to respect the huge body of work created by contemporary writers of children’s and YA literature.

Trust me, it will be transformative.