A little over two years ago, I asked the teachers on my secondary ELA leadership team to help me compile a list of all the texts English teachers in their buildings were teaching whole-class.
An unscientific study, certainly, it did give a sense of the story we were telling throughout our district. It was male, and it was white, and it was dead. No one clutched their pearls.
I took the titles and pulled apart the demographic information of the authors and the protagonists as well as the year each book was originally published. Then, I did the math on the chances of a student who magically completed sixth through twelfth grades in one year encountering an author of color. The odds were not good. Get more specific and ask about a Latinx author or an American Indian author and the likelihood was almost nil.
I shared this information with my team. The responses were shocked, but not surprised. I wasn’t surprised when they asked how many authors or protagonists should students be reading to get to the right number. How many African American authors could make up for the ones we’d been missing? What was the quota?
Of course, there isn’t. As soon as we start chasing that, we’ve moved from people to numbers. Instead, it is incumbent upon us to ensure all students are experiencing many different threads constituting narrative tapestries. It’s part of the work we’ve set about doing as we’ve been building our new curriculum. Our recommended texts feature voices and stories offering a more inclusive and representative set of mirrors, windows, and maps into and of the human condition.
The other bias of the curriculum is toward choice with challenge. There’s no one book every person or student needs to read. Give them choice. When giving that choice, though, make challenges – Read a book by an author who is different from you, make sure your next book is by someone writing at least 30 years after or before the last book you read, read a book recommended by a stranger. The trick is to make the pathway narrow enough to lead to something new and broad enough to keep control with the students.
Each student must be reading broadly and deeply. Each must encounter stories that build deeper, more challenging, and more complex understandings of both those who look like them and those who do not.