There’s been a lot of buzz over the past year or so around the word equity and many educators calling for replacement texts for the traditional cannon in the English classroom. You can’t bring up a book like To Kill a Mockingbird or The Great Gatsby in a teacher Facebook group right now without getting called out to one side or the other of the fight to keep and the fight to replace long-taught novels. To me, these verbal battles are a good sign, a sign of growth among educators reconsidering and truly reflecting on what they’ve done in the past and whether or not those same practices hold up as we learn new information about the world, about what our students need, and as best practices evolve in our profession.

But this is also a dangerous time. It’s a time when we might be letting the pendulum swing too far in any direction and what we really need to be doing is having comprehensive conversations that are bigger than a single text alone. Here are a few questions that you might bring to a department meeting in the near future for discussion. This blog post is designed to be an outline for a discussion amongst colleagues and a reflective experience that determines next steps for your department in their professional development journey. I’ve provided some of my own insight under each question, but these are my opinions based on my own experiences and work as an individual.

For a worksheet version of this blog post, simply download that below. Let’s get started!

Should texts alone be the only reflection of our equitable practices?

I sure hope not, but this is a lot of what I’m seeing in the social media world of education. The battle seems to be primarily over books, and to me, this is a battle that boils down to the idea of representation. Representation means that a curriculum represents a well-rounded set of voices, styles, backgrounds, lifestyles, and life experiences. Here’s the problem: if we replace To Kill a Mockingbird with The Hate U Give, teachers who feel unprepared to discuss racism or privilege still don’t know how to address racism or privilege. Changing the book didn’t make the real issue here any easier or help the teacher feel any more prepared to challenge students in their self-reflection journey. Even if changing a novel helps create more representation in a curriculum, we can’t forget that training and learning about teaching like an anti-racist goes beyond swapping out books, no matter how well-intentioned that move might be.

Teaching and creating an equitable education for all students is engrained in all of what we do, not just what we read. It’s in our grading practices. It’s in our classroom management policies and behavioral expectations. It’s in our follow-through on those policies and expectations. It’s in our late work policy. It’s in the social emotional learning that we provide (or don’t provide) for our students. Equity is not achieved by a heroic YA novel coming in to the curriculum to save the day. Take this example from Val Brown at the Center for Antiracist Education:

During a read-aloud, shortly before winter break, her white teacher was trying to get students to imagine themselves in front of a warm fire. “Imagine you are sitting in front of your fireplace. You are wearing your coziest clothes, and you have a warm cup of hot chocolate,” she said.
At that moment, a white student sitting next to my daughter patted my daughter’s head and said, “I have my hot chocolate right here.”
The teacher said nothing, and my child sat there silently mortified. She told me the story when she got home from school with tears in her eyes.

Yes, intentional work needs to be done to revise our reading lists and truly deciding why any novel should stay or go in a curriculum, but the work doesn’t end there. The teacher mentioned above might have a beautiful lineup of anti-racist picture books, but that doesn’t matter if we aren’t doing the internal work, too. Brown continues in her article by saying, “When educators are silent about racism, marginalized students assume the educator is comfortable with the status quo.” Let’s make sure we’re not oversimplifying the work that needs to be done.

What voices are missing from our vertical alignment across the department?

Again, equity is something to be considered on a large scale and not only on a novel by novel basis. Consider the experience from a student’s perspective. Think: If I went from E1, to E2, to AP Lang, to Senior Comp & Lit, what would my experience be? What stories would I hear? What voices would dominate that four year stretch? Trace a few different tracks that students might inhabit and make a list of what’s missing. In making that list, be sure to specify which texts have more real-estate than others (whole class vs lit circle/choice) and what kinds of supplementary texts are expected and important (articles, poetry, etc.).

How might equity be more possible if we shift units away from being text-centered and instead essential question/inquiry-centered?

To Kill a Mockingbird is problematic if it stands alone in a curriculum as the one book designated to “discuss racism”, but in a unit that asks When injustice occurs, is empathy enough? we have a different situation on our hands. Placing that novel in the context of that question turns the conversation entirely. Now, instead of the unit being a chapter by chapter plot driven experience, students are asking questions about what to do when they witness injustice. It puts Atticus on the spot, pressing students to think did he do enough? Is walking in someone else’s shoes actually good parenting advice? Why does Harper Lee focus so much on the Finch family and so little on the family that’s actually experiencing the trauma of an illegitimate rape accusation? In what ways is silence its own form of injustice? Why was it easier for the jury to believe in the demonization of Tom Robinson and not Bob Ewell? An EQ pushes the unit into multiple lines of inquiry deepening the investigation into the novel itself, it’s merits, its message, and its commentary on the society for which it was written and the application to us as a modern audience.

When we’re poised for units that ask questions that are critical of the words students are studying, we create a more equitable, student-centered, and rigorous learning experience.

Also, to be clear, we could easily replace Mockingbird with a long list of other titles from authors of color using this EQ and the unit would be stellar.

For more help writing and utilizing essential questions, check out the following resources;

What are the literary merits of the text in question? What are the experiences that only this text makes possible?

Here’s the deal: the cannon is inarguably filled with tons of dead white dudes. It’s an absolute fact. The argument that “the classics are classics for a reason” is not a good enough reason to keep something around. Consider the actual literary merits of the text in question and the experiences that the study of this novel that are unique to only this text. If this cannon text provides skill, inquiry, and thematic teaching points that are critical to the overall experience that you want your students to have, maybe it doesn’t need to be cut. Maybe it needs a facelift or reframing or reality check. Maybe it needs some fresh supplementary texts or poems to provide the balance of perspectives that the novel alone can’t provide.

But maybe it needs to go. And we need to be open minded to that possibility.

Can another novel of equal literary merit be use to teach the same skills, themes, and concepts and also provide a much needed or missing voice from the curriculum? If so, that’s probably a sign that a revision should be considered.

Why do we feel overly protective or defensive of particular texts? Where does that come from? Do those reactions stimulate innovation and growth OR repetitive, unrefined practices? Something else?

This question is hard to face for so many of us. When we love novels and love teaching them, the idea of giving them up for something new can be scary and unnerving. Linger on this question for a while and see where your department goes, but know that honest reflection on this question will have to happen over and over and over again. When we love something, we’re really good at defending it, even when we know the other person might have a good idea. But because I love it can’t be a reason to keep a novel in the curriculum that’s not working or needs a facelift.

When a text is selected as a whole-class novel, what does that communicate to our students and families? What about texts that are placed in lit circle units or choice units?

Here is another disturbing trend happening in English classrooms: the “diversity” lit circle unit. Many schools are taking the step to recognize the deficit in voices and stories in the current curriculum, and as a band-aid, have created singular units of study where students read a choice novel or a lit circle novel that checks off the diversity box. This is not creating equity. Don’t get me wrong: there are amazing novels from a wide variety of authors that make great choices for lit circles, but if the only time we’re going to address discrimination is in a unit where the whole class literally isn’t on the same page, then we’re treating these novels as tokens.

We have a lot of growing to do in the English Language Arts world and that growth needs to come from critical conversations and leadership willing to facilitate those and provide teachers with the PD and support that they need to take the next steps. In Bettina L. Love’s book We Want to Do More Than Survive, she writes, “When you understand how hard it is to fight for educational justice, you know that there are no shortcuts and no gimmicks; you know this to be true deep in your soul, which brings both frustration and determination. Educational justice is going to take people power, driven by the spirit and ideas of the folx who have done the work of antiracism before: abolitionists" (13). This charge is powerful - something we need to feel in our bones. We can be anti-racist and anti-biased educators alone, but to move our students toward an educational experience of equity, we must move together and move seriously without playing games and looking for quick-fixes.

For further reading, consider some of these professional development opportunities: