Pam Allyn, a literary expert and the author of What to Read When who runs an organization that educates teachers, agrees that the time has come to abandon the class novel – leaving it to selected high school English classes designed to teach the classics. While some teachers can be effective with the approach, she says that often students tell themselves: “I have to get through this book. I’ve got to learn to understand it the way my teacher wants me to.” That can be boring for good readers, she says, and “devastating” for struggling students.
Tina Gordon, president of the Canadian Council of Teachers of English and a resource teacher at a Winnipeg-area high school, says many teachers are trying new approaches – such as introducing one book in many different ways, or reading excerpts out loud – and seeing the value in choice in English class. She understands why many teachers still love the class novel, wanting to expose young people to the books they love. But, she says, “some of our practices we keep because they’re tradition.” And because, she adds, both teachers and parents hold on to the idea that “what makes a more educated person is if they can quote Hamlet.”
Source: Erin Anderssen, Letting students choose books could make them better readers, Globe & Mail, March 29 2010
Intuitively, the findings reported in this Globe & Mail article, Letting students choose books could make them better readers, strike me as very plausible. I remember accessing the school and public library during my elementary years with great fondness. I’ll confess that I wasn’t reading the great novels of the nineteenth century though – I wanted to read about the Cold War, World War II, Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, technology and so forth. I certainly fiction as well, but I think that something like two thirds to three quarters of my reading then (and now) tends to be non-fiction. I wonder if the unrelenting focus on reading novels is part of the problem with engaging young students. Maybe some of them want to learn about history or other non-fiction topics more than they want to read fiction? I think that Tina Gordon makes a good point in arguing that some practices in reading education is little more than traditi0n. Tradition can be a good thing (e.g. the rule of law in the West) but it shouldn’t be continued solely on the basis of it being traditional.
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Hi Bruce,
Glad you found this article interesting. I agree that English classes should make greater use of creative non-fiction as reading material. English teachers should also encourage students to learn how to write this kind of work as well as poems, short stories and other staples of the high school English class experience. I liked the approach of the teacher quoted in the article who gave her class a list of books to choose from. Her method provides opportunities for both individual choice and class discussion.
Since this piece focusses on reading material, it would be interesting to see the Globe and Mail run a follow up piece different approaches to encouraging student writing skills. I seem to remember there was a Facts and Arguments column last year about an English teacher who assigned her students tandem stories. They had to get into pairs and take turns writing a paragraph of a story, each incorporating the other’s material.