(Anna Ruble) A HOW TO Guide To Curating an ELA Class That Your Students Love
How many of you love to read, but have not been able to fully enjoy it because of the texts that have been picked out for your classes throughout your education? - ME.
Now that we are the teachers, it is our turn to curate an ELA curriculum for our students and colleagues. This is no small feat. If you're worried about what kinds of texts to choose, how to keep your engagement up, and creating a healthy community in your classroom, look no further. This guide will help you on your journey to creating curriculum that your students are excited to engage with.
As most of us know, there are some specific texts that almost everyone who went to public school had to read throughout English classes. These texts may have helped some students to grasp the content, but I am willing to bet that a majority of students didn't actually gain knowledge from these texts that they still remember today. What was the problem? They weren't engaged. Why weren't they engaged? It was not relevant to them. Student engagement is far more important than knowing the story line of classic Literature pieces.
As curators of curriculum, it is important that we: (Garcia, 2015, pg. 89)
- Make the content relevant to our students
- Select the best of those materials for sharing with others
- Make the content convenient and organized
- Add context so students fully understand the background
- Share our content with others (colleagues)
We need to bring in texts that are culturally relevant to our students, texts that they are interested in and engaged in. Chances are, you may unfortunately teach somewhere that your district has required texts that you have to use. Use these texts, but use them lightly. Bring in other texts that are interesting and relevant to your students. Don't be afraid to "push the canon," and stray away from the traditional texts used in many ELA classrooms. (i.e. To Kill a Mockingbird, Shakespeare, etc.) "Foster student choice" (Garcia, 2015 p.90) when it comes to choosing texts. "This is not simply about making a list of the "right" texts to teach in your classroom, but about assembling with care a collection of materials that deliberately reflects your commitment to culturally proactive teaching (Garcia, 2015, p. 91). Your students will thrive in a classroom like this, and you will begin to see them enjoy learning in your classroom.
Now that we’ve established the importance of
bringing in unconventional texts (as in modern text, as opposed to Shakespeare)
that count as literature in the ELA classroom, we need to discuss the equal
importance of making these texts culturally relevant to our students. “We can’t
consider the texts to teach without also considering the students in our
classroom who are reading them.” (Garcia, 2015, pg. 92) A lot of the popular texts in classrooms do not resonate with our students, mostly because they're from a "perspective dominated primarily by White, Eurocentric, hetersexual male voices." (Garcia, 2015, pg. 96)
As curators it is extremely important that we be
mindful of the fact that what we choose to bring in to the classroom will be
what is discussed. So while our students may love it if we bring in something
that is fun for them, we should also be mindful of the kinds of conversations
we want to cultivate in the classroom. We should be stretching our students’
minds to talk about, think about and be critical about the social injustices
that exist, the political situation of our country, and discuss what we can do
to make a difference. These are things that are important for our students to
engage with. Keep this in mind when allowing your students to choose their text. Texts chosen by the students are important, but challenge them and spark a desire for change in them.
Lastly, redefine what "text" really is. Literature can be found in more than just a culmination of words and letters. Literature can be found in music, Environmental Print, social media, and more. Look past the age of the thick books that have been defined as literature, because there is so much more to literature than that. Seek out creative ways to bring literature into your classroom, and you will find that you have curated curriculum that your students truly enjoy.
Anna,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the guidelines for how to re-imagine texts and literature to ensure our students will learn. I was one of the students who could not connect to some texts we were reading. I, in turn, looked online for the spark notes and was able to pass my English classes without actually interacting with the text. My teachers would choose long and boring books that were about contexts that had no relevance to my life. I like the idea of bringing choice to your classroom. This is occurring more and more frequently now. My children's school uses book groups. The teacher chooses a theme for what they are learning, like the theme for the week can be courage. They then choose three to four texts that focus on courage in different ways and with different characters. The teacher then allows the kids to choose what book they will be reading and discussing. This allows them the choice and gives them a sense of freedom in how they learn.
I love the way you say that we need to re-think about what literature actually is. I really like looking at lyrics of a song. This gives you a deeper understanding of what you are singing, the emotions connected to the song, and allows you to connect to the day to day life of your students. There are so many ways to pull meaning from non-traditional texts.
Melissa, that is so awesome that your children's school is doing that. Have you noticed anything different about your children with reading at school? Are they more excited about it? Do they include multicultural texts? I wish more schools did this because I think that is such a wonderful idea. By doing something like this, I think you could include texts that the school wants you do use and different text that you as the teacher can incorporate.
DeleteMelissa, I can relate to how you managed to passed your English classes. I was also one of that student who could not find any connections to the readings that we had to do in class and how they fits into my cultural backgrounds. So often, I just skimmed through the books that we were given the classroom and just read a summary of it through spark notes and cliff notes. That was also how I passed most of my English classes. One time during my freshman year, the professor gave us the options to choose which book we wanted to read. I remembered enjoying it and was more engaged. Unfortunately, I never had that kind of experience in middle school or high schools year. That would have been amazing. Allowing options and giving students the freedom to choose what they want to read and how they want to do it is crucial to our students and as educators, we need to "reimagine" how we are teaching.
DeleteMelissa, that is great that they do that at your school! Courage is a great topic to talk about. Some topics you could bring to the table to talk about with your students that would be culturally relevant and could even help you to get to know your students' better would be the topic of music. The students could name the songs that they listen to, and even that could give you a better idea of the things that they like to listen to, and the culture of the music they listen to. Does anyone have any other ideas of what you could bring to the classroom to create a more culturally sustaining community?
ReplyDeleteAnna , this was a very informational post , yet also incompassed a personal touch that I loved. I can see all of the research and reading you included while also feeling your heart through this and I love that. I agree with so much that you stated in this post perhaps the biggest lesson that stood out to me was about incorporating relevant topics into literature that our students need to be aware of. Some of these students may not be getting any information about our world at home and they need to be aware of things that happen that are effecting them and their lives in and out of the classroom. I agree that some canon literature is overdone and that we should be “fostering student choice” however, there is some merit to the canon on which we include in schools that can teach our children lessons better than we can. Books like “Brave new world” and “To kill a mockingbird” give a narrative explanation of how our world was and could be and students get a sense of political, social and economic issues through friction which I believe can be extremely useful. That being said not doing away with classics but adding more modern literature seems to be very good way to go.
ReplyDeleteMs. Leeds , I like how you touched on some books that address "political, social, and economic issues." This brings up a very powerful point. We as educators must go back and reread certain text especially before handing them over to our children. I remember reading "To kill a mockingbird" but I can barley remember it(Clift notes was my best friend Junior/Senior year). What I am trying to get to is that reading a text once might not allow one to make the connection you made. However, digging deep into the text and rereading it allows one to educate themselves and others correctly on what the text it truly trying to get it. Educators can then integrate cuturally relevant activities that help elaborate the text and help students gain a real understanding of the message the text is bringing. Thank you Ms. Leeds for bringing this point to the discussion!
DeleteI think what is so important about using books like To Kill a Mockingbird is to actually discuss those political, social, and economic issues. So many teachers now just assign students to read a chapter every night, give them a quiz, and maybe a worksheet. These books can start really hard conversations. If we fail to let our students ask questions about the text then we are failing to get the real meaning out of these books. Olivia I love that you brought up Clift Notes because I used that a lot in middle school and high school. I hated assigned reading because all I needed was to know the answers for the quiz the next day. If we reimagine our classroom to have discussions about reading it will hopefully push students to want to read. Much like this year in college for me. we have had discussion about the readings, which pushes me to want to read them and not just quickly skim them before class.
DeleteMrs. Ruble, I would like to first state that this post elaborated on all the keys points in our reading. Good job! Not only was it extremely informational it was impactful and liberating.
ReplyDeleteEducators and truly leave a mark on how children examine subjects. If you sit children down and force them to read material and memorize information from the text just because it is "required" truly hinders children from seeing literature as anything but "boring" or "useless". This banking method of teaching is only creating a divide in the classroom and not allowing educators to truly connect with their children. Finding out your children's interest allows educators to make their first steps to practicing a cuturally sustaining pedagogy. I like how you stated some schools do have a list of books we are made to integrate into the curriculum. However, just referencing one text is not enough. Integrating other text that are cuturally relevant to your children is VITAL. This means as educators we must expand our knowledge on material. Not just what we are told to use but we must go out gain new material to bring into our classrooms. If we (educators) are really for OUR children's learning, then this won’t be viewed as a choir but exciting! Again, great job Mrs. Ruble I can feel the PASSION through your text.
Lastly, I would like to touch on how you examined pushing children to be activist. Referencing social justice issues while exploring text allows children to see they have a voice in this world. This also allows children to understand the world they live in.
My question I would like to bring to this discussion is the following - DO YOU FEEL IT IS OKAY FOR CERTAIN TEXT TO BE PROHIBITED FROM CERTAIN SCHOOLS? WHY? IF NOT, COULD YOU SEE YOURSELF BEING AN ACITIVIST FOR THIS CAUSE? This is a very broad question so if you would like to examine a certain school district or certain book in particular that is fine. (-:
Olivia, I want to comment on your questions you have posed for us.
DeleteMy high school had SO MANY "banned" books that would not be read in class or put in our school library because they were "too controversial". In 8th grade, my English class was not allowed to read "To Kill a Mockingbird" because we were not "mature" enough. The English teachers in my high school teamed up and started a banned book club.
To me, this angers me. Why are other people deciding what I can read? I feel like they were trying to hide real world problems that were going on and trying to keep our minds in a box. At the time, I did not think much of it because I trusted that the school was doing what was best for us. But now I understand they were just trying to hide things from us. I wish I could go back and ask so many questions.
Ms. McGlan, thank you for your insightful response. I appreciate the question you posed. In response to your question, I do feel that it is okay for certain texts to be banned from schools, but I don't necessarily think that will solve our problem. What we need to do is encourage our students to think about all texts critically. Our students themselves will begin to examine the biases that traditional ELA books may hold, and simultaneously, as teachers we can empower them to be agents for change. It's more about changing the perspective of what we're reading. Again, loved your enthusiasm. I can't wait to discuss this further in class tomorrow.
DeleteMrs. Ruble, first of all, I LOVE your blog post because you included many information that I personally related to and which I am sure other student too. I like the quote that you wrote at the top about how a majority of students who love to read but didn't enjoy the readings that they make them read in a traditional English classroom. It's very accurate that not many student like the readings that the teachers forced them to read in school. Throughout my middle school and high school years, I never once liked the readings that they made me do. One time in my freshman year of college, the professor made us choose which book we wanted to read for a project. I remembered I love that idea and really enjoyed doing it. From one of our readings, I found this text that really stood out to me, "We are asking a great deal from our students when we ask them to invest in material that does not reflect, respond to, or engage with their cultural identities."(pg. 53). I like this statement a lot because it is something we as an educator have to know and realize that it's not fair for our students to invest and waste their precious time reading the things that are not relevant to them whatsoever. I shouldn't blame a student who is not engage in the classroom and doesn't have good grades in class because it's not fair for them. It is our job to make the readings and discussions engageable because our students are not going to be engage if its not relevant to their life. So often, I found myself not engaging in a classroom discussions because most of the topics did not seemed relevant to me just because I came from a total different backgrounds than the rest of my classmates.
ReplyDeleteI very much appreciated your picture. Reimagining is so important especially when choosing a text for our classroom. Many teachers tend to fall back into the ways that they were taught, so reimagining what we can do with those texts is very important. Cultivating conversation from those texts is also another whole feat that we will be trying to deal with as an educator. We have to be knowledgable about what conversations we want to be having, and how the literature helps start those conversations. I know in eighth grade I had to read To Kill A Mockingbird. This book is filled with conversation starters about race, and gives many segue's for students to ask hard questions. When I was in eighth grade we never had those discussions. We actually never had conversations about the book, we just took reading quizzes and did worksheets. This is the problem with taking assigned readings so literal, and also what makes assigned reading so terrible. If students are never having conversations about what they are reading, then are they really taking anything from the reading?
ReplyDeleteKyrsten, I can totally relate to the feelings you talked about in this post. When I was in high school we read Shakespeare and took it VERY literally. The teacher made us read it, interpret it, and take quizzes on it. To me, I was not engaged, nor did I care to be. I didn't find Shakespeare relevant to me in any way and my teacher didn't seem to try to make it relevant either. I think relevancy is KEY to education. If the students can relate, they will become engaged. Just like in life; if we can't relate to what people are talking about, we often don't even want to be a part of the conversation. That's why student choice or connecting assigned readings to their lives in someway is a great way to make literacy fun and engaging. Just as you said, To Kill A Mockingbird can start conversations about race which would be a great way to take a literacy piece and make it relatable. Reimangining literacy and the texts we choose to teach is something we should all think about before starting our own libraries in our classrooms. Another thing from the readings I found interesting was that when students own the books, they feel more inclined to learn. This way they can make marks in it and also go back and read it again to take a more critical look at it.
DeleteAnna,
ReplyDeleteI love that you included the "As curators of curriculum, it is important that we:" guidlelines because this was something that I made sure to book mark in my book, as well as take note of as a way to keep myself in check. When I first began reading this chapter, I had no idea what a "curator" does or even what it was. However, what struck me was when the authors stated, "That's because the word 'curate' originates from the Latin word 'curare', which means 'to care' (Garcia & O'Donnell-Allen, 2015, p. 89). That's what I felt set in stone my understanding throughout the reading. As curators, we must care. We must care what are students are learning about, how they are learning about it, and what can they do with the information being learning in a critical context? We have a responsibility in which we must inspire our students. We cannot inspire students if we don't take the time to care about them and their social and cultural experiences. It is ignorant to believe that what occurs outside of the classroom's walls won't affect what goes on inside of them.
Great post; I agree that we should be bringing in unconventional texts. I was thinking that going with the other post from this week, we could bring in hip-hop/rap lyrics as text. It would be easy to relate many rap songs to social justice because many of them directly discuss issues of police brutality and other issues for communities of people of color, such as racism/hate crimes/injustices, systematic oppression, and poverty. “We can’t consider the texts to teach without also considering the students in our classroom who are reading them” (Garcia, 2015, page 92). I completely agree with this; I think it will be important to allow our students to choose non-traditional texts that resonate with them personally, instead of choosing all of the material for them. They can bring examples of poetry/music/online writings or other forms of non-conventional text that is relevant and meaningful to them into the classroom.
ReplyDeleteAnna,
ReplyDeleteI really like the guidelines you mentioned in your post. I feel like these are things we have already been working on, but I think these guidelines provide a more clear and concise list of ways to be culturally responsive. However, I do pose the question of how do we engage student who simply doesn’t like to read? I have seen kids pick up several different kinds of books that are written in all kinds of ways, but they still don’t become engaged with the text. At least not fully. So how can we develop ways to maintain engagement or reach these kinds of students?
I've noticed in each of your responses and in your blog post how at the end of forming your thoughts, you pose questions to the reader/author and create insightful thinking and conversation that skims beyond the surface topic by branching into numerous ideas. I love it!
DeleteI personally think it is still okay to bring in the old text (How to Kill a Mockingbird, Shakespeare and many others). But, not to read them fully, but only meaningful parts of them. In Romeo and Juliet, they suffer from political issues from their families. This could bring in social issues from around the world and could make this cultural relevant to both reading and real world. I am not saying read this text fully, but parts to bring the issues to literacy and other books. You can bring in Shakespeare or many other authors we have read and combine the learning together. Like How to Kill a Mockingbird, you can bring in what your rights are and teach them about history and social issues that they may face, like with the wall and our Latinx population. But reading them fully is more a waste of time that focuses too much on the text and what they mean. Like we have been talking about, we must hack the system of learning to better include more into the learning. Because, if the students are interested, they will go out and read those stories and then hopefully they bring them back into the class. That is when you see the connections to learning to start to happen with each other. You see, that if the students start to bring in their own stories or even items that resonated with them. This will spark class discussion that would help you understand if they can relate this to others material in life. But, also make sure that they are always engaged with the material and hopefully ask for more teaching like this in the future. As the article commented, “After reading the picture book Rosa (Giovanni, 2005), a story of the historic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, the preservice teachers debated whether elementary students were equipped to wrestle with real- world issues like dis-crimination, poverty, and social protest (Riley and Crawford-Garrett, 2016, Pg. 94). This is what I will end on. Because, the way it says are equipped to really handled these texts. The answer is yes most of the time. You should no go to violent with blood and detail with that manner for they might have psychological issues with the gory detail. But, state the facts and don’t bring in your own personal political views at the start. Let them think for themselves and then say what you think after some time has passed.
ReplyDeleteAnna,
ReplyDeleteI love your text! It was an absolute joy to read your work and see your summarization on how to create a culturally sustaining and relevant pedagogy through creating culturally relevant ELA content. I can't tell you how many times I've thought to myself while doing an assignment, "When am I ever going to use this in my life?" or "I won't ever have to look at this again, so let's just get it done." There's going to be content ranging from poetry units to analyzing works of literature that we will have to incorporate by state standards into our curriculum. However, it's about bridging those works and finding a common medium/conflict between fictional/historical works and making it relevant to our students' lives. How much more interesting would it have been if we had gotten to analyze some of our favorite songs, bring them into class, and share them with our students for a poetry analysis? Or, for example, during reading a novel like "The Outsiders", we got to relate some of the conflicts in that book with conflicts that occur in the outside world, or if the students could insert themselves as a character in the book and write a pretend chapter on what they would want to happen and how they would handle the situations?