Workshopping the Canon and No More Fake Reading: Two Recent Approaches to Combining Classics with YA Literature by Diane Scrofano

As many of us prepare for the ALAN workshop, reach the mid-point of a YA course, or await for the announcement of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature it is nice to be reminded that the classics still exist. Some of our colleagues in high schools, community colleges, and universities are still struggling to have their students read and respond to any literature. Over the last fifteen years, I have frequently wondered if what we over at the large university is is a true liberal arts education; one in which students are exposed to a full range of disciplines. Do we try to streamline students through a college degree that really equals job training instead of an education in the full sense of the word. Not that four years is ever enough. I readily admit to still learning. In fact, over the last week my students have forced me to reconsider my own thinking (maybe entrenched thinking) about teacher preparation.

I love it when Diane Scrofano suggests an idea for guest blog post. She keeps me ground in thinking about literature large ways. She reminds me that we can think bigger that a single text or a single way of teaching literature in a classroom. She has written about YA text and mental illness in a post that suggests the need for more diversity in the representation of this national issue. She addressed it again in a post that talked about Dear Evan Hansen in its form as a book and as a musical. Her first post for the blog took on Hamilton and YA historical romance. It doesn't surprise me one bit that she would want to discuss combining the classics and YA.

Workshopping the Canon and No More Fake Reading: Two Recent Approaches to Combining Classics with YA Literature 
by Diane Scrofano

​I just finished grading one of the worst sets of essays on Emily Bronte’s 1848 novel Wuthering Heights that I’ve ever received in twelve years of teaching that novel. Of twenty enrolled students (fewer than the usual about twenty-seven that my community college English classes usually have), two didn’t turn in an essay at all. Three used their thesaurus to change the wording of the SparkNotes just enough so that Turnitin.com wouldn’t recognize the content as outright copy-and-paste plagiarism. There were a few Cs and Ds because students misunderstood key details in the novel or in the assigned pieces of literary criticism on the novel. After grading this batch of essays, I wondered if it was still worth it to teach Wuthering Heights. Despite the fact that sometimes it doesn’t go well, I’m going to teach Wuthering Heights again. In fact, I hope I never stop using Wuthering Heights. Here’s why. 

​When we study Wuthering Heights, we analyze changing attitudes toward race through postcolonial lenses. We see how tropes like weather, seasons, shared meals, and boundaries are used to convey themes. We look at the two different kinds of masculinity represented by Edgar and Heathcliff and how those two versions of masculinity are still at war in our own times. 

And then we look at some of the same things in Gene Luen Yang’s 2006 graphic novel, American Born Chinese. Who is the real man? The Monkey King beating the crap out of the gods who won’t accept him or the reformed Monkey King who serves others? What precipitates the Monkey King’s reform? Why do 19th-century stereotypes of Asians sometimes resemble stereotypes of present-day Latinos more than they resemble 20th- and 21st-century stereotypes of Asians? Once Jin Wang gets some “cool” status, does he oppress those below him, kind of like Heathcliff does when he ascends the social ladder? How do artistic elements of color, line, and negative space help express the theme of self-acceptance? 

I love young adult literature. I love the classics. There should be no contradiction perceived here. Nothing starts out as a classic; most classics got famous because people liked them at some point. I’m all about giving our students that context to see why people loved these books once and how they speak to timeless human concerns and why we can love them again today. By the same token, I believe that classics aficionados shouldn’t be suspicious of all things YA or all things new. Even the classics were new once. How sad to not jump on a great new book because we’ve got to wait 200 years just to make sure it’s good?
           
​And yet these two factions war on. At YA literary events, there can be outright hostility toward the classics: You are an elitist because young people today can’t understand the outdated diction. Classics are too hard. Classics are too white. Classics are irrelevant. If you like them, you are out of touch with the youth. Worse yet, if you think that young people are actually reading the classics you persist in assigning, you are deluding yourself. 

This brings me to the approach of Berit Gordon in No More Fake Reading (2018). The cover features a blue-nailpolished adolescent girl hiding her cell phone inside of The Scarlet Letter. In Gordon’s approach, the solution to that problem is this: Don’t ask students to read whole classics or to read them by themselves. The teacher should pick snippets of the classics to read aloud and project onto a screen for the class. This will ensure that the students know enough of the story to be culturally literate. Then, the teacher will use the classical snippet to teach a transferrable skill, like identifying character traits or interpreting symbolism. The students will then apply these transferrable skills as they analyze young adult texts. Gordon insists, “we’re not teaching them everything that’s important to know in The Scarlet Letter; we’re teaching them how to read well” (81). She urges us to resist the temptation of “teaching the book, not the reader” (81).  The teacher and his/her classical snippets will take only about fifteen minutes of an approximately one-hour class period. The remaining forty-five minutes will be spent with students silently reading their independently chosen YA novels and making notes on character, symbol, or whatever the daily literary device was. As students read, the teacher will circulate to conference with students one-on-one about their novels. 

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​But something about Gordon’s approach seems fundamentally backwards to me. Why give the challenging material a short amount of time but the easier-to-read books the bulk of class time? Why not use a snippet of a YA novel to teach the device-of-the-day and intrigue the students, and then give the bulk of the class time to students to grapple with the challenging classical text while the teacher is there to help? Gordon also asserts that students don’t read the classics, so rather than waste time on books the vast majority of your students won’t read, read YA instead; the readers ready for a challenge will be inspired enough by the classical snippets to pull the classics off the shelf and read them on their own. So, the few who would’ve read the classical work if it were assigned will end up reading it anyway; you won’t be depriving them of anything. Couldn’t it work the other way, though, in which the students are intrigued by the YA titles and can read those books independently? As a teen, I think I would’ve felt more confident reading a YA title on my own rather than a classic.

​At the same time, there is a lot I like about Gordon’s No More Fake Reading approach. For introverted teachers like me, this approach relieves the pressure to be performing in front of large groups all the time. For disciples of Teaching With Your Mouth Shut (Donald Finkel’s book from 2000), Gordon’s approach puts the onus for the learning onto the students. The teacher can be the “guide-on-the-side,” not the “sage-on-the-stage.” The approach also allows students large blocks of time to read. They need all this practice to develop fluency, and this fluency will serve them well in college, Gordon argues, where they’ll need “marathon-like stamina” (81). 

​But can reading modern young-adult fiction about topics that students like really prepare them to tackle reading in college, where most of the books aren’t chosen by students and where many books, particularly those assigned in their general education or non-major classes, will not be on topics they enjoy? When Gordon asserts the common wisdom that “we’re teaching reading skills and strategies, not the content of the novel” (88), she directly contradicts research that indicates that often students are unable to transfer skills independently of content (see British researcher Daisy Christodoulou’s Seven Myths About Education, 2014). Also, reading fiction is very different from reading expository text (see Louise Rosenblatt’s distinction between “efferent” and “aesthetic” reading), and even expository texts vary from discipline to discipline. But uh-oh. If I argue that reading isn’t a transferrable skill, that reading YA won’t prepare them to read classic novels, then I must also admit that reading classics won’t prepare them for reading their Biology 101 textbook. So why read any fiction, classical or modern, at all?  

​Gordon’s equity-minded answer regarding classical fiction is that it gives our students “cultural capital” (24): “If we leave the classics out, we risk sending a message that our students can’t handle those texts, don’t deserve them, or won’t need them in the futures where they are headed” (26). But this argument, like the fluency argument, values fictional literature only insofar as it is a means to something else, like social mobility. While Gordon concedes that “Reading texts like Jane Austen’s actually activates parts of our brain that popular literature cannot” (25), she approaches the assertion that literature may be valuable for its own sake, but she doesn’t commit to this idea. The idea that classics help us understand universal truths about human nature, human history, and human language in ways that modern books cannot is an idea that seems overlooked in Gordon’s text. Furthermore, rather than explore why fiction, both classical and modern, is valuable because it helps students become thoughtful humans who better understand both themselves and the world around them, Gordon falls back on the because-it-will-help-you-in-college and college-means-a-higher-social-status argument. Admittedly, this is a tempting argument to make; it’s concrete and practical, and it doesn’t require challenging our culture’s widely shared belief that education’s purpose is social mobility.  

​For blending the classics with YA literature, I’m much more comfortable with an approach like Mary Styslinger’s in Workshopping the Canon (2017). Styslinger suggests themed units that bring in a wide variety of texts and techniques of studying those texts. A unit on heroes might be necessary in a practical sense to meet the requirement by the school district to read Beowulf but would also include modern songs, poems, YA short stories or novels, non-fiction articles, and more. Rather than being dragged through a several-weeks-long teacher-led slog through Beowulf, students would actively learn about both ancient and modern concepts of the hero through reader response journals, essays, book clubs, readers’ theater, and more. I know I could certainly put more modern materials into my Wuthering Heights unit and incorporate more active learning. Perhaps I could even give chronological order the boot and teach American Born Chinese before Wuthering Heights so that students could tackle big questions with an easy-to-read book first and then work up to the harder one. 

​So, while I might make changes, I’m still hanging on to Wuthering Heights. But is it because I live in the magical unicorn land of college, where I can ask more of students than high school teachers can and my classes are capped at twenty-seven, not thirty-eight as some of them were when I taught high school? Is it because it’s actually the last piece of classical fiction I’ve been able to hang onto in the composition-dominated world of first- and second-semester college English? When I teach composition, I use nonfiction. When I teach literature, Wuthering Heights is the only thing from before the twentieth century that I’ve got left on my syllabus. In my privileged position where I get to choose my own texts, have I forgotten the slog through whatever’s available in the book room? Am I merely nostalgic for the classics since I no longer teach a lot of them? Some semesters, I even do a YA-literature-themed introduction-to-literature course and don’t use anything classic at all. Should I practice what I preach and put more classics into my literature courses? Or is my purpose as a community college instructor different than that of a high school English teacher? Some people might argue that once a student gets out of high school, have they gotten their recommended dose of cultural literacy and I should teach more special-topics literature classes. I know I enjoyed going beyond the classics as a college student and looking at more modern works by the very people the classics excluded. It’s a lot to think about, especially as I find myself teaching future teachers, as I did last spring when our long-dormant children’s literature class was revived and I got to teach it. Who do you think should be more classics-heavy: high school or college? How do you mix the classics with YA literature?  

Works Cited

​Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Edited by Linda H. Peterson, 2nd ed. Bedford St. Martin’s, 2003. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism.
Christodoulou, Daisy. Seven Myths About Education. Routledge, 2014.
Finkel, Donald. Teaching with Your Mouth Shut. Heinemann, 2000.
Gordon, Berit. No More Fake Reading: Merging the Classics with Independent Reading to Create Joyful, Lifelong Readers. Corwin Literacy, 2018.
Rosenblatt, Louise. The Reader, the Text, the Poem. 1978.
Styslinger, Mary E. Workshopping the Canon. NCTE, 2017.
Yang, Gene Luen. American Born Chinese. Color by Lark Pien. Square Fish, 2006. 

Until next week.