Teaching 21st Century Students to Read

The other day, one of my veteran colleagues wondered aloud, “What are we to do with today’s population of bright, young nonreaders?” It’s a question that plagues English teachers and one that different factions have attempted to answer in a variety of ways. As The Washington Post recently reported, some curricula have moved away from canonical texts in favor of nonfiction, young adult literature, and other texts that might be considered more relevant to students’ lives.¹ Others have suggested that we incorporate new technological modes into our teaching of literature, hoping technology will serve as the proverbial spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. At Germantown Academy, we’ve chosen a different path in our English 9 course — one that teaches classic texts in a meaningful way and doesn’t attempt to distract students with what Melanie Shoffner calls “shiny technology squirrels.”² At the end of English 9, students report a meaningful and personal investment in the literature; as one student explained it, “I finally get why English matters!” My own experience with this course has taught me that, in order to reach today’s “bright, young nonreaders,” we simply need to teach them how to read.

Understanding Today’s Readers

In order to make literature relevant to modern students, we don’t need to use technology; we need to think like those who do. For students today, technology is not just a tool; it’s a culture, a language, a way of reading the world. As Suzanne Miller notes, the omnipresence of the Internet, computers, and smartphones in adolescents’ lives creates a new “social culture” that shapes the way they read and understand “text.”³ In digital culture, what nondigital readers might understand as discrete texts are no longer discrete; they are endlessly recombined and reposted on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. Each reposting creates a new “text,” as the Facebook wall or tweets surrounding it color the way that artifact gets read in its new context. Indeed, the original context of a piece is often irrelevant in digital culture; how many of us have “googled” something and not bothered to look at the source of our answer? Technology isn’t just a new way to access the same old content; it radically reshapes what constitutes a text and how that text gets read.

While today’s students may seem like “nonreaders,” they are really reading and living stories all the time. Video games, television shows, memes, and YouTube videos are all, at their core, different forms of narrative. As our students “facebook,” text, and tweet, they create narrative records of their own experiences. Stories still reside at the heart of their experiences; the difference is that today’s students don’t think of their engagement with stories as “reading,” and neither do their schools. If we hope to teach students to “read” in the more traditional sense, we must do so in a way that is sensitive to their natural inclinations as readers. We need to understand that, for today’s learners, reading literary texts constitutes a kind of code switching. While English teachers have become increasingly responsive to the literacy needs of readers who bring different codes to the classroom, we have been less attentive to the literary needs of our “digital natives.” If we approach literature instruction as we have historically approached literacy instruction — knowing, as Miller and Fox remind us, that “all students need to be taught mainstream power codes and discourses and become critical users of language while also having their home and street codes honored”⁴ — then we can teach kids who “don’t speak the language” of literature to place their own codes in dialogue with the literary code of power.

The Power of Stories

Classic literature remains the literary “power code,” and the ability to thoughtfully consume a classic text is valued in high schools, on standardized tests, in college, and beyond. Despite the attempts of some to dismiss literature as passé in an increasingly pragmatic world, literature endures with good reason. As Peter Guber argued in Psychology Today,

Telling stories is not just the oldest form of entertainment, it’s the highest form of consciousness. The need for narrative is embedded deep in our brains. Increasingly, success in the information age demands that we harness the hidden power of stories.⁵

As a commercially successful filmmaker (The Kids Are All Right, The Color Purple, Midnight Express), Guber understands the practical and lucrative side of storytelling. He explains that stories continue to resonate, even with today’s nonreaders, because “they connect us to others.”⁶

In many ways, the modern literary landscape echoes the digital world in which our students reside: It is an endless “reposting” of classic motifs, or tropes, being tagged, commented on, and recombined in countless ways. The hero’s journey is why Hollywood makes so much money on superhero films — why The Hunger Games was an instant success. These stories continue to be popular because, as Pamela Rutledge notes, "There's a huge cognitive comfort just in knowing you’re on a story arc."⁷ There’s something about classic literary tropes that is innately familiar and innately human, which explains why so many cultures have continued to explore these stories for so long.

Because they are endlessly sampled in the pastiche of popular culture, classic stories can help our students become savvier readers of their own world. While appropriation can be entertaining, a level of meaning remains inaccessible when one is unfamiliar with the source material. For example, I recently had the amusing experience of watching several senior boys perform the “Old Time Rock and Roll” number from Risky Business as part of a school talent show. As I was leaving the theater, I overheard one freshman girl say gleefully to another, “It was just like that commercial!” While the experience was more meaningful to her when she thought of it as allusive, she missed a level of meaning in the performance because she was unfamiliar with its original source. I have found that students who are endlessly adrift in a sea of references that go right over their heads are incredibly grateful to finally “get it.” After reading the Sirens episode in The Odyssey last year, one of my freshman boys exclaimed, “Mrs. Burnett, I finally get that Mumford and Sons song!” referring to “The Cave,” whose lyrics draw on that adventure. In her course evaluation, another ninth-grader praised the class because it “makes it so we have to find the deeper meaning in things we usually would have missed.” Reading traditional stories isn’t just valued by the establishment; it can be valuable to students as they seek to understand their own lived experience.

As Guber astutely comments, “The brain may be prewired for stories, but you still have to turn it on.”⁸ While the world our students inhabit is uniquely suited to allow them to observe and compare how different texts retell and reinvent the same stories, today’s students don’t naturally tend toward critical consumption. In order to help our students read their world, we have to help them access the literary tropes they consistently consume unawares. We have to help them “harness the hidden power of stories.”

Teaching Students to Read Literature Their Way

In English 9 at Germantown Academy, we help students harness the hidden power of stories by teaching them about some common “building blocks” that provide the foundation for many different tales. In addition to introducing students to these literary tropes, we ask them to explore the ways in which these tropes are exploited, reinvented, and built upon in different narratives. In the world of Facebook, users see the same stories recombined in different ways, posted with slightly different slants, and commented on from different perspectives. In English 9, we approach literary elements in the same way, helping students see how different authors “post” the same basic stories on their respective “walls.” By highlighting the core similarities while examining contextual differences, we treat each literary motif like an Internet meme, asking students to consider how the motif takes on new meaning with each “reposting” in a new narrative context.

Because of their prevalence in stories students often consume outside the classroom, we have selected four literary tropes as the core for our curriculum: the hero’s journey, tricksters, relationships between parents and children, and the ways in which patriarchal society grapples with powerful women and vice versa. Rather than simply telling the students “this is what the trope looks like,” we hand them a variety of texts from different genres, cultures, and time periods, which we purposefully juxtapose to help them arrive at a nuanced understanding of each literary element. In a sense, we perform a “Google search” throughout literature and popular culture for each motif and compare the ways in which the search term plays out in those results.

With each trope, we explore canonical literature, modern fiction and nonfiction, poetry, and nonprint texts such as images, television, and film. In our study of tricksters, for instance, we establish the trope with Puck, Tom Sawyer, Brer Rabbit, and Loki. We refine our understanding of tricksters with an extended look at Odysseus and many of the other characters in The Odyssey. We compare these classic tricksters with Bugs Bunny, the Joker in The Dark Knight, and Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. By the time our students get to The Catcher in the Rye in May, they are so conversant with this trope that they can offer a sophisticated understanding of how Holden Caulfield both replicates and deviates from the pattern. For instance, in his final paper, one student compared Holden to Odysseus, noting that both are classic tricksters in so many ways, except that Odysseus consistently succeeds, where Holden consistently fails. He concluded that Holden’s inability to succeed as a trickster functions as part of Salinger’s social critique; in a world where underdogs and outsiders have no place, where the mechanical perfection of conformity reigns, a character who is traditionally hopeful becomes a tragic sign of the times.

Our English 9 course helps students engage meaningfully with classic literature by approaching literary instruction as code switching, instructing our “non-native speakers” in the “grammar” of the language of stories and using their own code as a way to help them understand this new language and learn to translate between codes. Just as language is made up of parts, so too are stories. In order to teach a non-native speaker a new language, we might start by showing her what a noun looks like, what a verb looks like, etc. In English 9, we take this same approach with stories, isolating literary building blocks that recur throughout the texts in our curriculum and explicitly teaching them to students. As a result, students can begin to see how these tropes function in stories from different genres, time periods, and cultures, including those they consume and inhabit beyond the classroom. 

Students are remarkably enthusiastic about our English 9 curriculum, consistently offering comments like, “I would recommend this course because it teaches a student to look at the world differently” and “It’s very interesting how these tropes play in our daily lives.” Students often remark on the extent to which the tropes have shaped their understanding of their environment. One said, “I think about the tropes in everything I do and watch”; another agreed, saying, “Now I recognize tropes in everything. I’m certainly thinking differently.”

Perhaps most remarkably, one student described a renewed love of reading as a result of our approach in English 9. In her course evaluation, she remarked,

I am so happy that I learned to read literature in a totally different way. It has helped me become a better writer, reader, etc. I now really enjoy reading and noticing different patterns with parent-child relationships, powerful women, tricksters, and heroes!

As this student’s words attest, we need not throw up our hands and declare reading, as we have known it, a thing of the past. If we read literature with students the way they read their world, we make literature accessible and relevant to students’ lives beyond the classroom.

Notes