In its recent report, “Banned in the USA: The Normalization of Book Banning,” PEN America reported 6,870 book bans during the last school year. I’ve been tracking this alarming uptick in calls to remove so-called “dangerous” books from schools and libraries for years, and as I started reading more and more news stories about teachers and librarians being fired for protecting student access, I felt an urgent need to somehow address this growing threat to academic freedom with my students. I felt compelled to create a class about censorship, and yet at the same time, I was unconvinced of my own ability to maintain the neutrality so often expected of teachers.
As I started to really conceive of and design a Banned Books and Censorship class for seniors at Westridge School for Girls (CA), I grappled with some hard but important questions. As the teacher and adult in the classroom, would I be able to create space for nuance and understanding despite how I felt? And if not, how would this impact my students?
How I Designed the Course
In 2021, leadership at my school gave English teachers the opportunity to build new advanced classes for seniors. I had spent over five years thinking about a banned books course, and even when I felt ready to share it with students, I still wrestled with how to create an experience where they could form their own conclusions knowing that I couldn’t fully conceal my perspective. And more significantly, I didn’t want to.
For the first time in my two decades of teaching, I decided to shine a light on my biases in an effort to bring the transparency I felt this topic––and my students––deserved. It was incredibly freeing that my students knew where I landed on this issue, and that I didn’t have to talk in code or imply what I wanted to say.
The course description reflected my vehement opposition to academic censorship while also making clear our responsibility to consider perspectives other than our own. I was fortunate that, not only did I not receive any pushback, I also experienced genuine excitement from our administration, my department, and our students.
At the start of the first class, I explained to my students we would read the selected texts outlined in the description not only as important works of literature, but also to examine why they might be labeled a “threat” to students’ well-being. I invited students to engage in their own act of resistance against the suppression of open academic discourse by reading, discussing, and truly knowing these silenced stories. I also wanted to challenge us to consider the right to free speech and to interrogate our own biases along the way.
I had a hard time narrowing the list of books to include, but I ultimately chose five novels because: they consistently top annual banned books lists; they reflect a range of perspectives, genders, cultural identities, and time periods; I knew we would have to wrestle with issues concerning the authors themselves (and I wanted us to!); and each text had valuable lessons about literary analysis. We read:
- 1984 by George Orwell
- The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
- Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez
- Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo
In addition to these five, I let each class choose our final text for the year, which have included One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Outsiders, and A Clockwork Orange.
What My Class Looks Like
Throughout the class, I introduce each text with the context of why it had been banned, where it had been banned, and if the author had any response to the challenges to their work. I frequently and openly share my distress and outrage about how dangerous I think these acts of censorship are.
I also ask students to consider the perspective of an adult who genuinely believes that literature can pose a threat to students. Together, we question whether there can be reasonable limits to student access, whether certain texts might expose young readers to ideas they are not developmentally prepared for, and whether a middle ground can be found—one that doesn’t simply dismiss those who support bans.
I was intentional in designing student-led and student-designed discussions as an integral part of class to ensure that they had numerous chances to focus on what they felt was significant. Given this freedom, students explore issues of art as activism, the role that reading can play in resisting suppression, and the cultural and social phenomena that create an environment in which attacking literature becomes an accepted political strategy. I encourage students to disagree with me and with each other and empower them to push back against the dominant perspective in our classroom. Because I am willing to be honest, they feel free to be honest as well.
As part of the class, throughout the year, we invite writers of banned books to our class to discuss their writing and activism, and we learn about organizations that attempted to infiltrate school boards to target the texts they deemed harmful. We also organize activities at our school for Banned Books Week. While Westridge did not formally acknowledge Banned Books Week in previous years, students in this class organize book drives, create exhibits at local public libraries, visit our lower school classes to discuss book banning, design and hang posters with links to the American Library Association’s Banned Books resources, and speak at our school’s annual alumni event.
How I Measured Success
For the group’s final project, I ask students to articulate their own theory about academic censorship; the responses I’ve received have been breathtaking, nuanced, and mature. One student linked the idea of discomfort to growth, writing, “these [banned] stories are not told for the sake of discomfort; they are told because they are true. The sooner the reader views discomfort as an opportunity for understanding, the sooner they will be able to claim control over their own identity and perception of the world.”
When considering the vital role parents play in their child’s academic life, another student made a nuanced argument in favor of parental rights: “Parental authority should only exist between parents and their own children; ‘parental rights’ should not be stood up to the detriment of other children’s education.”
And while demonstrating a remarkable ability to look beyond the present moment and consider the lasting impacts of academic censorship, a third student explained that “Students living in places where book banning is prevalent are only exposed to material deemed appropriate or correct by their parents/book banning groups, causing those students to learn those opinions rather than decide on their own. Book banning creates shared generational opinions that grow less and less nuanced with each new group of students.”
Students self-select into this class, so many of their views skew toward mine, but these arguments showed me that students are far more capable of recognizing the gray areas than educators often give them credit for. One of the great injustices of book bans is the underlying belief that students cannot navigate challenging material, but I realized I was guilty of a similar assumption about their ability to handle their teachers’ opinions. My students hear my opinions repeatedly, and they are nonetheless able to formulate their own complex understandings of a nuanced issue.
Lessons I Learned
I hope my students learn that activism can come in the quiet moments inside a classroom. That teachers are as vulnerable to the issues plaguing the educational landscape as students are. That sometimes teachers have to forego neutrality when transparency feels more important.
I have learned that this type of class is developmentally appropriate for 12th graders who are about to step into the next phase of their lives as adults with nuanced perspectives and the ability to engage with complexity. It’s important to stand beside students in moments of intellectual risk and to take those risks with them. I realized that, in the right space and with the right context, I can be honest and vocal with my students about issues that directly impact me as an educator and them as young women who deserve unfettered access to texts, stories, and narratives that cultivate critical thinking, global engagement, and empathy.