“I can’t believe we read this whole book!” How reading for their own purposes affected struggling teens

Smith, Carol A., & Scuilli, Suzanne. (2011). “I can’t believe we read this whole book!” How reading for their own purposes affected struggling teens. English Journal, 101(2), 30-36.

This classroom story tells how a literacy teacher engaged a class of struggling high school students in literacy activities surrounding the popular book and movie, Twilight. The story, told through the alternating narratives of the two authors (Smith was then a high school literacy coach and Scuilli was a classroom teacher), begins with a vignette of an incident where a student put a DVD of Twilight into the classroom computer without permission, and when their teacher objected, the students begged to watch the movie. The teacher relented, on the condition that the students would agree to read the novel and engage in literacy activities surrounding it. We then read an account about how the subsequent unit unfolded, hearing alternately the teacher’s report of classroom happenings and the literacy coach’s attempts to support the teacher as she implemented the unit, which included extension activities employing digital literacy skills, as students did Internet research on the novel’s author and on the actors and actresses who starred in the movie.

Although the report of the results of the unit was positive, the teacher was concerned that only some of the goals the students needed to meet were met by the Twilight unit. The goals of the unit were tied to the National Council of Teachers of English/International Reading Association English Language Arts Standard 12, which is about students’ reading and writing for their own various purposes. Those purposes might include enjoyment and entertainment, but also might include learning, persuasion, and the exchange of information, and not all those purposes had been achieved. The teacher followed up with a second unit using nonfiction texts on African-Americans and civil rights. Although the print texts chosen were more like the typical high school readings than was the Twilight novel, the teacher attempted to engage students by including a movie on an African American football team in which racial issues are prominent, Remember the Titans. She then worked with students on the skills they needed to participate in an online discussion board on which they could communicate with the actual team members. In both units, the ideas of beginning with students’ interests, reading, viewing, and composing varied kinds of texts, and allowing student interests to guide the progression of the units were followed.

At the end of the article is an important note that tells us that the district where the reported occurrences took place was one that allowed for “considerable teacher authority and flexibility regarding text and activities” (p. 35). That is an important note, and I’m afraid the freedom this teacher had to structure her curriculum to engage students might not be given to every teacher that reads this article. That doesn’t mean that teachers in situations with less freedom cannot incorporate some of the ideas described here. An encouraging, flexible environment that honors teachers’ decision-making abilities and allows flexibility would make this kind of instruction easier, however.

I am entirely on board with the notion that without student engagement we have nothing. I believe that good teaching boils down pretty much to three words: engagement, scaffolding, and connections. The instruction reported here did all three. I do have a couple of concerns regarding this account, however. First, it seems that in the classroom stories we often see in the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) practitioner journals like this one, the accounts are almost uniformly rosy, and this article is no exception to that. Yes, the story begins with a negative incident (which was turned to a positive thing), and yes, we hear that this teacher experienced some uncertainty and that the students experienced some concerns about being able to read an entire novel. Still, these problems are downplayed, and the picture of what happened in this classroom is overwhelmingly positive. I am not saying it is not a true account, but in the classrooms I know, this all would not have gone quite so smoothly. I’d like to know more about any bumps in the road that occurred and how the teacher dealt with them. That would strengthen this account rather than diminishing it. Maybe this school district was so supportive that there really weren’t that many bumps, but that seems unlikely.

My second concern is something I am admittedly ambivalent about. Popular texts can indeed be useful in engaging young adults in literacy learning, but I think we have to choose carefully. Not every popular text, engaging as it might be, is suitable for a classroom, and I am not sure that Twilight is suitable. Schools can use popular texts, but I believe those texts need to be those that focus on what is good, honorable, and just. A novel about vampire love does not seem to me to have those qualities. I could be convinced, I suppose, if a case could be made for redeeming literary value of some sort, but the choice to go ahead with this text and this movie worried me. Do I really want to be emphasizing some of the themes and situations in that novel and movie, and using precious instructional time to do it? I guess if such a novel could be turned into a bridge to introduce students to other more exemplary texts, I could accept that. Maybe that’s what happened here, but I wonder if a text that is equally engaging but more appropriate could have been found to do that. I may need to revisit Twilight to decide finally what I think about all this.