Moral obligations of YA literature

Mice by Gordon Reece
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I didn't like this book and I don't feel I have a right to be overly critical of a book unless I can put in the time to explain why - so here goes.

This is a YA book and, whilst I'm not of the opinion that YA literature should shield readers from the harsh realities of the world, I do believe that it has a moral responsibility to treat difficult issues with complexity and insight. As the narrator of the novel notes:

"So much of what Mum was was made up of what she'd read. Is that what our middle-class culture created? People formed more by the books they'd read than the lives they'd lived?" (p.199)

To the extent that this may be true, I was disappointed by the lack of empathy or insight shown in the novel. The main character is a victim of cruel bullying which drives her to decide to suicide. A series of events saves her from taking her own life. She then goes on to murder two people. Despite having been a victim herself, Shelley, the first-person narrator of the novel, shows little or no empathy for her victims. There's a level of egotism that is in itself quite frightening. In another moment of reflection she says:

"After everything I've lived through, surely I'll be able to write something truly great? After all, how many writers actually know what it's like to kill somebody?" (pp.224-225)

And this is where I think the novel fails. Reece didn't convince me that he truly understood his subject matter. Too often I felt that Shelley's introspective moments were there to move me to the next point in the plot rather than to explore honestly this difficult subject matter.

If the novel had been about a less difficult and important topic or if it had taken a much lighter hand to it's subject matter, I could be more forgiving, but if you choose to write a YA novel about these topics you have a moral responsibility to say something that matters. I don't think this novel does.

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Imagine

It’s the complexity of it all

That gives me a headache.

Reimagining John Lennon’s

Song with my Grade Six

Students, we stumbled into

The binary of black

And white as John

And Yoko walk down a

Dark path to arrive

At a white house and

Yoko opens shutters to

Illuminate an empty

Room in a place they

Call “not here”.

The peaceful simplicity of a

Black and white world

Greyed as we walked

Our own path:

Black White,

Wrong Right,

Evil Goodness,

Dirty Clean,

Ambiguity Clarity,

Weak Strong,

Chaos Logic,

South North,

African European,

Female Male,
Innocence,
Experience,

And arrived at a room

Where my illumination

Opened eyes
And minds onto

A world which is increasingly

Hard to see.

David and Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Gladwell's ideas are as compelling as his prose. The essential premiss is that mainstream views of success produce Goliaths who may be unable to view the world creatively and may lack the resilience to adapt and succeed when times change. The Davids of the world might see opportunities others miss and have the the necessary resilience for success which comes from being an underdog.

It's interesting that several of the case studies Gladwell works through are based on religious figures as there is something of the evangelist in the way Gladwell writes, too. This makes for an easy read - like listening to a sermon on one of the Gospel stories - but did make me wonder at times how much the flow of the story was encouraging me to lazily drift over the rigour of the argument. Not that I have particular reservations about Gladwell's argument, just that he is so skilled with his prose that I wondered at times if I might have forgotten to think for myself.

From my perspective as a Middle School Teacher, I'd like more of my students to think about Gladwell's discussion about universities and the advantage of a 2nd tier university over a 1st tier uni. I particularly liked the argument that we can define success broadly and see opportunities for meaning in many different life paths.

I was given this book by one of Grade 8 students who wanted to know what I thought. I hope this review helps, and a copy of the book will be going into my classroom library to challenge some of my other enthusiastic readers.

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More about Middle School - an article for Dunia

This is a recent article I wrote for Dunia, a magazine published by UWCSEA. You can find the digital version here. The version below is the original which was clipped slightly to fit into Dunia.

It follows nicely from my reflections in my last post about the changing nature of teaching and learning in Middle Schools.

Reading and Writing Workshop in the Middle School at East

“Do you like the rhythm of this?” asks Ali, as he turns to his partner.

“Yeah, but the mentor text is shorter, maybe you could cut out a few words.”

The two boys look again at the lead they’ve been using as a model: There’s no dignity in poverty. They compare their writing to the mentor text discussing what they’ve been learning about meter and rhyme and the need for a catchy phrase to help anchor their audience’s attention. After a moment more of discussion, they return to the speeches they are writing as a part of their study of the Grade 6 Development Unit.

This style of learning will be familiar to parents who have had children come through the Primary School as UWCSEA East. The “Workshop” approach uses a combination of very structured “mini-lessons” mixed with sustained periods of time for students to write and conference with their teacher and student partners. At the heart of “Workshop” is the belief that ‘children want to write’ and that instruction around writing should be very focussed and succinct leaving time for students to apply and consolidate skills.

In our Primary School, reading instruction takes a similar form with focussed lessons on particular skills and an emphasis on building student’s reading volume and stamina. The teacher’s key objective is to help the students find the right book for their reading ability and interests and to keep them reading.

Learning in High School English classes can look quite different to this. In High School students will spend sustained periods of time in whole class discussion around one common novel and teaching points will often come organically from this discussion. Writing becomes increasingly focused on the essay form and feedback will focus as much on the student’s ideas as it does on the craft of writing. This transition from learning in Primary Schools to High Schools is sometimes described as the difference between “learning to read and write and reading and writing to learn”.

What should reading and writing instruction look like in the Middle School?

Middle School is, of course, in the middle and we need to do a bit of both. Middle School students have a very particular set of developmental needs and learning instruction needs both to recognise what is unique to early adolescents and also where students are in their journey through the curriculum. Over the past twelve months, Middle School English teachers have been working with our colleagues in Primary and High school to decide how best to build on the success of the Workshop approach in Primary School as we prepare students for High School. UWCSEA’s English Standards and Benchmarks describe what we should teach; our discussions have centered on articulating how best to deliver this curriculum. What has resulted is a plan to extend the Columbia University “Workshop” approach up through Middle School but with modifications to meet the needs of our particular circumstances here at UWCSEA East. We have been trialling many of the teaching strategies from Workshop already and parents will already notice many similarities in the way writing is taught between Primary and Middle Schools.

The big challenge in our planning has been around reading. By Grade 6 or 7 students are classified as “independent” readers meaning that, whilst they need guidance in their reading choices, they don’t need the same kinds of support in learning how to read.

A lot of our discussion has been about how to encourage good independent reading habits when the diversity of demands on students’ time are increasing. The establishment of a dedicated Middle School section in the Senior Library has certainly helped, but we have also decided to establish classroom libraries in all Middle School English classrooms and High School is exploring a similar approach. The emphasis here is on maintaining stamina and engagement in a wider range of novels to supplement the common class texts that students study in Grades 7 through to 12.

As you can see in the photograph accompanying this article, students still share texts in the Middle School. One important insight into the complexities of Development comes from the novels that describe the experience of poverty and these Grade 6 students are sharing their understandings through their Literature Circle discussion. They will use what they are learning in their writing as well, building both from the ideas in the text and also learning from the skills the writer uses to construct his narrative.

Reading and Writing Workshop supports a rich environment for learning; we believe it provides the best foundation for building readers and writers who are skilled, confident and capable - ready to face the many complex communication challenges they have ahead of them.

More about curriculum - the what, how and why of subject English

The last two years have been the only two years in my teaching career when I haven't taught Grade 12 English or Literature alongside my Middle School classes. I miss the energy and momentum of this final year; it's hard work keeping up with the kids and making sure that I have given them the best chance to demonstrate their skills in the final exam, but it's very rewarding.

What has surprised me about teaching only Middle School (G6, 7 and 8) at UWCSEA is how much harder it has been. At Grade 12 I had to think deeply about texts and how to connect students to the ideas but what I taught and what the students needed to be able to do was clearly defined - this part of the learning didn't require much thinking at all.

At Middle School we have to think not just about the "what" of our teaching, but also the "how" and the "why". Over the last 15 years, Middle Schools around the world have been going through a curriculum revolution and it occurs to me that only now are the many pieces of the new understandings about what it means to teach young adolescents coming together. We began with research into the unique developmental needs of adolescents. Concurrently curricula authorities began looking at benchmarking and sequencing K to 10 curricula. As these two pieces come together, Middle School teachers find ourselves at the pointy edge of a new set of curriculum understandings. Grade 12 students have a skill-set not too far from my own; thinking my way through how a Grade 7 student might best grasp an idea takes considerable imagination and energy.

I  articulated some of these ideas this week in response to a question from a parent about why we don't do more essay writing in Middle School. Here's what I wrote:

As you may know, UWCSEA made the decision a few years ago to review our curriculum and develop Standards and Benchmarks for a unique UWCSEA curriculum. What we found as we compared English curricula from around the world and looked at our own teaching practice, was that, from Primary to IB, we were doing a good job of teaching students many of the writing skills associated with essays but that we needed more emphasis on the thinking skills. The students who are most successful with essay writing in Grade 12 and University are those who see the form as a media for thought and have the confidence to adapt and build their writing to match their own insights and the needs of their audience.

Writing a good essay is about a lot more than putting pen to paper. If students are to do this writing part well, they need some complex reading and thinking skills so that they have something meaningful and engaging to say. We know from the research into how Middle School students learn, that this is an important time for building student's thinking skills and autonomy. Students want to think for themselves but we also have to teach them how to support their ideas and arguments and how to engage critically and respectfully with the wider cultural world.

What our review of the curriculum has shown us is that students need this greater emphasis on critical reading and developing the confidence and autonomy to make claims about the underlying ideas in texts; equally important is the close attention to detail to find appropriate supporting evidence for the things they want to say. When students are able to do these things - and they have been doing a lot of them in G6, 7 and 8 - they are doing the very important "pre-writing" component of the essay writing process. As adults, we sometimes form the misconception that having an opinion about a text (or about a topic in Humanities or Science) is a relatively easy process. Reading deeply, independently and widely and finding meaningful and appropriate evidence to support your arguments is a difficult skill that requires significant time and effort to learn.

Which isn't to say that the writing component of an essay isn't also important. Knowing how to craft your words to say what you want to say clearly and appropriately is also a skill that needs to be taught and practiced. We do this mostly in smaller pieces of writing in the Middle School and often focus on forms other than essay writing recognising that students will have less and less space in the curriculum ahead to develop their capacity for creative writing and for writing in forms other than the essay, but that the best writers are those who can paint from a wide palette of skills. 

The writing mechanics for producing an essay are not, of themselves, terribly difficult but if we focus on them too early, students write essays that are hollow and dispiriting. If we can prepare our Middle School students to be careful thinkers who are learning to experiment and craft language, then our High School colleagues have the foundations they need to build strong academic writers in the final years.

As I sit here working on the next unit to teach my Grade 6 students, it occurs to me that it is no wonder it takes so much time and seems like such hard work. At UWCSEA we've articulated a clear and thoughtful description of what we think needs to be taught from K to 10. Translating these understandings into meaningful units which really prepare students well for each next step requires creativity, imagination and lots of time.

I miss the relative simplicity of Grade 12 but I'm relishing the challenge of Middle School.

Using story to make sense of the world

Writing curriculum is a adventure story all of its own.

By Alfred Henry Miles (1848-1929)
[Public domain],
via Wikimedia Commons

I wrote in November about the power of seeing curriculum as dialectical rather than as a linear narrative. In essence, the argument was that student learning is more effective when curriculum content* is constructed through an ongoing conversation between teachers and the curriculum authority rather than being mandated by a set of commandments from on high. The agency this gives teachers translates into agency for students. When curriculum is based on an understanding that 'the mystery of discourse is not order, but disorder, incoherence, the possibility of the unthinkable,' to quote the sociologist Basil Bernstein (Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity p. 11), then teaching and learning can be truly empowering; students can be prepared for a world where they have the agency to change the defining discourses rather than being controlled by them.

The power and potential of the approach that UWCSEA has taken through writing its own curriculum was highlighted for me this week both in my classroom and in the weekly planning session with the Grade 8 English team.

Let me tell the story...

...o0o...

Making sense of the world

A play in one act

SCENE: Jabiz's classroom. A classroom on the 5th floor of UWCSEA's East campus in Singapore. The structure of the room is quite traditional but Jabiz has brought it to life with pot-plants and cushions and clear demarcations between the working spaces (chairs and tables around the back of the room) and the instruction space (couches and beanbags at the front of the room). Sitting on the couches looking at the whiteboard are Jabiz, Stuart and Ian. The two other members of the team, Paula and Adrienne, are in Manila and Phnom Phen respectively. Paula is helping to select the next group of Scholars to represent the Philippines at one of the 14 United World Colleges around the world. Adrienne is in Cambodia on a service trip using her ICT skills to help support learning in a range of schools that UWCSEA work with. (The location of Paula and Adrienne is not directly relevant to this story but it is pretty cool! - it shows how serious the school is about its mission to use education to make a better world). On the whiteboard is a projection of the planning document for the current Grade 8 unit on reading.**

JABIZ: Hey, I'm really liking the way the kids are getting into this unit at the moment.

IAN: Yeah, one of my kids greeted me in class today by saying "can we learn like this all the time?"

STUART: Agreed. We talked a few weeks ago about how the students seemed less motivated than we wanted but they have definitely turned a corner. What are we doing right?

JABIZ: I think it's down to the choices we're giving them. Modelling the skills first and then getting the kids to demonstrate their understanding in novels that they choose is the way to go.

IAN: Choosing the right books is key here though...

JABIZ: Exactly. So we model by working through a common class novel that is a bit easier and accessible and then we put the kids in groups to try out the skills on books that are right for them.

IAN: I think that's the thing we really nailed in this part of the unit: putting the right groups of kids in front of the right novels.

STUART: Agreed. That's where our professional judgment based on our knowledge of the students comes into play. So how are they getting on with the skills?

Frank R. Paul [Public domain],
from Wikimedia Commons

(Our 3 adventures look towards the the Planning document projected onto the screen in front of them. Jabiz clicks the link to the POE for the unit and the key skills are highlighted as follows:

I can identify alternative interpretations of a text.

I can consider and use others' interpretation of a text to deepen or alter my own.

I can identify how an author has constructed a narrative point of view.

I can explain the impact of a narrative point of view on my interpretation.

I can identify examples and explain how the author creates voice through diction and literary techniques.

I can explain how the author's use of voice in the text has shaped my interpretation of the text.

JABIZ: Yeah, it all seems to be coming together. They're making the transfer from the class texts like I said.

IAN: I agree, but there's something bugging me. These skills all come from our Reading Standard and they all focus on craft skills that a writer uses when they construct a text. I think they're important but they're only part of the story.

JABIZ: (in a supportive and thoughtful tone - without nearly the level of exasperated condescension that might be expected towards a colleague who questions everything and uses conversation to sort out his ideas rather than taking the time to do it in the privacy of his own blog). This is what you were talking about yesterday when you were going on about the lack of Benchmarks to articulate the purpose of reading.

IAN: (oblivious) Yeah. This is part of the struggle I've had to explain the transition between "learning to read" in Primary School and "reading to learn" in High School. We're right in the middle of this process in Middle School and something hit me about the way our current unit is working.

STUART: Go on.

IAN: Well, all our Benchmarks at the moment are about craft - I know this isn't strictly accurate, but the emphasis is very much on how a writer writes. But that's not why I read books nor why I think writers write them. They write because they have something to say about the world and I read because I want to know what it is. How they write is interesting and important but it's not the main game. I don't think we teach English in High School primarily because we want students to know how to read and write but because we want students to use these understandings to engage with the cultural understandings that writers share.

STUART: You're right. This idea is stated clearly in all the position statements for English Curricula that we looked at when we started work on our curriculum but it seems to get lost when you get to the fine detail. All around the world English Curricula say things about focussing the ethical and social understandings of writers, but they struggle to articulate what this looks like when it comes to the specifics of what to teach in the classroom.

JABIZ: So is that our Standard "Humans use story to make sense of the world?"

STUART: Yes, I think it is.

IAN: Interesting that we articulated all our Standards around craft and that we haven't worked out what the details of our Standards around content are yet. There's something going on here about the way we think as a profession and as a culture about learning - what can be taught and measured etc. We go for the more easily measurable first.

STUART: Looks like the time is right to articulate this next Standard. I'll set up a meeting.

NARRATOR: And so the curtain falls on yet another curriculum adventure and our protagonists return to their classrooms a little wiser and with yet another meeting to attend.

The End

...o0o...

Humans use story to make sense of the world

Interestingly, when I went just now to look at the Australian Curriculum, there are Level Descriptors under the Literature Strand that say something about the content as opposed to the craft of writing but they are very much in the minority. Of the 10 Level descriptors for Grade 10, here are the two which I think are not primarily about craft:

Compare and evaluate a range of representations of individuals and groups in different historical, social and cultural contexts.  

Evaluate the social, moral and ethical positions represented in texts

And I wonder to what extent these Descriptors are engaging with the idea of story. Writers make a deliberate decision to write narrative rather than philosophy, for example. There is something in the nature of the narrative mode that represents an ordering of the world which is in contrast to a philosophic or analytical approach. I'm reminded of the line attributed to Novalis that 'poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.' My best students have always been those who can dance poetically with the texts they analyse.

I'm not sure what our articulation of "the world as story" will look like or even if it makes sense to "analyse" something which is assumed to be outside of "reason". What I love is that we have a process for trying and that I get to share in this adventure.

And I can't help wondering if we might be trying to articulate the wrong Standard. Perhaps the point isn't to make sense of the world but rather to enjoy it: it might be the playfulness that enters these stories that we make together - in our meetings and in our classrooms - that really matters. We spend so much time applying the scalpel of reason to our world and rewarding those who can cut with the most precision; perhaps what we need is a way to value those who heal with humour and playful subversion.

How on earth could we write an assessment criteria for "constructive subversion"?




*My argument is based on my areas of expertise in the liberal arts and specifically "subject English". Basil Bernstein in Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity argues that pedagogic practice is systematic across schools and, indeed, 'is a fundamental social context through which cultural reproduction-production takes place' (p. 3). According to Bernstein's formulation of cultural reproduction, the argument should be equally valid across the school curriculum but I don't feel that I have the expertise to speak other than tentatively about the experience of teaching and learning in other areas of the curriculum.

** Apologies to Stuart and Jabiz whose dialogue is in the spirit of our conversation but in no way accurate.

Poem written with my daughter

Photo by Rosie

Meaning is a possibility,
Not a certainty;
A space,
Not an object.
I like elephants
And Swiss-bake muffins.

Meaning is a negotiation
And a shared potential:
Between philosophy
And elephants,
Fathers
And daughters,

Between pretension
And certainty,
Ambiguity
And muffins.