This semester I'm in a unit which pertains to bringing Young Adult Fiction into the high school classroom. This blog is a reflection of what I learn along the way.
The idea of bringing YA literature into the classroom is gaining new attention now that the YA literature market has exploded. Don Gallo (2010) has noted that around 2000 more YA books were aimed at older adolescents rather than primarily middle-schoolers. The genre has decidedly taken off and continues to grow. Although we have "classic" young adult books in the likes of The Outsiders or perhaps Catcher in the Rye there is a new popular trend in the genre which cannot be ignored.
Groenke and Scherff wrote that, "We know adolescents like young adult novels because, unlike classical, canonical works, these novels have been written about adolescents,with adolescent readers in mind. It is these books that teachers should use in the classroom if today’s adolescents are to see school as relevant to their lives and experiences."
All said, English in High School did not introduce me to any new and exciting genres which I continued with beyond the classroom. Hamlet was a dying flame. Probably the most memorable element of English class, oddly, was watching the film Dead Poet’s Society. I suppose our teacher had us watch it hoping that the film would encourage us to see classical references in pop culture and find our own creative voice, but the film was largely about rejecting social normalization: about seizing your most pronounced self. I remember thinking that this was the most valuable lesson I had been taught in class. It meant that I did not have to enjoy all the literature I read, but it encouraged the notion that I might find inspiration in some. What I read should reflect my own interests. Importantly, I should not be afraid of holding my own points of view.
One day my teacher posted giant laminated copies of poems all over the classroom. She gave us erasable markers and told us to walk around the classroom, reading the poems and writing our thoughts- any thoughts- in the margins. As we made our way through all the works we would start over again, this time reading and potentially interacting with the comments our peers had made. The exercise encouraged stating opinions and defending or attacking poems, even peers’ opinions, which we did or did not like.
YA novels did not have a place in my high-school curriculum, and to be fair, in 2003-2005 there was much less to draw on than there is now. Even so, Harry potter, as the best example, was viewed as something that would never be brought into the classroom. It was disparaged as irreligious by some, in the religious school I attended, but moreover it was viewed as simply not good material. The same would go for many books which have followed in its tradition. But Groenke and Scherff's point above rings true for me. Why not have literature which reflects a young identity, thus creating a collective understanding of what it is to be a young adult and creating a sense of comradeship, this way, in the classroom? Kornfeld and Protho (2005) wrote that "literary embodiements of their own academic experiences help students realize that their experiences are not unique, and help students make sense of their abstract concerns and criticisms of schooling by anchoring them in something more tangible.(221)
Nine years on, I can’t say that the philosophies which justified the expounding of Hamlet, the showing of Dead Poets, or the conjecturing on poetry were off base in any rudimentary way. They affected me, but to what end? Should the literature and exercises youth encounter in High School encourage them to be themselves and not give into social pressures? Certainly. Much literature is about self-realization; certainly young adult literature seems to be, on the whole. Does the value of self-actualization justify putting special value on individual opinions? I’m less than convinced. Speaking for myself, I know that I continued to read the particular genre of fiction and vein of non-fiction as I had been interested in outside of high-school English classes. I continued in an illogical trend of dogma which asserted that my opinion was correct or at the least irrefutable for the very fact that it was mine. Relativism became a platform for my individualism rather than a table of mutual interest, understanding and learning. As I mentioned, High School English, ultimately, did little to inspire me to change my literary tastes beyond the classroom.
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Outside the classroom I was reading Tolkien’s fantasy and Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars fantasy for enjoyment. I was writing my own free form poetry and occasionally read modernist poets as a means of emotional expression and expression. I explored non-fiction, such as history, which made me think myself rather self-made, even if I was a slow reader. The importance and value of empiricism and logic in non-fiction was a dialectic I didn’t learn well, however, until college. The values of self-assertion and opinion had to eventually take a back seat to listening. The importance of learning about the areas of literature that I especially did not enjoy, I realized, had not been explained to me in high school as having a special value: If I did not like something, it probably meant I did not understand the value it had for me.
So I have to face it. Perhaps persistent stubbornness against certain literature has prevailed to my own loss. Beginning classwork which will have me focusing on the world of Young Adult literature for the next two months is going to be an opportunity to break a genre wall, because, to be frank, I did not read very much young adult literature in High School, and I haven't since. Even Harry Potter, the Holy Grail of Young Adult Fantasy, has never been touched by my hand. I have much to learn. But I doubt that Young Adult Literature will be put back on the shelf as quickly as Hamlet was.
