Finding a Story: Choice Reading and Representation

I will give you $20 to put me out of my misery. The boy next to me still had his eyes rolled back into his head after I'd read the note, looking downward to hide my wry smile. You know, I could use $20, I scribbled. The monotone of an audiobook reader washed over us, and our relationship as table-mates started and ended with a mutual hatred of our classroom reading assignments. We wrote sarcastic comments to each other on torn paper fragments, aching for the hour -- and the boredom -- to finally cease.

However, as the days passed and the notebook pages filled, I began to realize it wasn't just the book-on-tape style or the monotonous drone that made me hate the book we were reading. I had hated the book before it, and the book before that, and the book before that. In fact, I hated everything we read in class that year.

I've been an avid reader for longer than I can remember. Even passing notes in my English class often occurred behind the covers of more interesting -- and more relatable -- pieces of writing. Today, I read something like 200 books annually. But until recently, I never truly identified with the books we read in class.

You see, we read whole-class novels, which are exactly like they sound: the whole class reads them at the same time. These are the books-on-tape of my middle school years, the 10-minute "chapter book" read-aloud sessions in elementary school, and the frantic high school SparkNotes summaries. For as long as I can remember, this is what we did in English. We read books I rarely liked as an entire class, and I pretended to enjoy them so I could get on with the reading I actually wanted to do.

As an alternative to our obvious boredom (evidenced by pre-pop quiz panics and phone-in-book hiding tricks), teachers have provided a solution: choice reading, in which students select from a variety of books and engage in small-group discussion. There are much-documented differences between the traditional whole-class novel and innovative choice reading options in English classrooms, the former offering more intensive teacher guidance and the latter providing increased student interest. However, the whole-class reading strategy does more than make us pass notes and fall asleep; it ostracizes students and contributes to cultural erasure, making even passionate readers like myself reluctant to come to class.

The whole-class novel caters to the perceived "majority," searching for an ability to appeal to every reader through the one-size-fits-all approach. By definition, every student reads the same story. But not every reader needs the same story.

I grew up in a white-dominated, homogeneous Midwestern community, and our books frequently focused on more "relatable," white characters. Even when books featured people of color, they tended to be secondary characters or relatively insignificant to the plot. They frequently contributed to, rather than dismissed the stereotypes Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discusses in her TED talk, "The Danger of a Single Story": "The single story [formed through a lack of representation] creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story." These readings never kept our attention for long, and we learned little from them because the authors frequently offered us little to learn. A friend of mine once explained the high school reading experience as a person of color: "It's like there's this fantasy world inside everyone's head, and it's pretty clear that I'm not in it."

Similarly, I don't remember ever reading a whole-class novel where we discussed feminine themes. In fact, most of our books were "unisex" or gender-neutral. However, the concept of "unisex" -- true gender neutrality -- almost never exists in practice. "Unisex" books are supposedly intended for a gender-neutral audience, but predominantly contain stories about men. This leaves the other half of the classroom scrambling to find identity in survival stories and teenage boy angst, searching for any rare instance of selfhood between the lines.

Take my own experience, for example. When I was in middle school, we read several variations and retellings of Gary Paulsen's Hatchet. And in high school, we read Of Mice and Men, Lord of the Flies, and A Separate Peace, all of which have no female characters. Even the books with some diverse characters were often lacking in positive representation: Heart of Darkness contributes to imperialist views of Africa and has female characters who account for minimal discussion and "airtime"; and the only major female character in Catch-22 doesn't have a name, only ever identified as "Nately's Whore".

It was easy for me to check out of books like these. It's not to say I didn't appreciate them on some level, but I didn't identify with them. They weren't me. And how could they be, when they rarely, if ever, portrayed characters that acted like me, felt like me, or even looked like me? Until I reached my final year of high school English, where I actually had input in what I read, I never had the story I needed. I never saw my story on the pages.

Once I had choice, I was reading The Handmaid's Tale and Americanah, giving presentations on my favorite writers, finding avenues for my love of black literature through Between the World and Me and The Bluest Eye, and examining feminist themes in The Scarlet Letter. Finding my stories made me further appreciate others' stories. I fell in love with books I never could previously. I realized it was okay to absolutely despise books about "finding yourself" in the woods. I realized it was alright, even justified, to be frustrated that the high schooler's experience of literature often completely ignores our differences. It completely disregards many of our stories.

This one-size-fits-all, whole-class reading method is dangerous, both for schools like mine and incredibly diverse communities. Students are left out of the discourse, as in my experience, or they are denied the opportunity to learn about other people and cultures. Put simply, they're denied the opportunity to find their stories and experience their classmates' stories.

Books are not one-size-fits-all. But the whole-class novel forces this to happen. It too frequently implies erasure of culture and selfhood. It too frequently sends avid readers running. It too frequently shows students that some of their stories are less worthwhile. It means that, at any given time, students are searching desperately for their identities between the lines -- and failing.

Not every novel I mentioned is inherently obstructive to story-searching, because I have many friends who found their story in Catch-22 or Lord of the Flies. But teachers must be conscientious of students' uncertainty about the state of their personal stories and make an effort to implement diverse reading material in their classrooms. They must understand that our stories look different, feel different, and ring differently in our ears. Our stories become who we are, but it requires conscious effort to provide opportunity for these stories to emerge.

Once I had a story, it became easy for me to develop other aspects of my identity. English class became my sole reason to come to school, and through it, I acquired the confidence to manage and excel in my other classes. This would not have happened without choice reading, a conscious effort on part of my teacher to diversify my experience and ensure I had control over my story.

So, to teachers: Create a culture of authentic story-searching. Create a culture of diversity and interest. Create a culture where students want to come to class. Create a culture of inclusion, of identity, of sharing, of relationships, of respect. Choose choice reading, and watch the stories find themselves.

In reading diverse books, I have developed a list of books -- both well-known and not-so-much -- I feel have a place in a diverse high school classroom library. Here are some of my personal favorites:

Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Sellout by Paul Beatty

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

Difficult Women by Roxane Gay

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

The Danish Girl by David Ebershoff

Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow

Let Justice Roll Down by John M. Perkins

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes

Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie by Ayana Mathis

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

The Awakening by Kate Chopin

Wonder by Ray Palacio

The Good Lord Bird by James McBride

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories by Charles W. Chesnutt

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban by Malala Yousafzai

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Carry On by Rainbow Rowell

#books #reading #teaching #english #diversity #representation #education