Reading, Literature, Books
I’ve been thinking about these three things and their place in a secondary school curriculum. So far, I’ve been thinking that I need more clarity on what we mean by each of these terms.
- What is reading? There are a sorts of reading behaviors that we value in schools. Do we mean that we want students to enjoy reading fiction? Where does non-fiction fit? And within that unhelpful category of “non-fiction,” what do we emphasize? Op-ed types of essays? History textbooks? How-to guides? Math and Science texts?
- What is literature? Do we mean storytelling? Or is there a body of information about literature and literary terms that we want students to know? I think that we mainly mean storytelling. And this leads me to think about digital storytelling. Don’t we want students to be critical users of a bunch of different media used to tell stories, of course including stories in books.
- What’s a book? Part of what books are has to do with editing and peer-evaluated texts. So are we really talking about the authority given a text when it gets published? I think we probably are, and I’m happy to ask students to include quotations from books in their writing. But maybe finding such quotes on Google Book Search would be smart, no? Maybe it has something to do with endurance, getting to the end of a long text?
These are some of my questions these days.
