Knowing the Territory of Literature

At the university where we teach, posted on the bulletin board for students in the teacher licensure program is a "Strongly Recommended Reading List." An introduction emphasizes the teacher candidate's need to build substantial knowledge of significant literary texts before entering into the methods courses, and exhorts the candidates to read the recommended texts and track progress toward completing the list. The list includes the following titles: The Odyssey, The Iliad, the Old Testament, The Aeneid, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, selected plays by Aristophanes and Sophocles, Plato's Republic and Meno, Aristotle's Poetics, and translations of The Divine Comedy and Beowulf. A major implication of the list is that teaching literature requires a developing level of expertise, one that begins at minimum with a basic understanding of the building blocks, the texts of the discipline, constituting such expert knowledge and practice. Consequently, the authors of "the list" assumed that novice teachers of English in middle schools and high schools should be familiar with classic literature, even if they never engage their own students with these texts.

As two professors in the same teacher preparation program, we have disagreed about the list — both the specific titles and the idea of a list of "strongly recommended" texts. In fact, we disagree about several issues about preparing candidates, although we converge about some core principles. As we share our disagreements and convergences on these pages, we invite readers to reflect on their own positions, perhaps taking the opportunity to refine thinking about what English teachers need to know in order to teach English in a principled way in middle school and high school.

According to John, the thinking behind the recommended reading is consistent for those who consider the teaching of literature as an acquired expertise, one that begins early in life with the pleasures of reading stories and then, over time, also includes noticing that story patterns develop in the ways tales are both told and received. Some readers appear naturally to gravitate toward stories that reflect their own time, situations in life, and familiar people, while others prefer literary experiences that take them out of their own world and into domains and lives very different from their own. The central issue confronting all teachers of literature is to achieve a balance between these two tendencies: encourage those students looking primarily for confirmation about the already familiar to explore other times, cultures, and varieties of characters, human or otherwise. David Lowenthal insists, "The past remains integral to us all, individually and collectively. We must concede the ancients their place. ... But their place is not simply back there, in a separate and foreign country; it is assimilated in ourselves and resurrected into an ever-changing present" (p. 412; quoted in Santirocco, 2016, p. 5). Conversely, some teachers urge those who want primarily imaginative versions of unknown people and places to look more closely at what they believe to be seemingly familiar. In a diverse classroom, selecting texts that convince some reluctant readers to expand their reading is a real challenge for many teachers.

One way to attack the problems just mentioned is prescriptive, and a well-known example may be seen with Hirsch's argument for cultural literacy. In his influential text, Hirsch (1988) reviews research literature about reading and accurately notes that a reader's prior reading experience will influence, and perhaps facilitate, the current reading experience. As a general precept, the more one has read, the easier it is to read other texts for understanding and appreciation: prior learning influences current learning. Few educators disagree with this part of Hirsch's argument, but he has had his critics for other reasons. Part of the controversy focuses on Hirsch's prescription for what constitutes appropriate background knowledge in a diverse cultural context; critics claim that his text choices come from a literary tradition that is primarily white and Western, and that they are too narrow to represent a "shared" cultural experience. Those refuting Hirsch's lists argue that every student brings a fund of knowledge to the variety of literacy experiences required in schools, although that knowledge base may not align with the texts that Hirsch values. And what was arguable in 1988 — the presumption of a monolithic and stable social culture — has been settled in the face of an undeniably diverse population in the 21st century. If our culture were stable — à la British literature of the later 19th century — it would be considerably easier to catalog what one should have read as a teacher prepared to introduce other learners to the world of quality literature. John argues, however, that cultural diversity is only one part of the problem even though some have made it the central issue in literary education.

Over the years we have heard preservice teachers complain about the expectations that they should be familiar with the works appearing on the "Strongly Recommended" list. In some instances, the teacher candidates recall that their early enthusiasm for reading, especially for reading popular fiction and various series targeting adolescent readers, influenced their decision to pursue a license to teach English. These reading enthusiasts rarely recall having read anything on the "Strongly Recommended" list, making it difficult for them to see the necessity for an English teacher to be familiar with these texts from a traditional literature canon: they had never met these texts along their path to the university and saw no imperative to introduce younger readers to them. Other skeptics among the prospective teachers are those who have experienced clinical placements in middle schools where they have encountered some readers reading at a third- or fourth-grade level. The preservice teachers question how their familiarity with Dante, Homer, Aeschylus, or even Shakespeare will help them as they work with reluctant and struggling readers.

While...