I’ve been watching the developments of Common Core with some interest. As a language arts and reading teacher, the proposed changes to my content areas are profound, and one of the biggest is the shift to including much more informational text in the curriculum than is currently used today.
I find this fascinating because I’ve always felt that informational text was getting the short end of the stick. I can’t speak as much to what happens in grades K-5 (although I’ve spent some time in elementary school classrooms), but in the upper grades, in a traditional language arts classroom, students read a lot of literature (novels, short stories, poetry, essays) but little else. As important as those things are, they do not reflect reading as it happens in the real world.
As things stand now, children in elementary school appear to read a lot of fiction, which seems odd when you consider that they are in self-contained classrooms where they are learning all the content areas at once. Don’t get me wrong, juvenile fiction is a wonderful thing, but there is a lot of wonderful non-fiction out there that probably does not get taken advantage of because a lot of elementary teachers tend to associate “reading” with “stories” and focus solely on that. It’s not fair to say everyone does it, but believe me I’ve seen plenty of cases of it.
There’s some question as to what role fiction and nonfiction should play in the curriculum. It’s fairly controversial to advocate in favor of non-fiction if one’s audience is traditional language arts teachers (who tend to revere classical literature), and non-fiction supporters often argue that the purpose of reading should be to prepare students for college and work. The trouble is that both are right.
I doubt anyone is proposing that novels, plays and poems should be banished from the language arts classrooms in favor of strictly utilitarian forms of reading, but the role that they play will no doubt change. Maybe instead of glorifying literary classics for their own sake, teachers may become more thoughtful in how they decide what to teach, and how to integrate literature in a way that supports the efforts of other content areas and some of the more esoteric functions of schooling (life skills, civics, critical thinking, ethics, etc.).
I would like to think that as the quantity of fiction declines, the quality will increase. That perhaps this will open up greater avenues for student choice in terms of reading materials, and open time and space for working on expressive literacy and writing skills that are rarely addressed due to the fact that there simply isn’t time for them. I see a lot of possibilities for differentiated instruction when you aren’t tied to a single “text” that don’t currently exist. I like the idea of being able to use more digital texts, magazine articles, speeches, feature articles, biographies, and current events in the classroom.
For this reason, I have always preferred teaching “Reading” over teaching “Language Arts”. The reason, perhaps is because of the kinds of students I like working with (students with labels), but also because Reading has always felt like a more flexible medium for literacy instruction than Language Arts has. Reading is a wide open sea of possibility. Language arts means when you teaching 9th grade, you’re going to be teaching Romeo and Juliet every spring every year for the rest of your life. “Reading”, as I imagine it in a secondary setting, would be both a place to improve specific literacy skills, but also a mechanism for exploring all kinds of literary genres that are currently neglected in favor of a narrowly prescribed curriculum that’s focused heavily on the classics.
I’m inclined to agree that most students don’t have enough practice with the kinds of reading that they’ll be doing in college, much less in the workplace, where most reading material is nonfiction. Aside from not having developed adequate strategies for using non-fiction texts skillfully, they also have no idea how to analyze or synthesize complex nonfiction information when they encounter it, much less apply it to real world contexts/problems. Part of the reason for this is because exposure to non-fiction text happens primarily in content area classrooms (science, history, vocational classes), but the literacy skills needed to truly comprehend such text are not taught simultaneously, because science, history, and vocational instructors are much more concerned with mastery of the content, than the mastery of the text.
It may surprise a lot of people that many children actually prefer non-fiction text. This is particularly true for kids who don’t consider themselves readers (because they don’t gravitate towards narrative fiction). Whenever I get a kid who claims to hate reading, it nearly always turns out that part of the reason is because thanks to their experience in elementary school, they associate reading with “stories”. It’s easier to hook some kids into reading when they can read non-fiction books on a topic of interest first. This is especially true for boys. For this reason, I’ve always kept about an equal mix of fiction and non-fiction books on my SSR (free-reading) book shelves for students to browse, because reluctant readers often gravitate towards non-fiction books.
It's very easy to add more nonfiction into instruction at the elementary level (where instruction mostly takes place in self-contained multiple subject classrooms), where curriculum can be organized around major topics of inquiry. But there’s no reason why this can’t happen more at the secondary level, with interdepartmental curriculum planning. Thematically, there’s a lot that could be done with this. I don’t see any reason why a language arts class has to be totally distinct from other content areas.
I really like the idea of being to team teach around topics like music, history, science, art, math, etc. (I call this the National Geographic approach to reading). There are a lot of opportunities to explore literacy in the context of these other areas: music and poetry go together quite nicely. History and literature complement each other beautifully. Cross cultural literature (comparative literature) happens at the college level all the time, there’s no reason why it can’t happen more in high school. Science provides a lot of interesting grounds for literary exploration as well, and even math has connections to literacy (exploring and analyzing data, trends, etc.). I haven’t even hit vocational subjects yet, but have done some of my best reading units around these topics. I find the possibilities of teaching in this kind of rich environment rather exhilarating, but have always had to do it without official sanction from anyone. With common core standards, that will finally change.
Source article: Novel idea? Emphasis on nonfiction over fiction shaking up Illinois classrooms (Diane Rado, Chicago Tribune, October 02, 2012
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