As students walk along the hallway to my classroom, they see a charcoal drawing advertising Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, a collage about Maya Angelou’s poetry collection And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems, a poem featuring words from Tupac Shakur’s The Rose That Grew from Concrete and an image of trees transforming from winter to spring to represent Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak. Students created these artworks to teach peers about their quarterly independent reading choices. They help foster interest in texts that expand students’ perspectives on how their own experiences fit within national and global contexts.
I was inspired to require quarterly independent reading alongside traditional required curriculum while reading Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide. I then made a conscious choice to curate the classroom library in a culturally responsive manner. I look for multi-leveled texts about complex characters with diverse identities and experiences. I also select works by authors who share my students’ cultural heritages.
The first quarter, I ask each student to choose a book by an author hailing from a home country or a culture different from their own. From then on, students can choose books freely, but each time they must answer this question: “How will this book challenge me to think in a new and different way?” For instance, a student who chose None of the Above by I.W. Gregorio wrote, “I have always thought there were only two genders, and this book has an intersex main character, so I will learn how to think about gender in a new way.”
I’ve also seen the power of this approach with Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor. Her sci-fi and fantasy books feature strong, African (usually Nigerian or Nigerian-American) female protagonists who question and defy stereotypes based on gender, race, class and cultural background. Her stories are usually set in a present or future African context as the lead character completes quests to dismantle systems of power, particularly colonial power.
After finishing a book, each student presents a creative or analytical work, such as a painting, newspaper article, essay or character interview, to help their classmates consider what to read next.
How will this book challenge me to think in a new and different way?
I update the books in our classroom library each quarter and present a “book talk” on available texts, making connections to units, community happenings and current events. This quarter, the play adaption of The Bluest Eye is being performed at our local theater, so I recommended the book to students. I also support reluctant readers by ordering books we choose together that match their interests. I also set aside books from the classroom and school libraries that match reluctant readers’ descriptions of what they like to read.
I’ve encountered two main barriers: providing time for independent reading alongside daily curriculum and procuring and updating the texts in our class library throughout the year. For help choosing racially diverse texts, Sharroky Hollie has a helpful appendix of books organized by racial emphasis and age appropriateness in the back of his book Culturally Responsive Teaching and Learning. Hollie encourages educators who must teach a particular mainstream text to also incorporate at least one culturally responsive text. Also, Teaching Tolerance’s Reading Diversity tool is a great model for choosing texts that promote cultural responsiveness as well as critical literacy and complexity.
To procure new texts, I’ve had to be proactive. At open houses and fall conferences, I ask caretakers to bring books they no longer read, and then I sort through the texts and donate those I do not use. I have also received grants and used Title I money. Gallagher offers ideas in Readicide, including using curriculum cycle money, the principal’s discretionary funds and school improvement funds. Every teacher’s situation is different and some of these options are more appropriate for some than others, but the key is to be creative.
Independently reading books that emphasize nondominant perspectives helps students develop their self-concepts as they learn similarities and differences between themselves and others. It also encourages student readers to question dominant narratives and to embrace their power as change makers in their own society.
Toedt is a ninth-grade IB English teacher at a public school in Minnesota.
