The Literacy of Echo

After having spent twenty years in the classroom, one thing is becoming crystal clear to me – students are reading far less of what we assign to them than they ever have in the past.

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On the first day of school this year, I asked my students the following question: by show of hands … how many of you qualify yourselves as being readers?

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I teach five sections of secondary ELA, and in four of those classes of twenty-eight students apiece, only two hands went up.?In the fifth class …there were zero hands.

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Out of 140 students, eight are readers.

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Given that my principle goal in the classroom is to foster a passion for learning, I realized that I’m up against some pretty difficult odds.

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And after having a lengthy discussion with my students as to why this current state exists, here’s what I’ve come to know:

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1.???We might want to reconsider teaching whole-class texts

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2.???The texts we are choosing for our students are not resonating with most of them

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3.???And the big one … students want to see themselves reflected in the texts they read

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So, I’m going to change the way I teach this year if my district allows for it.

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I want to call it The Literacy of Echo.

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Personally, when I look at my top ten favorite books of all time, I hold them so near and dear because I can see myself reflecting back to myself through the characters and events.

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Or, in other terms, I can hear my voice echoing back to me through the voice of a character in the book.

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As a teenager, I wanted to hear my life story and my struggle to find “self” echoing back to me.

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And guess what??All 140 of my students agreed with this idea.

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They want the echo effect when they read.

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MacBeth, Gatsby, and the like represent the classics and warrant being taught … but most of our students do not become lifelong learners and readers because we saddle them with these texts.

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In fact, specifically with regards to MacBeth, three students out of 140 attest to having read more than half of it last year.

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We are not fostering a love of learning.?We are breeding intellectual disengagement.?

We’re at a crossroads … do what we are doing and face these staggering statistics … or radically change our approach to teaching literature.

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My notion of The Literacy of Echo works like this – no more whole-class text teaching.

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And of even greater importance, we need to change the paradigm of how we view instruction and ask ourselves the following question: are we teachers of literature or are we literacy instructors?

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Whether we are the former or latter, we know who we should be in the classroom given today’s focus on standards-based learning.

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And here’s yet another possible obstacle – are we in districts with rigid curriculum maps that are still centered upon the classics (Dead White Men), or are we in districts with more representative voices?

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I say that we start offering students the opportunity to hear their lives echoing back to self.

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Therefore, I’m all in on offering Literature Circles.

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I can teach close reading skills through smaller texts like poetry and short stories.?Heck, students love to act out plays.?I could go this route too.

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Teenagers try on a modicum of masks as they come of age.?This is their reality – to construct their identities.?Few of our students will don the mask of Othello or Hester Pryne.?But many can see themselves in the character of Charlie from The Perks of Being a Wallflower – and further – in characters like Winter in the The Coldest Winter Ever.

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There is so much good literature that our students would love to read.?And we all know – when we have created readers – we have planted the seeds of lifelong learning.

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The Literacy of Echo.

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I’m going to let my students hear their lives and their stories in the texts I offer.

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