Like any English department across the nation, the English lit programming in my district has its list of essentials.

At the ninth grade level, the anchor works we are required to teach are To Kill a Mockingbird, Animal Farm, and Romeo and Juliet. Tenth grade: Lord of the Flies, Into the Wild, and Julius Caesar. Eleventh: Fahrenheit 451, The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, The Crucible. Twelfth: The Things They Carried, Hamlet, Catcher in the Rye. These are the published core. The non-negotiables, the must-dos, the anchors.

In summary: One female author. No non-white authors. Only one author still alive.

This obviously reflects neither the demographics of my students, nor the society they live in. On the literary canon’s over-representation of white males, The Harvard Political Review points out that books like those on our anchor list “have literary merit and provide high school students with shared cultural references, the homogeneity of their authors and characters provides a canon that fails to cater to a heterogeneous audience” (source).

To be fair, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God is approved as an optional supplemental text for seniors, but is unfortunately rarely used. Anthem is similarly approved for 9th graders, mainly because the Ayn Rand foundation is eager to send free copies and the whole novella can be taught in about 14 minutes flat. There are class sets… somewhere in one of our three high schools… of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees is approved as a supplement, but few of the spines have been cracked. Same with Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, but to be honest, despite its obvious literary merit, that is one I would struggle to feel comfortable teaching to 10th graders (the level for which it is approved) due to the graphic scene that forms a key crux of the plot.

“While these books have literary merit and provide high school students with shared cultural references, the homogeneity of their authors and characters provides a canon that fails to cater to a heterogeneous audience.”

From Reconstructing the Canon — Harvard Political Review

Though these titles are “approved” and there is at least a class set purchased and stored on some shelf somewhere, these are rarely (if ever) making it into the hands of students.

If we can’t make space to shoehorn these titles in among the anchors, we are invited to supplement with diverse short stories or poetry we can find, provided we can find it for free on the internet or in the public domain. And what does that say about which literary voices are “worth reading” in our curriculum?

A small group of high school teacher leaders have worked the last few years to push the boundaries of our reading list. They have managed to secure approval for titles such as Persepolis, Purple Hibiscus, The Hate U Give, and Behold the Dreamers, but there’s the purchasing problem. These teacher leaders (from our largest high school) were able to secure an outside grant to purchase several sets of each title. The whole process to review and select appropriate titles, achieve approval from the district’s Instructional Materials Committee, secure funding, purchase and then pilot those books took about three years.

Our administrative leadership isn’t the barrier. On the contrary, our principals and central office administration are quite supportive of teachers championing new titles to bring to our bookshelves… they work with us to pave the way toward approval, and are often creative with budgets to find ways to get at least a class set or two of new texts purchased.

The challenge is what marginalized voices have faced all along: moving out of the margins. Diverse poetry or short stories are great, but short works are but small voices when the curriculum is centered almost wholly on white male voices. If we are forced to choose, we ostensibly are supposed to choose the anchors over the margins. Plus, access is an issue: One class set of Purple Hibiscus for 10th grade is great…but there are, district-wide, probably 25 or 30 sections of 10th grade English happening at any given time. That one class set only goes so far even in heavy rotation.

Then there is the argument that is too often echoed in our political landscape: Replacement. If we make room for more diverse voices, who are we displacing? My opinion is that the displacement is for the better, but not every teacher or every parent thinks so.

This is one part of the institutional inertia that I and other teacher leaders are up against. The other inertia comes in the approval process, how curriculum money is prioritized, and even whether that money exists. Both sources of inertia are difficult to overcome, but I’m going to give it a shot.

Earlier this year, I listened to the audiobook of Tommy Orange’s There There. Even though I had picked it up for my own pleasure, by five minutes in I knew it was something I wanted to teach: Brilliant storytelling, beautifully crafted. A plotline set in the same millennium my students live in. An up-and-coming Native American voice, casting Native American characters as human beings rather than caricatures of worn stereotypes.

So last week I filled out the form to get There There approved for senior English. I have the support of my principal, my colleagues, and my assistant superintendent. I have my seat at the table as a member of the Instructional Materials Committee, representing my high school. What I don’t have yet is money to buy copies of the book to get into kids’ hands if I get the stamp of approval.

More on that in my next post…