We hear a lot about how our kids aren’t reading anymore.  Lured by social networking sites and videogames (which we don’t count as “real” reading), educators and parents alike lament how our children and teens don’t pick up books anymore.  Last year, a New York Times article touched on this subject, noting that,

“As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books. But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount.”

I wholeheartedly agree that educators need to understand (and teach!) the kind of visually-driven, nonlinear reading that occurs in online spaces.  But I also think that book reading is far from dead: we just need to give kids and teens something good to read.

When I taught high school, many of my students had never encountered a book that they found fascinating, engrossing, or thought-provoking.  It’s not just that they encountered a language arts curriculum that drew heavily from “the classics” – it’s that the texts were taught in a decontextualized, inaccessible way that made them feel unengaged or downright discouraged.

In the class that I’m teaching this semester, my preservice teachers have come up with a number of ways to integrate young adult literature into the curriculum.  Each class, we brainstorm how to teach the novels: pairing them with classics, using documentaries to introduce them, creating space for multimodal composition, and many more.

As Santoli and Wagner (2000) argue,

“Young adult literature can be a vehicle that allows teachers to present the same literary elements found in the classics while engaging adolescent students in stimulating classroom discussions and assignments.  Unlike classic literature, it can foster a desire to read.  Because it: a) employs the literary elements of the classics, b) engages adolescent students in analyzing literature along with themselves and their principles, and c) promotes and encourages lifelong reading habits.  Young adult literature deserves a valued and respected position in secondary language arts classrooms.”

Is that to say that I don’t think that we should teach the classics?  Of course not.  But do you know how many times I had a high school senior in my science fiction elective class exclaim in surprise, “Wow, I loved that book!  That’s the first book I’ve ever read all the way through in high school!”?  Far too many.  While we read Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World, we also read Feed and Ender’s Game.

It’s so important that our students be given the opportunity to discovery what kinds of genres and narrative styles that they’re drawn to – the opportunity to become thoroughly engrossed in a character, a plot line, or a setting that they can’t put the book down.  As educators, if we can’t provide books to our students that accomplish that, I think that we need to ask ourselves who our curriculum is serving and who it is alienating – and at what price.

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