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  • Chris Sturdy

We Are What We Read


Some people liken teaching to gardening. A process where a responsive, reflective gardener utilizes their watering can while monitoring soil health and making sure appropriate sunlight is distributed. During my six year tenure as a high school English teacher, I viewed myself as a gardener, and I knew many other professionals who did the same. I also worked with professionals at the other end of the spectrum who seemed to treat the profession like a mad, narcissistic scientist. To them, teaching was mixing a static potion and pouring it into another brain for absorption. This usually brought about one of two responses: 1) gloating when the potion worked and the student (read: specimen) “learned” what the teacher set out for them to learn or 2) blaming the specimen for their lack of work ethic and learning while mixing up the same potion for next time.

As teachers, we aren’t forcing changes with concoctions from the laboratory. We’re inviting flowers to open their petals. Every flower is different, so the soil and the watering regimen need to be constantly evaluated. In the English classroom, a large part of the soil—the foundation—is the curriculum, the books we choose to put in our students’ hands. A myopic list of reading options causes a flower to wilt about as fast as dumping the concoction in an open skull causes a student to flounder in their learning. Historically, many of us were subjected to a myopic list of reading options. Reading lists that were overwhelmingly white, hetereosexual, cisgender, and male. I don’t have an issue with white, hetereosexual, cisgender, male writers. I’m one of them. But I do have a problem with overrepresentation of one group inside an institution which is responsible for the growth and learning of a multicultural group of people, mainly children. It creates erasure and marginalization and perpetuates systemic harm onto bodies that are just as part of the fabric of art, history, and life as white, hetereosexual, cisgender men.

I say this as someone who has taught in schools where school boards asked I stop teaching books by authors of color for reasons of content and gave me a list of mainly white authors to substitute in for my previous text resource choices. I say this as someone who has taught in schools who fully supported just about any curriculum choice I wanted as long as I could find funding for it.

The more schools I step into, the more evidence I have on how a multicultural education isn’t something commonly valued in the United States education system—from Pre-K to graduate programs. I’ve run into curriculums with no authors of color, no LGBTQ+ authors, no non-Christian authors, etc. Even schools that claim diversity as a focus often clump all non-white authors into their World Literature class offered one semester each year as an elective while using heroes and holidays as a foundation for their proof of practicing anti-racism, anti-sexism, and more.

When curriculum is monocultural or seriously lacking authorial representation across many intersections, the message is clear to groups not being represented: you don’t belong. On the other end of this experience, narrow text selections bolster and normalize cisgender, hetereosexual, white experiences and pass down a message that lives of privilege are the only lives worthy of discussion and attention; a message of belonging internalized in privileged students. Schools, districts, and communities can give any response they’d like as to why their text resources are in their current state of short-sighted affairs, but it won’t offset the damage done, nor the damage that will continue to be done without change.

Our schools are gardens. And right now, we need to accept the fact that our soil isn’t healthy. It helps if a teacher has a reliable watering can and bountiful sunlight, but it’s not enough. Students deserve multicultural text resources for their novels, short stories, textbooks, and multimedia materials to serve as windows and mirrors for all facets of life. We must bring balance to our garden. Changing out our soil is an early step on the large scale to offset privilege, build empathy, and bring about a future of inclusion.

Image via Flickr @Martin Stone


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