A Case for Muddying the Waters
The job of being a high school English teacher has changed pretty dramatically since I started doing it some 35 years ago. Of course we English teachers are still in charge of making sure that our high school graduates can read and write and speak and listen with some degree of proficiency. Traditionally, this enterprise has been pursued alongside the equally compelling goal of exposing our students to literature and in particular, classic literature. These classic works of literature both reflect and perpetuate our cultural values and our collective history, so of course, as our cultural values and collective history evolve, so have our ideas about what classic literature looks like. And so it has become part of our job as English teachers to interrogate our use of certain classic texts, especially when they amplify and maintain thinking that our society no longer finds acceptable. And to make things more just in our schools and in our classrooms, we English teachers often find ourselves working against tradition—and sometimes our own school boards—to add contemporary texts that are more diverse, more representative of our society and more aligned with our values.
In addition to these lofty goals of new and old, we high school English teachers are now compelled by both state and national curriculum standards to teach our students to be effective critical thinkers. This means that students should be able to read and respond to informational texts and to navigate, with care and discernment, an increasingly complex digital information age. We call this media literacy and in the state of New Jersey, where I teach, the governor recently signed into law a bill which will require all schools to develop programs that give students the tools they need to effectively navigate the barrage of information they are exposed to. I am proud to say that my school is currently piloting a program ahead of this mandate and that my colleague and friend, Mike Warren is doing exceptional work in this area.
As Mike and I—and most other teachers—will tell you, helping students to become effective critical thinkers would be challenging work in a vacuum. You can imagine, then, the challenges we encounter in a world in which teenagers are spoon-fed curated media narratives using sophisticated algorithms on devices they hold in their hands and have access to 24-7. Also, consider that these narratives have varying degrees of truth and validity and are delivered on visually compelling social media platforms, replete with pithy memes, students’ favorite music and the celebrities and sports heroes they revere.
Suffice it to say that helping students to navigate this space thoughtfully and critically is literally like trying to lure a teenager to a salad bar after they have just feasted on pizza and ice-cream.
It is hard work at its core. When politicians or school boards or parents suggest that we are out of bounds—or worse, trying to manipulate students—when we engage them in critical literacy activities around current topics, they make it even harder, and worse, they ignore the standards that guide our practice. Not only should we be teaching about the issues and events of our time for a myriad of educational and ethical reasons, but we are actually compelled by legal mandates and formal curriculum standards to do so.
And that is exactly why I spent a week last year with my 12th grade English class reading, writing and talking about the issue of transgender athletes in high schools and colleges. This was right about the time that the case of the swimmer, Lia Thomas, was in the news and questions about transgender athletes in high school competitions were being considered in federal and state courts across the country. My classes began by reading a news story published in NEWELA (a vetted, middle-leaning news site for middle and high school students) which examined a number of states who were considering bans on transgender athletes in high schools and other groups who were pushing the NCAA to cancel college athletic events in those states. The article ignited fiery debates in class and students voiced strong opinions that ranged from outrage on behalf of student athletes who may lose a competitive edge when transgender athletes compete against them to empathy for those transgender athletes who they perceived as just wanting to be part of a team and participate in sports in the way other high school students do. What was clear was that almost every student in my classes had a very strong opinion about how they stood on the issue and they weren’t shy about voicing it.
And then we dug in.
We read and responded to dozens of articles from multiple sources and from many different perspectives. We read about two high school girls in Connecticut who lost their spots in the state track meet of champions, after being outperformed by a transgender athlete. We read about a young transgender athlete who was finally accepted on her soccer team and although she didn’t earn the starting position she had hoped for, she felt like a true member of the team. We listened to speeches from various governors and other lawmakers and from high school coaches, athletes and parents. We read about the science of hormones and gender and the long history of transgender athletes. (I know you were wondering about the picture attached to this post.) Whenever the conversation seemed to lean too far in one direction, I used the words I often use to help train my students to give fair attention to the many sides of an issue: Someone, please articulate a credible counter-narrative to that point. And by credible, I mean a counter-narrative that assumes its speaker has good intentions and is speaking from a logical well-reasoned position. I always emphasize that this the work of a great thinker—to thoughtfully and eloquently articulate a position that you don’t necessarily believe is the best position. You might be surprised at how this simple prompt motivates students to actively work toward a better understanding of complex issues.
And then after a week of reading, writing and discussing in this teacher-moderated forum, I assigned a Socratic Seminar for which students did their own research and explored their own questions in an effort to advance our thinking about this issue. In each of my five classes, we had a powerful hour of student-moderated discussion and it seemed that the deeper we got into the issue, the more thoughtful the comments and questions were, the more engaged my students were and the less certain they were that they had the definitive answer to the critical question at hand.
When I perused the written reflections my students submitted the next day, I was oddly delighted to note that almost all of them included the word complex when describing the issue. In addition, almost all acknowledged multiple perspectives and the subtle nuances and complexities of the questions surrounding this issue. Instead of oversimplifying the issue and reflexively voicing their strong opinions, my students grew more comfortable exploring the difficult and complex questions that surround this and most other critical issues.
In a world in which we are constantly being driven—by algorithms and other mysterious forces—toward identity-driven positions on everything from the price of gas to the environment to the safety of our cities, it is crucial that we teach ourselves—and our students—to interrogate and think critically about the information we consume. And, yes, while really investigating and trying to understand multiple perspectives of a single issue might feel like we are making it less clear, or as if we have muddied the waters, it will also probably lead to a little less division in the world and maybe even a little more understanding.
