Canon ball: a dive into the deep end of diversifying texts in grades 6–12 English Language Arts classrooms
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Date
2024-03-22
Authors
McLauchlan, Tara
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Abstract
In my role as a high school English Language Arts teacher, and more recently as a literacy coach, I have observed that the canonical texts used in senior-years classrooms reflect a complete lack of diversity and representation. The dearth of texts authored by Indigenous, Black, Asian, Hispanic and/or 2SLGBTQ+ voices necessitates an urgent conversation around diversifying the texts being used in our senior-years ELA classrooms. While the importance of representation in story is well documented in the literature, there is less known about how teachers recognize and enact this call for diversity. Informed by the powerful rationale for diversifying texts, this study explores how grade 6–12 English Language Arts teachers recognize and enact the call to diversify texts in their classrooms. In five half-day professional learning sessions (PLS), eight teachers participated in book clubs to explore middle grade and young adult texts written by diverse voices. This study was grounded in the research question, How do teachers recognize and enact the call to diversify texts in ELA? More specifically the study explored:
• How do teachers define and select diverse texts for their classrooms?
• What motivations and barriers exist in using diverse texts in the classroom?
• How are teachers facilitating learning with diverse texts?
In order to engage these questions, I invited teacher participants to book clubs where they explored middle grade and young adult texts written by diverse voices. Book clubs provided the framework of a shared text through which the teacher-readers could think more deeply about the importance of diversity and representation. To ensure that teachers had multiple entry points into the concepts of power and privilege, I provided language and conceptual frameworks that were spiralling, recursive, and interconnected.
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Keywords
English Language Arts, diverse texts, language and literacies, teacher education, professional development, professional learning community, high school, middle years, diversifying the canon, book clubs