I was contacted by Queensborough Community College to be a partner/support organization on their application for The Big Read, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts. We've done Big Read programs before and we did it when I worked at BPL, so I was really excited to be part of QCC's project.
Then I read the text they had selected: The Shawl by Cynthia Ozick.
The Big Read is geared at middle and high school students with an aim "to broaden audience outreach and deepen participation, especially reaching lapsed and/or reluctant readers" so when I read Ozick's haunting literary novella about a Holocaust survivor, I will freely admit to thinking "This will NEVER work with our teens!"
I understand why QCC selected this text; they have a renowned Holocaust Archives and Resource Center they are planning to use to support the program, but I just got stuck on how hard a sell this book is going to be to reluctant readers.
But then I started thinking about my own prejudices and assumptions about what teens can handle. This came up a little bit in the In-Service on Tuesday, too. Early next week, I'm participating in a two-day training with People and Stories/Gente y Cuentos a reading and discussion program that introduces literary short stories to underserved adults and teens. The whole foundation of their amazing work is that even people without much formal education can interact with high quality literature in a way that incorporates their lived experiences as a valid means for understand the text.
So I've been reading Paulo Freire again and thinking about popular education and realized that I have been too willing to accept that our teens "can't handle" complex, moving works of literature in this "Jersey Shore" day and age. And maybe some of them can't, or won't, but that's no reason not to see what they CAN handle. And so I am preparing for the literary revolution!
Cash in the Coffee Can: $236.00
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