Episode
410: The American Lit Curriculum I Would Teach Now
- Published
- Jan 28, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1456
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Summary
American Lit has the potential to be an engaging, broadening, fascinating course. We're in what I consider an in-between era, where many schools are still providing the historical American lit canon to teachers, while other schools or independent teachers going around the system have moved into teaching a broader swirl of America's diverse stories. The American Lit curriculum I was handed twenty years ago was 98% written by dead white men. Since then, I've learned about the impact on our students when they can (and can't) see themselves in the books they read. When they can and can't see their identities. Their communities. Their problems. Their hopes. I learned from Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop's call for books in which students can see themselves and learn to understand others in her appeal to our collective humanity in her landmark essay, "Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors." I learned from Felicia Rose Chavez, author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop , who shared her personal experience as a young reader: "It's startling as a young person of color to stare down the spines of literacy and note the neat annihilation of most of the world" (29). I learned from Dr. Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica and Dr. Allison Briceño , co-authors of Conscious Classrooms , that using culturally relevant texts can improve student outcomes by helping improve their comprehension, motivation & engagement. I learned more about pairing contemporary texts to the canon from the #distrupttexts movement , about "completing" the canon from Chavez, and about layering multicultural, multimodal texts from Dr. Gholdy Muhammad's Cultivating Genius . For me, it feels so clear. And yet I still see so many curriculums either still cleaving to the classics for the most part or abandoning books altogether in…