Madeline M. Craig
To put focus on the knowledge and creativity students already bring to the classroom community, most of the writing process is centered on the writing students compose and share. However, reading can be an important tool to develop a writer’s skill set. Whether it is for self-exploration or demanding change, students should be exposed to a narrative’s various purposes to best understand the power they wield within their pen. The traditional writer’s workshop model uses mentor texts that affirm “the authority of white literary ‘masters’ through a strict study of canonical texts, imparting an implicit rubric for the ‘right’ way to write” (14). The white cannon is clearly exemplified by the anthology Literary Genius, in which the editor, Joseph Epstein, appoints twenty-five classic writers as definitive masters of Western literature. The list features twenty-two white males, and three white females (15) which implies that to master the art of writing, one must also master and artificially imitate the literature of white, literary (so-called) geniuses. Many of these works, while not written in the last few decades, are also written from a bourgeois and elite sensibility that excludes a broad range of issues relating to labor, gender, race and sexuality. While it is not as if all writers who are white will automatically write in the same way or form, teaching only from these texts suggests that to write well, you must exclude these pieces of the human experience.
To contrast this elitist narrative, Toni Morrison asserts that the idea of white literary purity is a myth and that “there seems to be a more or less tactic agreement among literary scholars because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, moved from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States” (16). Due to the nature of the preservation of the white canon, to teach within the traditional writing workshop method is to uphold a political, historical and social narrative that denies the effort and contributions that African, Latinx, Native and Asian Americans have made to literature.
Additionally, most students find classic models of literature to be inaccessible and uninteresting at best. If educators want to spark interest in writing, we should choose reading examples that fuel that same motivation. Where the traditional workshop methods make writing feel inaccessible to students who do not reflect the values and social norms presented in these texts, the anti-racist workshop methods embrace contemporary work from living archives composed by people of color, gender-nonconforming writers, queer writers, or differently abled writers. Chavez argues that by “supplementing participants’ own writing with a living archive of scanned print material, sourced pdfs, and multimedia art” (17) will create an environment that centers justice, dignity and self-love within the writing workshop. Teachers should aim to embrace works that focus or highlight diversity in both style and form, but also written perspective and audience.
For this unit, the selection of narrative prose texts are taken from the winners of the New York Times Youth Personal Essay Contest in 2020 (18). Not only are the selected essays written by authors of various race, ethnicity and backgrounds, but each of them are composed by different high school students across America. They will be taught in tandem weekly alongside poems that share common thematic ideas centering on defining and discovering identity. The selection of narrative poems come from the anthology, Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice (19) which includes poems from activists and authors such as Jason Reynolds, Mahogany L. Browne, Elizabeth Acevedo, and Mahogany L Browne (20). The complete collection of poems covers a variety of topics surrounding social justice, activism, discrimination and empathy, focusing on the need to embrace your voice. The weekly thematic ideas explore how we can make amends for our past misconceptions, reflect on our present mindsets, and manifest our future selves.
