Alexander T. K. Elnabli
Why develop a unit on myths focused on allusion, given the many literary devices students are certain to encounter in their study of literature in English? The answer is that this unit results from a backwards plan where the end goal is students’ rich participation in the “humanities.” By “humanities,” I mean that set of academic disciplines, artistic products, and intellectual activities through which people have asked and answered fundamental questions about what it means to be human. The set of questions people have asked, how they have formulated them, and when and where they have attempted to answer them is as diverse as the history of human cultures and languages. Being able to wade into this human conversation, learn from it, and advance it is a wonderfully difficult and complex journey for any student, and making sense of how to teach it is equally challenging for instructors.
By 2024 I am not sure we can even count the number of pieces that have been written decrying the “death of the humanities.” While I am not interested in rehashing any of these specific arguments, I want to weave together a few threads that motivate my development of this unit, and what my aims are in developing a humanities-oriented ELA curriculum unit for the public school student. These threads ultimately point me to a view of what goes into a humanities education, and how this curriculum unit serves that end.
First, in the ongoing debate between whether our educational focus for students should be on skills or content, I think it is fair to say that the answer is that both matter. I’m sure you have heard that a student with content knowledge about baseball is more likely to answer reading comprehension questions correctly about the subject of baseball even if she otherwise has been shown to be less skilled in reading comprehension than a peer who knows nothing about baseball (see Bibliography). It is perhaps uncontroversial to say that textbooks, school of education professors, and continuing education trainers for ELA teachers have for a long while emphasized exposing students to a large variety of texts and text types from a wide variety of authors in order to maximize their familiarity with as many subjects as possible and also to increase their familiarity with a variety of ways the written word can be crafted for diverse purposes. Does this pluralization of readings in practice serve student literacy or not?
I cannot answer that question in a scientific way here, so I will at least try to offer a speculative response. Putting aside the practical constraints on real life teachers, let’s just consider the written curriculum document with its idealized modeling of the learning process: When professional textbook writers or individual teachers get to work developing curriculum units which meet the demand for exposing students to such a wide variety of texts, they do not do so haphazardly. If following the Understanding by Design (UBD) model or some similar framework, texts as content will be selected for their relevance to the Essential Questions and Essential Understandings organizing the unit. If guided by the Common Core, designers will also attempt to collect texts of sufficient complexity and challenge for students at a particular grade level resulting from quantitative and qualitative analysis coupled with the educator’s professional judgment. These aims may also be achieved by including in a unit opportunities for students to select their own texts that meet a set of important standards-based criteria.
Further, articulated or unarticulated, curriculum designers may be guided by a set of additional educational aims that inform text selection, including cultural responsiveness, LGBTQ+ inclusion, antiracism, critique, tradition, patriotism, and character formation, to name a few commonly discussed today. Within that short list are those unmandated educational aims which most energize and polarize. In popular discourse, these aims are dubbed “political” or “moral” and are quickly flattened, becoming labels with which one can be associated to the approbation of her social network or their denigration. At their best, these educational aims allow teachers to expose students to a set of meaningful content that implicitly or explicitly promotes some values that inspire them in their work as educators or that reflects their individual expertise. At their worst, however, these ulterior aims (which for many teachers may in fact be their primary aims) result in students receiving fragmented educational experiences year-on-year in their ELA educations, drawn this way or that by the interests of whoever happens to be their ELA teachers.
And so I return to the question: “Does this pluralization of readings in practice serve student literacy or not?” It would be unfair of me to put too much weight on my choice of the word “fragmented” to motivate my answer to that question. I strongly suspect upon a more scientific investigation we would find some important practical value to the under-regulated autonomy of teachers to design curricula responsive to their individual passions and the needs of their students as individuals and members of various communities. The great variety of texts meeting the demands of a host of textbook publishers’ stakeholders may also produce a valuable assortment. Nevertheless, allow me now to pull on this thread I’ve spinning, which ultimately concerns the relationship between high school ELA curricula and the “humanities” as a set of disciplines and a mode of inquiry.
As in all disciplines, studying the humanities requires both a mastery of skills and knowledge of content that inform an intellectual tradition so that one may become capable of participating in and perhaps furthering, critiquing, or otherwise directing that tradition into the future. While not all high school students will go to college, I take as granted that the Common Core standards that (are supposed to) guide the work of public-school teachers are designed to equip students graduating high school with the academic skillset to continue to undergraduate education should they have the means to choose. But even if college were out of the picture, l would argue that high school graduates deserve to be able to read for what Mortimer J. Adler calls “understanding,” a literacy characterized by the ability of a student to identify and persist in reading a text whose ideas are challenging in a way that requires effort and persistence, which are rewarded with a unique kind of “enlightenment.”
While the term “enlightenment” may feel antiquated, I imagine that many would agree that a sense of wonder, an “AHA!” moment, or the feeling that you have come to understand something deeply world-changing through the words of another is a familiar experience to educators. Arguably it is that intellectual pleasure and experience of eye-opening insight that we have with others through reading their words or talking with them or writing out our own thoughts that inspires many to a life of learning and teaching in the first place.
Humanities disciplines are those dedicated to honing the skills and knowledge relevant to reading for understanding in Adler’s sense. However, those scholars and academics who are vocationally dedicated to the humanities do not merely design courses in which they assign a variety of texts and text types organized by essential questions alone. Texts are also selected because their framing of and contribution to answering essential questions has played a historically pivotal role in an ongoing conversation that constitutes some tradition. Sharper, more practiced, and more insightful humanists are those with deep and wide familiarity with influential texts and ideas that are taken for granted or explicitly debated by later writers, artists, and thinkers. In short, taking text as the example, our ability to engage later works with understanding, to read sympathetically as well as critically, depends in part on reading the earlier texts that inform the later ones.
But if chronology and direct influence were all we cared about, then humanistic inquiry would be sequestered to small cultural bubbles alone. What I would argue is wonderfully true about the humanities in the 21st century is that as more philosophical, literary, cultural, spiritual, institutional, or other traditions acquire a voice in humanistic conversations, we continue to gain an opportunity for more profound, more expansive, and more just insights into what it means to be human. While there is value in studying “traditions” insofar as these have been limited by geography and time, there is even greater value in uncovering the permeable borders between traditions, both as historical fact and as theoretical possibility.
We all live and think in a world produced by artifacts of the “humanities” and various distinct and intersecting traditions in this global sense. We have received these millennia-long conversations by and large in written form. The written word and the type of thinking that goes with reading another’s writing is crucial to the kind of ongoing forms of inquiry and contemporary conversations that make up the living humanities. Simply put, one cannot enter cogently into a conversation in the humanities without ‘conversing’ with the texts and thinkers that have shaped and been shaped by traditions. This process is in many ways analogous to the way mathematical building blocks of arithmetic and geometric proof establish a foundation for participating in more advanced mathematics. They both provide the raw materials of mathematical thinking along with common vocabulary and symbols to participate in and perform mathematical inquiry with others. While we can only stretch the analogy so far, the givenness of mathematics’ incremental structure in school ought to be extended to ELA as education for the humanities.
At the level of high school education, then, our aim cannot be for students to match the breadth and depth of reading that a student may achieve by the time she completes ten years of postsecondary education. Rather, our concern could be with supporting students to develop the skills and content knowledge that are foundational for their continuing participation in humanistic forms of inquiry as reader-citizens or, perhaps, as undergraduates in American colleges.
While what I’ve written above leaves several under-supported claims in need of qualification, for the purposes of this curriculum unit, I hope at least to have provided an adequate rationale. In sum: to read for understanding is to participate in humanistic inquiry, and to engage in humanistic inquiry calls for familiarity with texts and ideas that influence others in a variety of traditions. From a literary perspective, it is allusion which exemplifies this quality of conversational heritage, one that cannot be understood and interpreted by students without familiarity with the sources to which an author alludes.
It should come as no surprise that fewer students choose to study humanities disciplines in college year-on-year, not only because professionally-motivated students do not see a direct road from the humanities to high-salaried jobs but because they have no explicit training in any humanistic tradition in the first place. I suspect you’d find that most students take ELA as their model of an English major in college, and they conclude that the only reason to major in English is if they particularly enjoyed reading the literature assigned in their high school ELA classes and if they do not care about a major that presumes to serve as job preparation.
ELA education in high school should have a broader scope that serves all of the criteria for text selection I outlined above while adding this one: to equip students with skills and knowledge that would allow them to participate in humanistic traditions. Such students could have a framework for accessing a variety of disciplines in college from philosophy and comparative literature to area or interdisciplinary studies. And those same students would, as citizens, be able to track the continuing impact of the stories, myths, fairytales, philosophies, and their morals, themes, and concepts that continue to inform how we individually and collectively think about and debate matters of pressing human concern within families, neighborhoods, spiritual communities, and within ever widening spheres of political participation. While this pluralistic state of our human world is the condition for the kind of fragmented text selection common to American public education which I described above, I do not believe the opportunities for appreciating meaningful connections across traditions to create a more inclusive human conversation is likely if students are not taught to identify and think through the historical and textual links that constitute humanistic traditions.
Thus, this unit teaches students to identify highly alluded to stories in later and contemporary texts from a variety of cultural and spiritual traditions to prove in practice what may be lost in my theoretical articulation above: human understanding of questions of human concern are formed in an ongoing conversation of which we can become increasingly conscious. This consciousness is a way of continuing inquiry into ourselves and improving our answers to the questions that continue to shape actual human lives in all our diversity and that press on us as ethical and political agents. This is a high school ELA curricular unit satisfied with Common Core skill standards and with an ulterior aim of supporting students as humanistic inquirers, readers conscious of and participants in traditions that we can access in and through the English language.
