In 2017, the students of Ms. Campbell’s eleventh-grade English class went through the IHS bookroom to find every book that was being used in the high school’s classrooms and researched each author’s race and gender. At the end, each of these student’s research were compiled into one data set and in Fall of 2017 they found that 82 percent of books (89 out of 108) used in the high school curricula were written by white authors. When I talked to Ms. Campbell about how the data should be interpreted she said, “… understand that a lot of the work that we’ve done will not be represented in this data so make a point that we have added a couple of texts since then. Has it astronomically changed in the last two years? No it has not.”
When exploring what has made this change so difficult in the past, I found multiple reasons. One prominent one is that bringing a book into a specific class means buying a new book for sometimes hundreds of students at a time. The 10th grade English teacher, Ms. Mellander discusses the funding restrictions, “If it’s not in the book room at the beginning of the year a teacher either needs to do grant writing or wait until the following year. This makes it difficult to pivot or supply new offerings quickly or to every 10th grader. Books are expensive.”
Another barrier that can stand in the way of more diverse voices being shared is the three required core texts for every grade level. The three core texts are voted on by the course teachers every year, but Ms. Campbell explains that they are, “limited by both tradition and availability of texts.” She goes further to say, “Right now our school and department requires core texts. So all teachers in 9th grade, 10th and 11th, choose 3 texts and they decide that all teachers are going to teach these three books and it’s almost always classics. For example, one of those books from 11th grade is the core text, 12 Angry Men and another is the narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass. Although those are great texts it means that three units out of the year are devoted to classical literature.”
In her interview on August 7th, Ms. Campbell expressed her desire to have English courses taught by thematic unit. An example of a thematic unit would be ‘racial justice in America,’ and each teacher of the course would then pick which books and texts they wanted to use to address that theme. Ms. Campbell states, “I’m trying to shift the discussion away from more required chronological texts and towards a shared discussion about key themes and key ideas that we want to focus on instead, and then give teachers and students more choice on how to address those themes and ideas.”
I reached out to the entire IHS English department for more details on how they are solving this lack of diversity. Since the racial reckoning of 2020, many institutions and individuals have been trying to make more of an effort to address race in America, and the English Department at IHS hasn’t broken that stride. Mr. Reiff, the English Department head collaborated with the English department in a statement to The Tattler to share some of the actions that English teachers have been taking: “From the spring into the summer and now into the Fall, the English department has been working as individuals, in small groups of teachers, and as an entire department, to move and change and shift what takes place in our classrooms. Teachers have engaged in two different anti-racism working groups through the summer, one devoted to strictly English department thinking, another to English / History (Humanities) cross-curricular thinking.”
According to the group statement, “Teachers across the board have begun tackling new texts, new voices, and new thinking. We’ve researched a far more diverse set of texts, authored by a range of dynamic writers from multiple elements of our BIPOC communities, that are arriving at IHS as I write this. We have begun work on collaboratively developing that new curriculum. Principal Jason Trumble has been behind us in this effort, helping us with his own intellectual thinking, and the financial backing of IHS. District leadership—from Assistant Superintendent Lily Talcott to Superintendent Dr. Luvelle Brown—have been supportive in our efforts as well.”
So what can you as a student do to diversify your classroom’s reading lists? Don’t be afraid to recommend new books written by #ownvoices authors to your teachers. If you feel like your English class doesn’t represent enough marginalized voices or that your texts and resources aren’t diverse enough, talk to your teacher, talk to your classmates and figure out a plan to change that. Keep recommending books you’ve read to your teacher and you have a chance to be part of the solution.