"Teachers and Students as Co-Conspirators: Reading
Dangerously and Dangerous Reading"
The presentation on Saturday 2:15-3:15 in ENGR E203 will examine
the place of talk, text(s), and ethics in the literature classroom, and
features case studies of university and high school English classroom teachers
incorporating “dangerous reading”—challenged/banned literature—and “reading
dangerously”—practices of teaching/learning which resist comfortable and
traditional interpretive stances.
The presentation will
offer a hybrid inquiry approach—part research presentation, part hands-on
demonstration—of what happens when teachers and students read and talk about
banned/challenged/controversial literature. Drawing upon the pedagogical methods and curricular
materials of several classroom English teachers who attempted to teach/read
dangerously as they incorporated ‘controversial’ literature in their classrooms,
the presentation will seek to move the critical discussion of teaching
controversial literature beyond the often binary considerations of censorship
and free speech to engage the perspective of ethical criticism and social
justice in literature classroom.
Part of our context was a series of recent book challenges within
several SE Michigan districts of classic and YA texts, but also of the expressive
and interpretive writing produced by secondary students in response to these
literary texts as well as the difficult material conditions of their own
lives. The “dangerous reading” of
the title encompasses both student and literary texts about controversial
topics.
The practices of
“reading dangerously” will be showcased through key excerpts of the classroom
conversations about this literature: first, of conversations between teacher
and students in a secondary classroom about select passages from frequently
challenged YA text; and then, of the critical discussion of classroom teachers
about the issues raised by those conversations. This double framing of such conversations will help
highlight the real and perceived challenges (and opportunities) teachers
experience in fostering new classroom spaces where teachers and students are
not silenced or do not fall prey to self-censorship.
Participants will
have an opportunity to examine data through multiple critical lenses and use
some techniques of discourse analysis (Gee 2004) to locate additional points of
contact between dangerous reading and reading dangerously.
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