A report came out last week that has broad implications for college teachers working in the humanities. It was conducted by University of Arkansas professor Sandra Stotsky with Joan Traffas and James Woodworth, supported by grants from National Endowment for the Humanities and the Bradley Foundation, and now published as FORUM 4: A PUBLICATION OF THE ALSCW (Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers), “Literary Study in Grades 9, 10, and 11: A National Survey.” (PDF here.)
Stotsky designed the study to determine which texts are most often taught in high school English classes (excluding AP and remedial), as well as how they are taught (including the kinds of assignments students are given). She and her colleagues were able to obtain a sample of 400+ English teachers and crafted a 67-item questionnaire. They compiled data on a total of 773 courses.
The first major finding they uncovered is this:
“First, the content of the literature and reading curriculum for students in standard or honors courses is no longer traditional or uniform in any consistent way. The most frequently mentioned titles are assigned in only a small percentage of courses, and the low frequencies for almost all the other titles English teachers assign point to an idiosyncratic literature curriculum for most students. Moreover, the works teachers assign do not increase in difficulty from grade 9 to grade 11.”
While the most of the popular titles are classics (Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Gatsby, Huck), the frequency of any one title is low. The highest scorer appeared in only 22.38 percent of the courses. By the time we reach the 10th most popular title, The Scarlet Letter, we have reached eight percent of total courses. This represents, in Stotsky’s words, an “idiosyncratic” English curriculum. Teachers in first-year college courses may reasonably assume that the 25 students in the class have each undergone a different English training in the previous four years.
The second major finding is this:
“Second, teachers of standard and honors courses do not regularly engage students in close, analytical reading of assigned works. They do draw on a variety of approaches for literary study, including close reading, but they are more likely to use a non-analytical approach to interpret a work (e.g., a personal response or a focus on a work’s historical, cultural, or biographical context) than to undertake a careful analysis of the work itself.”
While college teachers might regard analytical reading as the first and foremost capacity for handling the complex texts they assign, apparently, high school teachers don’t. Indeed, according to Stotsky, the rate of analytical reading has gone down since the last time such a study was conducted (by Arthur Applebee in 1993). Here is a fuller breakdown of the approaches:
For teaching literature in Grade 11, 31 percent of teachers favored “Close Reading,” 27 percent “Biographical or Historical,” 45 percent “Reader Response,” 27 percent “Multicultural,” (teachers could choose more than one approach).
For teaching literary non-fiction in Grade 11, 31 percent chose “Close Reading,” 36 percent “Biographical or Historical,” 39 percent chose “Reader Response,” and 21 percent chose “Multicultural.”
These numbers are reason for deep concern. While in its better examples contextualist approaches are rigorous and informative, they slip all too easily into discussions tangential to the text at hand. Students and teachers end up talking more about the life of the author than the author’s prose; about social relations at the time of the work’s publication, not social relations as presented in the novel; about their personal experience instead of the personhood outlined in the psychology treatise, etc.
Such activities may increase historical knowledge, personal reflection, and social awareness, but they don’t much enhance the kind of detailed and deliberate reading comprehension essential to college readiness. College students generally can complete simpler comprehension tasks such as summarizing a thesis or theme, compiling evidence for it, and taking a (crude) position in relation to it. But Beyond Good and Evil, Middlemarch, “Further in summer than the birds,” and “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” demand more. The language is figurative and ambiguous, the voice modulated, the ideas difficult. The more analytical practice they’ve had in high school, the better students can meet the demand. The less they’ve had, the more they will pile into remedial courses. (More commentary here.)
