I remember being a young student and always looking forward to the summer. What I didn’t look forward to was summer reading. The selections never felt like anything I could sink my teeth into. When I see some of the readings my own children are assigned for the summer, I realize that, sadly, little has changed in that way.
Schools should be creating strong readers. That doesn’t happen by simply teaching children how to read. It also happens by introducing texts to children. Much has been made about children reading less, and certainly, AI doesn’t make matters any better. But the onus is on us to help facilitate reading among our young people. We’ve failed to do that.
We haven’t instituted the kind of process that will cultivate strong and willing readers. The way we “do it” now just doesn’t work. And while our current societal circumstances are not ideal in ways that ensure justice for all, they do provide us with an opportunity to make reading a real endeavor to empower and liberate youth, and thus whole communities.
We must change up our approach to reading assignments, both over the summer and during the school year.
Step one of assigning a text should be to define its purpose and communicate it to students. Reading a recipe has a purpose. Reading an instruction manual has a purpose. Therefore, whether reading Toni Morrison or Walter Rodney, we must know the “why,” and we must communicate that to students. Students derive meaning from what they read. We simply need to give them an entry point to arrive at that place.
The purpose is that entry point.
Secondly, students need the right content to fulfill the purpose. Once students know why they’re reading, it becomes important to provide the right content. If justice work is your goal, or if you want to understand where we are as a society and why, what a student reads and who wrote it matter. I’ve seen way too many teachers give Black and Brown students books to read by a Black author without purpose.
Black and Brown kids aren’t going to read a book just because you say a Black or Brown person wrote the book.
Teachers, particularly white teachers, have to not assume that’s the answer.
But once the purpose is given, the content can be added. Offer those Black and Brown authors, scholars, and poets who will bring purpose to life in the heart of a child. The content must be culturally relevant, responsive, and restorative. The content must address community matters and empower young people with the knowledge to begin the process of reflection.
Third, the students need to be taught and given space to reflect on the content and connect it to a purpose in an attempt to define a social problem. There is power in the ability to define a thing, particularly a problem, issue, or circumstance. That only comes by way of reflection. Because reflecting on what one has read requires wrestling with it. This reflection takes time, effort, and sweat. It takes fire, but with fire comes refinement. When our children reflect on purpose and knowledge, they find themselves in a world that would have them lost. By finding themselves and understanding the world they find themselves in, they can determine what to do next. That is the last piece to the puzzle of a reading exercise.
Students need to be empowered to act. Purpose, content, knowledge, and understanding, through reflection, will provide the impetus to act. Action does two things for young people. It empowers them to know that they can make a difference. That’s powerful enough, but the second is more powerful than the first. Action propels students to repeat the process, but for themselves, and on their own: define purpose, choose the content, reflect on it, and act. This is why the revolution will be literate.
Because literacy is more than just knowing how to read. Literacy is knowing how to resist.
To resist is the purpose.
If resistance is the purpose for our students, and it must be, then reading assignments can’t continue as business as usual… neither can your teaching.
