Literature textbooks have been used in English classes, particularly in underresourced schools, since the late 1800s. Since then, literature textbooks have been the de facto literary studies curriculum for most high school students. Practitioners and researchers in the field of literary studies at the secondary level do not have an account of how the questions central to literary studies have been addressed by the publishers of high school literature textbooks since the 1960s. I selected six widely adopted tenth-grade literature textbooks and their accompanying teacher’s editions from three generations (the 1960s, 1990s, and 2020s) and analyzed the texts and authors, organization, and instructional apparatus in the student editions and the teaching materials in the teacher’s editions. I used the data to identify the types of literary texts, author characteristics, knowledge emphasized by textbook publishers, and the cognitive, social, and interpretive abilities they favored. I then compared these findings across the three generations.
Three characteristics of literary study have remained stable from the 1960s to the 2020s. First, the knowledge privileged by textbooks—understanding literary terms and enlarging vocabulary—has remained constant. Second, students spent more time in class on solitary activities, such as keeping logs and reading texts, than on group activities. Most textbooks in the study emphasized a product-oriented approach to interpretation and favored a single, authoritative answer to questions..
Starting in the 21st century, literature textbooks have transformed from print-only editions to digital-only and hybrid print and digital editions, raising concerns about the cognitive and economic impact of screen reading. Audio, visual, and multi-media texts have become the focus of study on equal footing with textual genres, signaling the emergence of digital literacy, a form of literacy that has become necessary because of social, economic, cultural, and technological changes in the early 21st century.
Digital editions allowed teachers and administrators to track data online from students’ assignments and assessments, suggesting that high school literature classes have become a site of instrumentarian power. 21st-century instructional apparatus introduced a two-step procedure for reading and interpreting texts. The first step emphasized the surface meaning of the text with comprehension activities. The second step instructed students to “close read the text" (Morrell et al., 2022a, p. 476). Both steps privilege an efferent reading of all genres while impeding students’ ability to have an aesthetic experience of literary texts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/bxys-x248 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Fox, Elizabeth |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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