“The Wrong Things About Literature” Invisibility and African American Texts

Abstract

Gray, E. S. (2009). The Importance of Visibility: Students’ and Teachers’ Criteria for Selecting African American Literature. The Reading Teacher, 62(6), 472–481.

Notes

1 Although Native American groups are also overwhelmingly under‐ and/or misrepresented in school curricula, Tom Horne’s bill allowed provisions for the continued study of Native groups, in keeping with federal mandates.

2 The discussion journals seemed to be the best method for capturing the students’ actual “selection criteria.” From this data source, consisting of prompted entries designed to elicit “aesthetic” (defined as “personal”) responses, Gray gathered that the students’ primary reason for selecting a text was “connection to the main character,” followed by a “realistic” storyline and an appealing “book cover” (p. 476). Because the ability to connect with characters is often not realized until one commences reading (and not during the “selection” process), it seems that a more appropriate focus for this study would have been the reasons certain texts appealed more to the students than other texts. The book ballots seemed explicitly directed at this question, asking students to rank texts on a scale of 1 to 4 and to state the degree to which they thought the books were “good” (p. 475). Similarly, the book battles required students to “defend” their choices of most “intriguing” books, rather than debate the reasons they chose these books in the first place (p. 475).

3 By choosing to look solely at the children’s responses to African American texts, Gray missed an opportunity to provide a more in‐depth analysis of the ways in which her student participants made book selections. By comparing students’ rationales for choosing non–African American literature, in conjunction with their responses to such texts, she may have developed a stronger argument for the importance of racial “visibility.” Without a more thorough examination of children’s book selection processes, these findings—though important—are limited in some ways to the researcher’s presumption about Black students’ reading preferences and reasons for identifying with the texts. In other words, this study does not say anything about the extent to which the students were (un)able to “see themselves” in non–African American texts. It simply exemplifies the ways in which they selected/connected with the texts the researcher identified as “[reflecting] them and their families” (p. 472).

4 With teachers, Gray remained focused on selection of African American texts. However, her analysis glossed over the reasons teachers gave for choosing the texts they used in their classrooms. As an example, she refers to one teacher’s “February” basket that essentially segregated all African American books in the classroom library. While this demonstrates that the teacher did not incorporate African American literature into the curriculum on a regular basis, it does not explain why she selected those particular books for her students. Nor does it sufficiently explain why she did not select African American texts for use during the rest of the school year.

5 Students defined “realistic” fiction as those stories with “plots that could only happen in the real world” (p. 477). They were much less inclined to pick up texts with fantasy or fairy‐tale elements.

6 For a similar firsthand teacher account, see Dudley‐Marling (2005).

7 This text also features a child protagonist, which may partially explain the students’ ability to connect with him. Unlike Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose lives are often introduced to children in relation to their adult accomplishments, Bud is introduced as a “boy on the run” (Curtis, 1999) and his story is told from the first‐person point of view as he maneuvers around the adults who have authority over him. Gray does not consider the protagonist’s age in her analysis of student and teacher selections of African American texts, however.

8 W. E. B. DuBois, for example, founded a magazine designed for “the children of the sun” in 1920. This text was intended to make “‘colored children realize that being ‘colored’ is a normal beautiful thing'” (quoted in Bishop, 2003, p. 26). This publication was one of the first responses to literary depictions that mocked Black characters for the amusement of White audiences.

9 Keene and Zimmerman (1997) describe three different ways by which students comprehend text—by making “text‐to‐self,”“text‐to‐text,” and “text‐to‐world” connections. Text‐to‐self connections occur when readers personally apply what they are reading to their own lives by connecting to familiar experiences or events in the story. Rosenblatt’s “aesthetic reading” is frequently misunderstood as a text‐to‐self connection when it is, more accurately put, the ability to “live through” a story (Rosenblatt, 1995, p. xxvii).The phrases aesthetic stance, aesthetic reading, and aesthetic approach can be used interchangeably to describe this element of Rosenblatt’s “transaction” theory. The transaction is the act that occurs between a reader and a given text to arrive at a particular meaning.

10 In my own dissertation work, which examined the ways in which boys of color made connections with texts, students had to determine on their own what it meant to “relate” or “connect” to a literary character/figure or experience. I found that students formed two types of connection, which I have termed “empathetic” (based on a familiar or literal personal connection) and “sympathetic” (based on an unfamiliar, yet relatable, connection). In other words, students either “saw themselves” in the material because they had lived through similar experiences, or they did not “see themselves” in the text but could imagine having experiences similar to those depicted in the text.

11 Gray does not consider the fact that “authenticity” in multicultural children’s literature is a debate in and of itself, with scholars and educators often disagreeing as to what constitutes a genuine and representative depiction of a given group (Fox & Short, 2003). She also states, “I was astonished that the four African American teachers had few books in their classrooms that would fit this study’s definition of African American literature. As a Caucasian teacher, this finding lessened some of the guilt I felt for not providing my students with quality African American literature” (p. 479). This statement essentializes her African American colleagues, presuming that because they are Black, they will automatically know what books to include to better represent the students.