Things (Don’t Quite) Fall Apart: Exploring the Diversity Insertion in the Secondary ELA Canon

ABSTRACT

This article presents the results of five open-ended surveys administered to two Advanced Placement classes in a primarily White high school in upstate New York. Surveys sought to explore how students make sense of the course diversity selection, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which was inserted into a primarily White textual canon. Responses were coded and analysed via a Critical Discourse Analysis methodology. Analysis revealed that while many students replicated the discursive patterns of White innocence, characterised by an obliviousness to their complicity in White supremacy, some students, often coming from marginalised social positions, registered more nuanced reactions to the power dynamics represented in the text. The study concludes that while diversity insertions like Things Fall Apart can be mechanisms that actually reinforce White supremacy due to a perceived social disconnect, modest insights can also be generated by students seeking to better understand the dynamics of contemporary social oppression.

KEYWORDS:

• English language arts canon
• curriculum diversity
• primarily white schools
• counter-discourse

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. All names are pseudonyms.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Geoff Bender

Geoff Bender is an Assistant Professor of English and English Education at the State University of New York (SUNY), College at Cortland. His research interests include the sociocultural analysis of curriculum, the politics of the professional development school, nineteenth-century American literary studies, and visual culture. His essays and articles can be found in such journals as English Teaching: Practice & Critique, Educational Considerations, Image & Text, and The Hawthorne Review. His first book, Photography’s Materialities: Transatlantic Photographic Practices over the Long Nineteenth Century, was published by Leuven University Press in 2021