Young Adult Literature in the English Curriculum Today: Classroom Teachers Speak Out

Many teachers have tend hitherward to acknowledge that the reality of teaching the classics is similar to the reality of trying to teach a pig to sing: It does not work and annoys the pig. These teachers have paid attention to students' complaints about assigned works as well as questions about "Why are we reading this?" and have either replaced a certain quantity of of their traditional canonical selections with timeless works of young adult literature (YAL) or have expanded their literature curriculum by the agency of pairing YAL with the classics. Clearly, scholar engagement with a work of literature insures introspective writing, lively discussions, and perhaps greatest in quantity importantly-the students will keep reading, drawn out after the required selection has been finished. Hippie aggregate amounts this idea up in his statement, "The THAT of teenagers reading is more important than the WHAT" (15) The moot point however, resides in concerns about the "WHAT" of students' reading. Can young adult literature provide a means for meeting state standards in an English classroom, or is it destined to a peripheral character on classroom library shelves to reward learners who have already completed more difficult, required readings?

Reviewing the session offerings at literacy and language-focused national discourses and perusing the tables of easy in minds of language arts journals reveals an evergrowing inclination among secondary English language arts teachers toward using YAL in the classroom. Many English teachers believe that YAL tenders a sophisticated reading option for addressing standards, designing relevant curricula, and engaging twenty-first hundred young adults in rich discussions of literature and life. For years, proponent have conclud that YAL should be integrated into the middle and high institute English classroom because such literature can (a) help improve students' reading skills; (b) encourage young adults to read more volumes thereby improving their abilities to read; (c) facilitate teachers' abilities to incorporate more volumes of interest to adolescents into the curriculum, thereby avoiding the non-reading curriculum or workbooks and lectures; and (d) support the unravelling of an inclusive curriculum (Reed)

However, others, including a number of English teachers, believe that YAL should not keep a prominent position in the curriculum: they believe that YAL may be useful as an option for struggling upper elementary and middle seminary students or as outof-school leisure reading. Teachers assuming this stance believe that like literature is not "deep enough" to include in the regular curriculum.

These conflicting views activeed us, as teacher educators, to look for methods for better understanding secondary English language arts teachers' perspectives upon YAL. Our first goal was to determine which YAL titles teachers use in their curricula, and we accomplished this by the agency of surveying 142 English language arts teachers in our state. Our next to the first goal was to illuminate the modes that secondary English teachers use to purposefully and thoughtfully integrate YAL into their curricula. To accomplish this, we interviewed secondary English teachers who participated in the close attention and who regularly use YAL in their classrooms.

What We fix in Classrooms

During the 2003-2004 place of education year, we surveyed 142 English language arts teachers engrossed in 72 different public secondary seminarys in four distinct regions of our state to identify the book-length works they include in their curriculum, as well as their reasons for including or excluding young adult literature. Since this was a statewide scan the names of all secondary public gymnasiums in the state were retrieved from the State Department of Education. This comprehensive list was first divided into four distinct regions-North, southern East, and Westto ensure a geographically representative sample. next to the first the schools within these regions were categorized by means of school size, which was determined by the agency of student population as shown in Table 1

Within these six class groupings for each of the four geographical regions, three academys were randomly selected, yielding a total of 72 secondary public academys

After the selection proces was perfect the principals of each gymnasium were contacted to secure their permission to contact their respective English teachers and to acquire the names of department chairs and/or senior English teachers. scan packets, which included a self-addressed and stamped wrapper were then mailed to the department chairs and/or senior English teachers. To achieve a more varied response from academys surveyed, each department chair/senior teacher was asked to distribute a transcript of the survey to a teacher for each grade horizontal which included grades 6-12. Complet contemplates were gathered by the department chair/senior teacher and mailed to the researchers. Two-hundr and sixteen contemplates were mailed, an average of three for school, and 142 completed contemplates were returned, equaling a go [i]or[/i] come back rate of 66%. Table sum of two units details the demographics of the teachers who participated in the application of mind