Project Inclusion, the English department’s concerted effort to incorporate more diverse literature in their curriculum, has been in motion since June of 2020, Principal Francis Rojas said in a Zoom interview. Eight titles have been approved, and four are ready to be taught this semester, Rojas continued.
The English department has always assessed its literature and looked for areas that can be improved, English department Co-Lead Ginger Roy said in a Google Meet interview. However, it was this past summer’s social injustices that catalyzed Project Inclusion, she added.
“There have been so many events in the news, in our world, in our school that are all about equity,” Roy said. “[We are] trying to take a hard look at places where we’re not diverse and trying to change that. We met with the principal and assistant principal over the summer and presented an idea that we wanted to try to add literature to our curriculum that would reflect our student population better, that would add diversity to our curriculum, that would help students to better relate to the literature they studied.”
According to English department Co-Lead Heidi Shannahan, anyone in the English department can propose a title to be added. Then, the whole department is encouraged to read the novel and vote on whether or not to officially add it to the list, Shannahan said in a Google Meet interview.
Roy outlined the process in greater detail. “Our English department has a process of approving new novels that has been approved by the district Curriculum Policy Council. We came up with a list that we’ve just gathered from different sources: the internet, college-suggested readings by people of color, by non-white authors that represent many underrepresented groups. We’re going through [the list], and teachers are volunteering to read a book, to recommend it to the department, to talk about it with the department, to go through this process. It’s a voting process, and it’s also a points process—the book gets points for various things like being on the AP-suggested reading list or college-suggested reading list or has won awards.”
Approving novels takes time as the department has to wait a month for teachers to preview the books and vote, Roy said. Then, the novels are taken to the administration where the department gets the funds to buy them, she added. So far, a total of eight novels have been approved and four have been purchased, Roy said.
“One title that we’re adding is ‘The Alchemist’ [for] seniors,” Roy said. “We’re adding, ‘Just Mercy’ for freshmen. It’s an autobiography about a man who sort of lived the ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ experience. We’re adding ‘The Time of the Butterflies.’ It’s about sisters in the Dominican Republic, who were martyrs to fight tyranny there. ‘The House of the Spirits,’ which is for seniors, and ‘Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen’ for freshmen. ‘Patron Saints of Nothing,’ which is by a Filipino author, for freshmen, ‘Homegoing’ for sophomores, and ‘The Plague of Doves’ for seniors.”
Project Inclusion is not an overhaul of the existing English curriculum, Roy said. Classics will still be available, but teachers will have more novels to choose from, she added.
“We’re not taking anything off the list,” Roy said. “We’re just trying to add to the choices to give teachers and students a chance to experience more diverse literature.”
Much of traditional English curriculum consists of dead white men, English teacher Brett Webber said in a Zoom interview. According to Webber, he has curated a diverse curriculum for his classes, but classics such as Shakespeare cannot be completely eradicated.
“I don’t want a student of mine to get to college and read Shakespeare for the first time,” Webber said. “When they get to college and if they take an English class, they’re probably going to study Shakespeare. I don’t want them to go, ‘What the hell? MHS never read me Shakespeare?’ In order for us to do our job, we actually have to create that foundation of English literature. So, what do we leave out if we want to add?”
Teaching a novel for the first time requires a lot of preparation, Shannahan said. The author’s background, the historical context of the novel, and all of the figurative language included in the novel must be thoroughly researched, Shannahan explained. This process is often time-consuming, but MHS English teachers are not alone in all of it, she said.
“One really great thing about our department is that we truly are collaborative workers,” Shannahan said. “We share materials, we share ideas, we help write curriculum, we’ll share our lesson plans. The experience for the student becomes more rich because you have all these teachers who are working on this, and that’s a real positive aspect of our department.”
The best way to learn something is to teach it, Webber said. If a teacher is prepared to teach something they do not know very well and accept that they might not do the best job, they can teach a book immediately, he explained.
“I’m an adventurous teacher. I also know that I am not the best teacher; I’m quite prepared to accept that I will never be the best teacher. But I love what I teach, and I love ‘The Kite Runner,’” Webber said. “I read the book 15 years ago, but I bought some [teaching] materials from England, where it has been taught at the highest level at high school, sort of [like] AP level. I was using [the material], literally, reading what am I teaching in the next chapter, today, and teaching it tomorrow. So my first year of teaching, and I probably didn’t teach it very well, [but] my kids loved the book, absolutely loved it.”
One of the beauties of working at MHS is the diversity, Shannahan said. With that in mind, it became clear that there was a lot to be gained by teaching more relevant and diverse novels, she said.
“When you read a book that is not necessarily about your culture, or your country, or your religion, you’re just exposed to that much more,” Shannahan said. “You have an understanding and you can look around our school and identify and relate to other kids in a different way. It just makes our world, which sometimes seems really small, that much bigger.
