What windows?

I appreciate the chance to reflect on the question of which texts to assign, in the spirit of Clare Vaye Watkins in her amazing essay from before the #MeToo movement, “On Pandering.” She writes, “Let us embrace a do-it-yourself canon.”

When I was in high school, Toni Morrison’s Sula and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine expanded my own personal canon (windows for me!). I still love those books. And if I had to choose right at this moment what to teach seniors in high school, maybe I’d include those authors. (But I’m also feeling very open to and excited about considering new options!) I’d definitely include poetry—a big, glorious mix of poetry from all kinds of writers, which I’m counting as one book in response to this question: Ross Gay and Marie Howe and Solmaz Sharif and Danez Smith and Leila Chatti and other wonderful poets in a homemade anthology of sorts. I love that poetry can breathe such life into a short span of time, and give a class the latitude to explore so many moments and writers and voices, so many opportunities for students to see themselves in the writing (mirrors!) and to see others.

The #MeToo movement, and any movement that lays out long and tiring realities plainly, also gives us the opportunity to reimagine what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, including the canon. I feel a pretty deep grief about the very premise of all this: That so many people in so many positions of power or fame have done so many wrong things to others (that we have to consider their legacies and wonder if we should even still be in relationship with what they’ve made). That in itself is just worth a pause: the avalanche of this, all the harm and violence it’s uncovered as the rock beneath us. My heart goes out to those who have been hurt, and continue to be.

In terms of cancel culture in general, I’ve been thinking a lot about restorative justice. I took victim-offender mediation training and worked in conflict resolution for a while, which offered holistic, structured methods for bringing offenders to justice and following the lead of those who were harmed, often toward healing. I don’t know how that kind of transformative work reconciles with cancel culture, except that if someone continues to harm others and won’t be called in to account, to change, then they must be stopped.

To extend these thoughts about cancel culture generally to teaching students (since that's my goal), I very much resonated with the clip from Ayishat Akanbi’s "The Problem with Cancel Culture," in which she asserts that people can change, that it’s “part of the beauty of living” that we grow and learn and evolve our perspectives and ideas. That we’re human means we make mistakes. And while I would have no tolerance for certain sentiments, or any threats, and while I don’t want my students to be able to freely espouse racist ideas or sexist ideas, I do wonder where and how they’d learn otherwise. It's tricky. Akanbi says she’s “much more interested in the root causes as opposed to the symptoms” and I tend to agree. Particular upbringings and circumstances teach us until other experiences and people do. How will teachers facilitate the perspective growth of those students while keeping classrooms healthy for everyone? How will we create the windows, a la Rudine Sims Bishop, and the necessary reflection and grappling in the classroom that Don Vu extends in “How to Get the Most Out of a Diverse Classroom Library.”  I appreciated the second step Vu makes, not only calling for texts exploring diverse experiences, but also a rigorous scaffolding of introspection and contextualization.

What does a text written by someone who is known to be an abuser represent? A window? I’d rather look through into someone else’s life than an abuser’s. Maybe that’s too neat. In Emma Goldberg’s review of responses to this question, “Do Works by Men Implicated by #MeToo Belong in the Classroom?” I was most excited by Emily Gowen’s approach to assign a short piece (that students didn’t have to buy) by Junot Diaz and ask the students if it was appropriate for her to assign in light of the accusations and his responses. She opened this same question for her learners to grapple with alongside her, to use the question itself as a door into complex tensions and perspectives, into a part of the world we desperately need to be present to. (Would I do that in a high school classroom? TBD...)