Professor Janet Alsup recently published A Case for Teaching Literature in the Secondary School.
Research Shows Literature Matters by Kathy Mayer Pondering three seemingly unrelated areas—her childhood, bullying and education standards—, Janet Alsup, professor of English education, dug deeper, made connections and proclaimed: Literature matters. The first was an area she knew—her summers reading on the porch of her Missouri childhood home surpassed fun. “Reading changed me. It helped me learn and understand things about myself,” she says.
Another she observed—increased school bullying and too little expression of empathy for others.
curtailing its study deliver a less-thanoptimum education?
“I thought about everything going on—bullying, school shootings, racism, increased crime, the inability to have conversations on topics we disagree on in a calm and lucid manner,” she says. “People are not taking the time to understand others unlike themselves or to consider the perspectives of others.”
Those questions became her research, and her findings fueled her 2015 book, A Case for Teaching Literature in the Secondary School: Why Reading Fiction Matters in an Age of Scientific Objectivity and Standardization.
Through literature, she contends, readers are “transported to another world, take on at least temporarily another character and place, and live vicariously for a short time. That changes how people empathize.” Perhaps most disturbing, her third focus was new school standards bumping literature aside for informational texts. In recent years, Alsup says, “I started hearing about teachers looking for help so they could be allowed to teach literature. There is the perception that humanities study is less important than STEM”—science, technology, engineering and math.
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Could literature be a path to selfgrowth and caring for others? Does
Book Presents Case for Teaching Literature
She presents her 153-page book in three parts: What literature can do, challenges to literary study, and reviving the secondary school literary experience. It also includes in-thetrenches teachers’ experiences and some of their lesson plans, to illustrate her message.
Reading and responding to literature is about thinking, feeling, considering, guessing, predicting, wondering and imagining. Janet Alsup Professor English Education