On several occasions throughout Textual Power, Scholes makes remarks about the challenges of designing an English curriculum. His claim that most resonates with me is that “school is the one place where our major concern is to study what we don’t know, to confront Otherness rather than to ignore it or convert it into a simulacrum of ourselves” (59).

I would like to highlight this passage from Scholes’ book and mail it to my Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Hatrick. It seems that recently Hatrick’s goal has been to pretend that Otherness doesn’t exist, to hide Otherness, to keep it under lock and key. I am speaking of his recent decision to ban And Tango Makes Three, a children’s book based on the story of two male penguins from the NYC zoo who “adopt” an unhatched egg. Though the theme of the story is the importance of family, unarguably it contains a family with two daddies, which, translated into the human world, would be a family with homosexual parents. Because one parent thought the “themes” of the book “too mature” for elementary students, ultimately it was taken off the shelves of all county schools. However, the resulting backlash toward our Superintendent forced him to reverse his decision in all schools except for the one with the complaining parent.

Though I whole-heartedly disagree with Dr. Hatrick’s banning of the book, I can recognize that he, as someone with power over texts, is often faced with difficult, delicate decisions. Those classroom teachers fortunate enough not to have their reading lists dictated to them must similarly decide: What texts should I teach? Should I stick with the classics or move beyond the traditional canon? What texts can simultaneously engage my students and teach them to think critically? For my first two years teaching, a primary consideration was often “For which books do I already have teaching materials?” I was so overwhelmed just keeping up with the day-to-day lessons, I never paused to consider the “otherness” of a text. Other teachers shared their plans with me, so for the most part, I taught what they taught.

Now, as I am considering a position for a lead English teacher, a position that would allow me to develop an entirely new curriculum, ultimately for grades 6-12, the passage about including and examining Otherness speaks forcefully to me. I would be shifting from an overcrowded, predominately wealthy, Anglo rural suburbia HS anchored in tradition to a small, fledgling, inner-city, public charter middle school with rich socio-economic and ethnic diversity. The job change itself would be an experiment in Otherness. But it raises some interesting questions for me. At my current school, many of the students are sheltered, naïve, unexposed to elements of Otherness. Their friends, their classmates, even their teachers, are very similar to them. This year in particular, I’ve noticed that this homogeneity lends itself to judgmental, self-righteous, and often ignorant attitudes toward Others. In my classroom, we’ve had discussions about people, beliefs, texts that are somehow different from my students, and I’ve struggled with trying to expand some of their narrow views. I wonder how the prior knowledge piece of Otherness will have affected the belief systems and attitudes of the students at the DC school. I’m wondering if, as important as prior knowledge is to understanding difficult texts, it is just as important in navigating “difficult” belief systems (difficult in that they are different from our own). My hypothesis is that an immersion in Otherness opens the mind to even more Otherness.

Now I just have to figure out What to Teach…

–Karen