From the Journals :: Personal Growth

tomliamlynch — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 20:27:42 +0000

In the recent issue of English Journal, Viv Ellis writes about why teaching toward understanding sexual identity is important in English education. He tells a powerful story of a student of his who was cruelly beaten to death, having been labeled gay. Ellis pinpoints his student’s death as a turning point in his teaching English and sexual identity. It’s a brief piece with a readable balance of the scholarly, the personal, and the pedagogical.

Especially compelling for me was not only Ellis’ astuteness and candor, but also the way he justifies teaching literature at all. He writes, “Personal growth–in terms of conceptual development, criticality, imagination, socialibility, empathy, morality, and ethics–may be presently an unfashionable phrase but it presists as an ideal for the institution of schooling, and English has an important role to play in the pursuit of this goal.”

In a time when the humanities are losing funding and support, and some teachers are being paid more because of the subject they teach (math and science teachers in Georgia are slated to start out at 5th year teaching pay), I find Ellis’ matter-of-fact defense for teaching literature a breath of fresh air that is currently all too rare.

Tom Liam Lynch :: New Literacies, New Literatures » gender

From the Journals :: Personal Growth