Literature As a Path to Social Justice

Stories are a gift. By reading a story, we are able to step into a new world, a world that is safe for us to question the rules, to accept or to dismiss a character, a government or even an entire premise. Then, when we put the book down, we wake to our own world. A story can encourage readers to look at their own society with a new paradigm. As teachers during the time of a global pandemic and a cultural uprising chanting “Black Lives Matter”, we should reflect on our country’s story and the stories we share with our students. We must rise to meet this moment. We have the ability to give to students art forms that will help them understand where their ideas come from and push their thinking beyond what they have been taught in the past. It is time for teachers to offer new gifts to their students.

In her award winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin writes in the preface, “In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while read, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find - if it is a good novel - that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little …” (xix). By helping students become immersed in “good novels” - ones that prompt broad questions about the world and how we choose to live in it - we can help students see the conflicts around gender, race, sexuality, climate change and more.

Le Guin admits fiction is capable of many things but she is clear that while science fiction is often set in the future, it is not a prediction of what’s to come in our own world. “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive … Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what to see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world” (xvi-i). Many teachers are desperate to find ways we can help our students understand the world they are living in as well as understand the cultures and perspectives of others. We can do this by enriching and diversifying the texts we teach in our nation’s classrooms. The classic novels need not be discarded, but can be enhanced and discussed deeper alongside stories that give voice to those who have often been silenced. If To Kill A Mockingbird is the only novel we read with students that includes people of color, we are sharing stories of white saviors and a potential belief that racism lived and died long ago, but if we read it alongside current events articles or in conjunction with books like Stamped by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi, students will have a richer and fuller understanding, not only of the text but also of their world. We know that educational systems have been used in America to promote racist ideas, so then why can't the inverse be true? As teachers, we have the ability - and the obligation - to spread anti-racist ideas.

As Rudine Sims Bishop wrote, literature offers the reader mirrors, windows and sliding glass doors. It allows readers to see their world reflected back at them. It allows them to peer into worlds that would have otherwise been beyond their comprehension, and it gives readers the chance to open a door and step into the shoes of someone who lives a life quite different from their own. In “Citizen, An American Lyric”, author Claudia Rankin writes about many different encounters she and her black female friends have had. There is one scene when a white man accidentally knocks over a young black boy on the subway and does not stop to ask if he is ok. "... you want the child pushed to the ground to be seen, to be helped to his feet, to be brushed off by the person that did not see him, has never seen him, has perhaps never seen anyone who is not a reflection of himself" (17).Through reading and discussing a variety of books, students will be able to more fully see others who are not just reflections of themselves. There are so many stories told by people of color, by women, by members of the LGBTQ community but often those stories are not shared within the classroom. Let’s fill our shelves and read them together.

But there are even stories that have been intentionally left out of history. How do we share those? In The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, the protagonist, Offred, offers the perspective of a silenced member of the society. “We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print… We lived in the gaps between the stories” (57). It is through reading a novel like this that we can ask our students to think about the stories we are not told in history classes and that we have not read together. We should ask our students: who are the Offred’s of today’s society, living in the “gaps” while those more prosperous and privileged share their stories unencumbered?

In the preface to the most recent release of A Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood wrote that authors, literature, and even Hollywood respond to the political times in an attempt to help readers and viewers discover some truth about their society. She said she wrote the novel as a mirror to reflect some of our darker historical times and then wove them together to create one disturbing era. “So many different strands fed into ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ — group executions, sumptuary laws, book burnings, the Lebensborn program of the SS and the child-stealing of the Argentine generals, the history of slavery, the history of American polygamy . . . the list is long.” By creating rules to a society gone wrong, writers teach readers truths about their own world, with the help of skilled teachers who pose the right questions and prompt an honest and meaningful discussion, students can learn these lessons as well.

Because if you are a teacher like me, I keep asking myself, how did we get here? Was it a failure of our educational system? Why have we mistreated others and our Earth the way we have? In the science fiction novel Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson gives us characters that begin to help us understand how world building can go wrong. Robinson creates characters like Arkady, who call for a systematic change, a complete overhaul of society when populating a new planet. While this may be more than teachers can tackle, we do have in our classrooms the next generation. The mending of a broken system requires a different way of thinking, starting with the literature we teach. What happens when we exchange the word scientist for teacher in this scene when Arkady calls for a rethinking of how to live. Ironically, it is easy to replace and have it apply to America in 2020: “To be twenty first (teachers) … but at the same time living within nineteenth-century social systems, based on seventeenth-century ideologies. It’s absurd. It’s crazy” (89). It’s time to offer our white students stories written by people who don’t look like them, who don’t think like them. It’s time to share new ideas and new stories with our students of color where they can see themselves and their family members reflected on the page. We must also go beyond the traditional teaching methods. The “nineteenth-century social system” has encouraged teachers to lecture at students. Gifting the right stories can only help if we try new teaching techniques, like running Socratic discussions that encourage creativity and curiosity.

I have created this site as a resource to encourage teachers to think about the sharing of stories as a gift. I am not an expert on this by any means, but I am a teacher who is devoted to helping students understand their world. Just reading new books alongside some of the canon is not enough. Students need teachers to be their guide. This is not just a list of book recommendations. The essential questions and quotes are meant to act as a way to encourage discussion around the text. It is up to the educator to be a facilitator and help students see that a science fiction and dystopian is not just an “escape read” but often an important commentary on our own world. By posing questions, we can help students begin to connect those important dots and begin to see how stories can truly shape what we believe and how we act. By using these and other texts and then asking students to compare it to a recent news article or a poem, we can help students put the novel into a larger context. Discussions could also include asking students to determine how literary worlds interact with and influence our own. These discussions can help students understand that reading and learning allows you to become more knowledgeable while at the same time discovering all you still have to learn.

In an article about Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments Elizabeth Sulis Kim tells us, “... We are reminded that… through conversations and storytelling, we can gain empathy, learn and unlearn.” Certain fiction can lead to important conversations around race, gender, sexuality, society and economic disparities. The roots of empathy can grow in these readings and discussions and can, in turn, change the future. Stories are the best gift can we give our children.

Thank you,

Elizabeth Szeliga

7/8 Humanities teacher

Lincoln Akerman School