Can educators continue to teach troubling but worthwhile texts?
Our current 'culture wars' have reshaped the politics of secondary literature instruction. Due to a variety of challenges from both the left and the right-to language or subject matter, to potentially triggering content, or to authors who have been canceled-school reading lists are rapidly shrinking. For many teachers, choosing which books to include in their curriculum has become an agonizing task with political, professional, and ethical dimensions.
In Literature and the New Culture Wars, Deborah Appleman calls for a reacknowledgment of the intellectual and affective work that literature can do, and offers ways to continue to teach troubling texts without doing harm. Rather than banishing challenged texts from our classrooms, she writes, we should be confronting and teaching the controversies they invoke. Her book is a timely and eloquent argument for a reasoned approach to determining what literature still deserves to be read and taught and discussed.
Incarcerated bodies, liberated minds: a narrative of literacy education behind bars.
Words No Bars Can Hold provides a rare glimpse into literacy learning under the most dehumanizing conditions. Deborah Appleman chronicles her work teaching college-level classes at a high-security prison for men, most of whom are serving life sentences. Through narrative, poetry, memoir, and fiction, the students in Appleman's classes attempt to write themselves back into a society that has erased their lived histories.
The students' work, through which they probe and develop their identities as readers and writers, illuminates the transformative power of literacy. Appleman argues for the importance of educating the incarcerated, and explores ways to interrupt the increasingly common journey from urban schools to our nation's prisons. From the sobering endpoint of what scholars have called the 'school to prison pipeline,' she draws insight from the narratives and experiences of those who have traveled it.
