Closing Thoughts

Now that class has unofficially ended and only my final course proposal is due, I have some closing thoughts to wrap up on this class, and this blog. I have a much different perspective on young adult literature than when I entered the class, for which I am glad. It's not the class I signed up for at all, but I think I have a new venue for getting my students to open up and explore themselves in ways I really think they need in high school. Many young adult books may not be schools for style in the way that the classics are, but they can open students emotionally and create meaningful discussion among young people. Much of my educational philosophy is about helping students find their own voices, and much of that comes from exploring different perspectives, which I want to fuel through literature and reading. I will always be a strong defender of the classics--you could never take the Shakespeare nerd out of my soul--but I see where young adult literature can fit into the modern high school classroom, and plan on using it where I can in my own future career.

Final Final Project

I've worked through all of my previous ideas for a final project for my Adolescent in American Literature course for which this entire blog was created, and wanted to share with you my imagined course proposal.

I am writing a syllabus and narrative proposal for a high school course exploring Gender and Sexuality in Young Adult literature. We'll be reading a group of texts that explore the entire range of gender and sexual identities and the issues these variations raise. As an entire class, we'll be reading:
The Heart Has Its Reasons-Michael Cart
This book would serve as our text, tracing LGBT issues in YA novels from the beginning of the genre in 1964 with The Outsiders all the way through modern texts. There are many, many novels mentioned and analyzed here, and the students can use these references for future reading guides.

My Most Excellent Year-Steve Kluger
I want to start with a positive portrayal of what it means to be gay today. There are a saddening and staggering number of heartbreaking stories about the LGBT communities out there, both fact and fiction, so I want to give my students a hopeful note with their first class novel. I have already written a review of this book on this blog, but in particular want to give students a quote from the main gay character's father: "As I tucked him in, I realized we'd never had the 'I'm gay' conversation. Has this generation made it superfluous? If only."

The Perks of Being A Wallflower-Stephen Chbosky
This is an extremely popular novel with young people, but it is one of those aforementioned heartbreaking stories. There are two secondary characters dealing with different stages of coming out in their high school, while the primary character and narrator is dealing with questioning his budding sexuality. This is a great chance to encourage students to delve into more complex definitions of sexuality, and the levels of acceptance that they meet.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic-Alison Bechdel
To get students experimenting with genre a bit, this is a graphic novel dealing with a young girl realizing she is a lesbian, while also finding out that her father was having homosexual affairs for most of her childhood only weeks before he is killed. There are classic literary references left and right in this book which students might need help understanding, plus the unusual genre will make this a tough enough read to really pull apart.

Kissing the Witch-Emma Donoghue
This is a book I discovered just while researching for this project and ended up really enjoying. All of the short stories in this book are retellings of classic fairy tales from a lesbian or feminist perspective, creating some radically different imaginings of familiar stories. I would love to pair this with a multimedia project involving the early music video for the Sara Bareilles song "Fairy Tale," a song which includes the lyrics, "Tall blonde lets out a cry of despair/Says 'Would have cut it myself if I knew men could climb hair/I'll have to find another tower somewhere and keep away from the windows.'"

Girl Goddess #9-Francesca Lia Block
There is one short story in particular I want students to read from this book, dealing with a teenager realizing one of her lesbian moms was once her father. Much of the short story deals with a teenager coping with having two moms, but at the closing, deals very positively with transsexual identity issues. This would be a happy and easy note to end full-class reads with.

Then the class will be participating in literature circles reading the work of Julie Ann Peters, a leading author for LGBT YA novels, including:
Luna
Grl2Grl
Between Mom and Jo
Far from Xanadu
Keeping You A Secret

The class would then end with a multimedia project, very open-ended, about what they think gender and/or sexuality mean. They would have to illustrate the continuum of one or both of those societal constructs as they see it in the modern world using some sort of creative format. I'm imagining a range of photos, videos, paintings, poems, short stories, and nonfiction papers for each student to explain these complicated concepts to the best of their ability.

This would be a tough push to get into a high school, but one I know I can explain and justify as really necessary to students' complete development into adulthood. These are issues they should be able to explore in the safety of a classroom where they can be challenged and questioned and feel free to change their minds.