Linking the 'Leaky Edges' of the Outside with the Individual Inside

To reach urban high school students, incorporating art and drama can be an effective strategy for teaching literature.

How might we teach in and through the leaky edges of the 'social outside' of the curriculum, and the 'individual inside' of the psyche?

-Elizabeth Ellsworth (1997, 116)

Curriculum exists in our embodied relationships.

-Dennis j. Sumara and Brent Davis (1998, 85)

I used to tell my friends that I was the best salesperson in the world. If I could sell reading and writing to a group of adolescents five times a day, five days a week, then I could sell just about anything. Like most effective salespeople, I had to know my audience to develop a good rapport, which meant that I had to understand and use their many cultural references. In short, I had to meet them where they were "at," and often that meant watching the television shows they liked, surfing the Internet, and listening to "their music."

Throughout my seven years of teaching in urban schools, I found that the most effective ways to teach difficult literary texts was to refer to students' out-of-school activities. In short, I had to connect the "leaky edges of the 'social outside'" with the "individual inside" to create a curriculum of "embodied relationships." This article discusses the ways I taught Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1 989), the play Twelve Angry Men (1 983) by Reginald Rose, The House of Mirth (1 964) by Edith Wharton, Fences (1 986) by August Wilson, and Siddhartha (1 999) by Herman Hesse to various groups of low-achieving secondary students in an urban high school in a large northeastern city.

On My Way to Canterbury

In her seminal work The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, Louise Rosenblatt (1 978, 276) argued, 'The benefits of literature can emerge only from creative activity on the part of the reader himself." Rosenblatt highlighted the interaction that occurs between the reader and the text to generate meaning. In my view, the teacher's role is to provide a space for students to interact with a variety of texts and to make connections among those texts.

This is how I approached teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to a group of ninth graders in an inner-city high school. This particular text complimented the students' work in their history class; thus, as students learned about chivalry, King Alfred, and the church, they also read the outrageous stories of the commoners. Chaucer's comical, yet serious tales of a group of pilgrims on their way to Canterbury satirizes English society during the Middle Ages. Written between 1387 and 1400, Chaucer's work brought to life the many contradictions within English society at a time when the church was experiencing significant upheaval.

The Canterbury Tales is not typically on state reading lists for the ninth grade. However, during my first year as a teacher in New York City, the Global History teacher and I collaborated to design a curriculum that would reinforce information students learned in our classes and help prepare them to do well on their state global history examination. Collaborating with the Global History teacher was effective because we could discuss how the history of a particular era influenced the literature and vice versa. Pedagogically, it made sense to combine the content in both the history and the English classes to ensure that students understood the content and context of the information acquired in both courses.

Bridging the Culture

My primary concern as a literature teacher was not whether the students would memorize and comprehend the history, but how to make this foreign and long ago time period relevant and important to the lives of my students. I wanted students to have a similar experience as the pilgrims in Chaucer's tales so that they could bridge the distance between the text, the language, the time period, and their own lives. By doing so, students would be able to comprehend the text and empathize with the characters; students, thereby, could have the opportunity to "be" the book (Wilhelm 1997).

To that end, I searched for an interesting and interactive way to describe and bring the Middle Ages to life. For me, the themes of bravery, honor, and love capture much of the literature of that time period. To teach The Canterbury Tales, I needed to find a current cultural reference that showed individuals telling outrageous, ironic stories with a moral.

I realized that Chaucer's stories resemble any number of talk shows that are on television every day. The content and style of many contemporary talk shows play on the element of surprise, expose chicanery, and revel in the dramatic. One might claim that many talk shows peel around the "leaky edges" of the "outside" of society in a similar manner as Chaucer's tales; hence, the activity was called the Ava James Show, and the segment was "You'll Never Guess What Happened on My Way to Canterbury." The show was named after a student, who served as the host.