Using ya in the classroom

John Kornfeld and Laurie Prothro
Envisioning Possibility: Schooling
and Student Agency in Children’s
and Young Adult Literature
This article provides a rationale for using literature in the classroom
to explore conceptions of curriculum and teaching. We discuss a
number of exemplars from children’s and young adult fiction, both
mainstream and less well known; offer a taxonomy for categorizing
the range of visions of curriculum and teaching in the literature;
and describe the responses of a group of middle school students to a
unit that examined schooling in literature. We argue that reading
literature which addresses student experiences in school can help
students make sense of those experiences and, more importantly,
open their minds to ideas about teaching and schooling that they
otherwise might never have considered.
KEY WORDS: critical pedagogy and children’s and YA literature; schooling in children’s
and YA literature; curriculum and children’s and YA literature.
Introduction
In the fifth Harry Potter book, Harry and his friends, profoundly dis-
satisfied with their Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, resolve to
take their schooling into their own hands. The curriculum for this
course, Hermione declares, should be ‘‘about preparing ourselves...for
what’s waiting out there. It’s about making sure we really can defend
ourselves...We’ve gone past the stage where we can just learn things
out of books. We need a teacher, a proper teacher who can show us
how to use the spells and correct us if we’re going wrong’’ (Rowling,
2003, pp. 325–326). In Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,
students grapple with the questions, For what should schools be
preparing their students? How should learning experiences be orga-
nized? Who should decide what will be taught? And what should be
the role of the teacher? In developing their own curriculum and
John Kornfeld is Profes-
sor and Director of
Graduate Studies in the
School of Education at
Sonoma State University.
His research in curricu-
lum, children’s litera-
ture, school/ university
collaboration, and the
politics of schooling has
been published in such
journals as Theory into
Practice, Social Educa-
tion, and Theory and
Research in Social Edu-
cation.
Laurie Prothro is a
school library consultant
and children’s librarian
in Sonoma County, Cali-
fornia. She specializes in
collection development
and young adult litera-
ture. Her most recent
publication with John
Kornfeld, entitled
‘‘Comedy, Conflict, and
Community: Home and
Family in Harry Potter,’’
appears in Elizabeth
Heilman’s Harry Pot-
ter’s World: Multidisci-
plinary Critical
Perspectives.
Rowling, Harry Potter
and the Order of the
Phoenix
Children’s Literature in Education, Vol. 36, No. 3, September 2005 (Ó 2005)
DOI: 10.1007/s10583-005-5971-2
217
0045-6713/05/0900-0217/0 Ó 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

choosing the teacher for what they call ‘‘Dumbledore’s Army,’’ they
come up with their own answers to these questions.
J.K. Rowling is but one of many children’s and young adult authors
whose books raise these kinds of questions while offering provocative
and compelling images of curriculum and teaching. Yet too often, such
images are all but ignored in schools themselves. In the classroom,
students generally are expected to adapt uncritically to the personality
and demands of the teacher in the room; rarely are they given the
opportunity to examine or to develop their own conceptions of the
curriculum, the teacher’s role, and their own positionality in their
formal education. In fact, addressing such issues should be a key
concern of curricula at all levels of schooling. The unprecedented
popularity of the Harry Potter books, and their ubiquity in schools,
provides the perfect stimulus for discussion in the classroom; it also
provides the perfect springboard for teachers and students to read and
analyze many other perspectives on curriculum and schooling that can
be found throughout children’s and young adult literature.
In this paper we present a rationale for using literature in the class-
room to explore conceptions of curriculum and teaching, and we
examine a number of exemplars from children’s and young adult fic-
tion—both mainstream and less well known—that provide a range of
visions of what is and what could be. Finally, we look at the responses
of a group of middle school students to these varied images. Most
young people in the United States spend much of their lives in schools,
thinking about school, or talking to one another about school; reading
literature, we found, can help them not only make sense of that
experience, but, even more importantly, open their minds to ideas
about teaching and schooling that they otherwise might never have
considered. Children’s and young adult literature can reveal possibili-
ties to readers by offering images of alternative educational experi-
ences, or a way out of unhappy or oppressive school situations, or
teachers who act as role models to young people facing the challenges
of living in an often unfair world while becoming well-informed,
contributing members of society. As Nilsen and Donelson write,
‘‘Books are one of the items that the community provides to young
people in the hope of helping them succeed in their journey into
adulthood’’ (Nilsen & Donelson, 1993, p. 3).
Schooling, Power Relations, and Literature
School, like children’s and young adult literature, should be a realm of
possibility—a place in which teachers and students together examine
their lived experience and envision ways to enhance their lives and
Nilsen and Donelson,
Literature for Today’s
Young Adults
218 Children’s Literature in Education

sense of efficacy in the world around them. But a description of an
‘‘ordinary’’ classroom usually evokes far less exciting imagery:
Learning is serious and life is hard. There is homework.... School [is] business: in
Beverly Cleary’s novel, Ramona the Brave (1975, p. 68), Beezus, Ramona’s sister
says of the teacher, ‘‘There wasn’t anything really wrong with [Mrs. Griggs], I
guess... she just wasn’t very exciting is all. She wasn’t mean or anything like that.
We just seemed to go along doing our work, and that was it.’’ But, yes, I believe
that there is, indeed, something wrong with Mrs. Griggs, something very wrong
with the system in which she worked. Education ought not to be just ‘‘going
along doing our work, and that was it.’’ Education should not, in fact, be so...well,
so mundane. (Block, 1997, p. 17)
While mundane is far from desirable, it is not uncommon to encounter
teachers even more unpleasant than Mrs. Griggs: those wary of
unconventionality, like Anastasia Krupnik’s teacher (Lowry, 1979)
who graded her poem an F because it did not rhyme; or obsessed with
control, like Mr. Chappell, Dicey Tillerman’s verbally abusive English
teacher (Voigt, 1982); or those simply weighed down by what Rowling
(2003) calls the ‘‘high inquisitors’’ of the school bureaucracy. As the
nationwide preoccupation with school accountability continues to
grow, increasing numbers of teachers feel compelled to restrict
classroom interaction to the inculcation of state-mandated information
and knowledge in preapproved areas of study. Pressured to provide
what Hirsch (1996) refers to as ‘‘intellectual capital,’’ too many
teachers emulate Mr. Gradgrind, the no-nonsense teacher in Dickens’s
Hard Times:
Now, what I want is facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but the facts. Facts
alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can
only form the minds of reasoning animals upon facts; nothing else will ever be of
any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children,
and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to the facts, sir!
(quoted in Kliebard, 1992, p. 26)
This banking concept of education (Freire, 1990) fails to acknowledge
the complexity of students’ and teachers’ daily experiences and the
contested nature of the knowledge produced in schools. Some students
refuse to passively acquire the intellectual capital that Hirsch argues
they need, but which they do not consider meaningful or relevant to
their lives: as Kohl (1995) and many others have pointed out, life in
schools often involves a struggle for control of the knowledge that is
produced there. In his study of ‘‘Harold Spencer’’ Junior High, Everhart
(1983) differentiates between two types of knowledge production:
reified and regenerative. Whereas reified knowledge was the non-
negotiable information, transmitted by teachers and anointed by the
textbooks, that made up the formal curriculum at Spencer, regenera-
tive knowledge—tentative, arguable, and open to interpretation—was
Cleary, Ramona the
Brave
Block, I’m Only Bleed-
ing: Education as the
Practice of Violence
against Children
Lowry, Anastasia
Krupnik
Voigt, Dicey’s Song
Hirsch, The Schools We
Need, and Why We
Don’t Have Them
Kliebard, Forging the
American Curriculum:
Essays in Curriculum
History and Theory
Freire, Pedagogy of the
Oppressed
Kohl, I Won’t Learn
From You
Everhart, Reading, Writ-
ing, and Resistance
219
Envisioning Possibility

the knowledge students produced among themselves as a means of
resistance to reified knowledge. Like the students at Spencer, Nick
Allen in Frindle (Clements, 1996) considers it his calling to literally
create knowledge in school—by inventing and defining a word, over
the strong objections of his teacher, which the whole community will
use:
Was Nick a troublemaker? Hard to say. One thing’s for sure: Nick Allen had plenty
of ideas, and he knew what to do with them. (Clements, 1996, p. 1)
Interestingly, though, as Britzman (1986) notes, students mistakenly
regard their resistance as simply a power struggle between them and
an autonomous teacher; they fail to recognize the teacher’s subordi-
nate position in the top-down curriculum development hierarchy. Nor,
for that matter, do students always recognize the impact on schooling
of the complex interactions among various constituencies (students,
parents, teachers, administrators, politicians, etc.). All parties, in
varying degrees, play a role in students’ knowledge and experiences in
school. As Giroux and McLaren write, ‘‘Schooling represents both a
struggle for meaning and a struggle over power relations’’ (Giroux &
McLaren, 1986, p. 215).
Schools need to provide opportunities for students to understand and
address these struggles. Examining schooling, the one institution in
this country about which every student has knowledge, experience,
and strong opinions, can help students develop what Bigelow calls a
‘‘basic skill’’: critical reflection on issues of equity, social justice,
knowledge construction, and students’ lives. Bigelow, whose high
school students study the history and sociology of schooling, writes:
We need to equip students to enter society as subjects, as individuals who look
around at the social architecture and ask why it is like this; who benefits and who
suffers; and what will it take to make it better for everyone? Studying an insti-
tution with which they’re intimately familiar seems a good place to start.
(Bigelow, 1999, p. 256, emphasis in original)
In Bigelow’s class, studying power relations in schools promotes new
levels of understanding between and among students. Moreover, this
examination of the power struggles in the classroom should not be
limited to student–student relations. By examining the complexities of
their relationships with one another and their respective relationships
to school knowledge, students and teachers can begin to ameliorate
the power struggles that so often poison these relationships. Freire
advocates that education ‘‘begin with the solution of the teacher–
student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so
that both are simultaneously teachers and students’’ (Freire, 1990,
p. 59). We must, as Apple advocates, ‘‘base a curriculum on a
Clements, Frindle
Britzman, ‘‘Cultural
myths in the making of a
teacher: Biography and
social structure in tea-
cher education’’
Giroux and McLaren,
‘‘Teacher education and
the politics of engage-
ment: The case for
democratic schooling’’
Bigelow, ‘‘Probing the
invisible life of schools’’

recognition of those differences that empower and depower our stu-
dents in identifiable ways’’ (Apple, 1996, p. 33). In order to under-
stand these power relations in school, students need the opportunity
to examine the institution of schooling itself and their relationship to it.
Children’s and young adult fiction can provide such an opportunity.
Gough writes that fiction ‘‘is useful to us as a means of posing options
and alternatives and for connecting ‘present reality’ with past and/or
future possibilities’’ (Gough, 1998, p. 93). Classic as well as contem-
porary fiction depicts various permutations of the ‘‘present reality’’ of
schooling: the double standard that a high achiever uncovers when
she refuses to perform dissections in Standing Up to Mr. O (Mills,
1998); the silencing of the students in Speak by the history teacher
who tells his students, ‘‘I decide who talks in here’’ (Anderson, 1999,
p. 56); or the freedom of movement that a caring teacher provides a
girl with Tourette Syndrome in Quit It (Byalick, 2002).
These literary embodiments of their own academic experiences help
students realize that their experiences are not unique, and help stu-
dents make sense of their abstract concerns and criticisms of schooling
by anchoring them in something more tangible. Like Sartre, who says
that ‘‘Raskolnikov’s waiting is my waiting, which I lend him’’ (quoted
in Greene, 1975, p. 301), students lend part of themselves to the
stories as they read them: they become a part of the world of the
characters in the books, but their perceptions of that world are col-
ored by their own experiences in school. And they emerge from the
fictional worlds with a better understanding of their own. As with
Pinar’s currere (a strategy using autobiographical reflection to help
students make meaning of their experience), exploring schooling
through literature helps students to disclose their ‘‘existential
experience of external structures’’ (Pinar, 1976, p. vii).
Literature and Visions of Possibility
It is vital, though, not to focus entirely on fiction that merely depicts and
confirms students’ traditional conceptions of schooling. To do so,
especially without critiquing such images in the books students read,
would only serve to reify conventional notions of mundane or repres-
sive schooling and establish that these conceptions are, now and
always, the way things are and must be. Heilman (2003) notes that
according to Sutherland (1985), children’s literature reflects either the
politics of assent (which affirms societal norms), of attack, or of advo-
cacy. The image of schooling in most classical literature (and, arguably,
the earlier Harry Potter books as well) is grounded in the politics of
assent and could potentially exacerbate rather than ease students’ sense
of helplessness. On the other hand, much contemporary young adult
Apple, Cultural Politics
and Education
Gough, ‘‘Reflections and
diffractions: Functions
of fiction in curriculum
inquiry’’
Mills, Standing Up to
Mr. O
Anderson, Speak
Byalick, Quit It
Greene, ‘‘Curriculum
and Consciousness’’
Pinar, ‘‘Preface’’ to To-
ward a Poor Curricu-
lum
Heilman, ‘‘Blue wizards
and pink witches: Rep-
resentations of gender
identity and power’’
Sutherland, ‘‘Hidden
persuaders: Political
ideologies in literature
for children’’
221

literature (such as Avi’s Nothing But the Truth (1993) attacks traditional
structures of schooling, with characters suffering from and/or resisting
the will of teachers or administration.
While such literature might encourage critique and resistance, it may
not stimulate alternative conceptions of schooling. Goodman writes
that the language of critique can be helpful in raising consciousness of
inequity and oppression; but it can also cultivate
a ‘‘discourse of despair’’ by promoting the view that people with a critical con-
sciousness are basically unable to exert a meaningful impact within our society:
that is, it [accentuates] the way schools act as agencies for social reproduction by
teaching young people and their teachers to be passive in their response to a
curriculum and organizational structure that serve those who dominate.
(Goodman, 1992, p. 168)
To progress beyond the language of critique, students need the
opportunity to explore the works of literature that go beyond the
politics of attack and into the realm of possibility. A language of pos-
sibility, Giroux writes, ‘‘would infuse pedagogical work... with a dis-
course that can function so as to raise real hopes, forge democratic
alliances, and point to new forms of social life’’ (Giroux, 1988, pp.
135–136). Many works of literature invite this type of discourse by
offering alternatives to the traditional curriculum, depicting students
involved in generative intellectual engagements in a variety of school
settings. The situations differ from book to book and school to school.
In Surviving the Applewhites, a family runs the so-called ‘‘Creative
Academy’’ established on the assumption that ‘‘education is an
adventurous quest for the meaning of life, involving an ability to think
things through’’ (Tolan, 2002, p. 27); in Skellig, the unusual girl next
door is home-schooled, explaining, ‘‘The mind needs to be opened out
into the world, not shuttered down inside a gloomy classroom’’
(Almond, 1998, p. 49); and the 1954 Newbery Medal winner The
Wheel on the School (DeJong, 1954) shows how students’ pursuits of
their own questions can change their world in wonderful and unpre-
dictable ways.
In The Wheel on the School, the teacher establishes the space and
makes the time for students to initiate and carry out their own
inquiries. As he tells his initially skeptical students, ‘‘Sometimes when
we wonder we can make things begin to happen’’ (DeJong, 1954, p.
6). Indeed, the image of the teacher as catalyst for transformative
experiences in school is key to many visions of curricular possibility in
children’s and young adult literature. In some cases, the teacher simply
makes special efforts to help a student, like the English teacher in The
Perks of Being a Wallflower (Chbosky, 1999), who continually feeds
books to the deeply troubled (but voracious reader) Charlie, or
Avi, Nothing But the
Truth
Goodman, Elementary
Schooling for Critical
Democracy
Giroux, Teachers as
Intellectuals: Toward a
Critical Pedagogy of
Learning
Tolan, Surviving the
Applewhites
Almond, Skellig
DeJong, The Wheel on
the School
Chbosky, The Perks of
Being a Wallflower

Mr. Lema in ‘‘The Circuit’’ (Jiménez, 1993) who gives up his lunch
hour to help a 12-year-old migrant farm worker with his reading. In
The Skin I’m In (Flake, 1998), a teacher with a disfigured face helps a
young African American girl, teased all her life because of her dark
skin, find the courage to stand up for and take pride in herself. And in
The Year of Miss Agnes (Hill, 2000), we see what happens when a
teacher encourages her students to pose their own questions, to name
their own worlds. Their world, a tiny Athabaskan village restrictive in
its remoteness and its established patterns of life, becomes bigger as
the children begin to make connections between it and the larger
society. ‘‘Everything [we did] had something to do with what we had
learned from her, as if we just woke up to see the world around us,
and way beyond us’’ (Hill, 2000, p. 111).
In a number of books, the teacher takes on a more politically active
role, challenging school authorities in the interest of the students.
After being reprimanded for refusing to do paperwork (including
grading his students) until the school provides his class with necessary
supplies, the irrepressible Mr. Freeman (note the name) ‘‘[finds] a way
around the authorities again’’ (Anderson, 1999, p. 102). Mr. Freeman is
naturally combative with the administration, but, in a surprising
number of stories, it is the students themselves who inspire the tea-
cher to challenge the powers-that-be. In Whale Talk (Crutcher, 2001),
a high school senior persuades his complacent swim coach to chal-
lenge the all-powerful wrestling coach over inequities in the athletic
awards system. And in The Landry News (Clements, 1999), students
actually rekindle the spark in a burnt-out teacher by challenging him to
help them resist an increasingly hostile administration seeking to
censor their class newspaper.
What might students learn from reading these and other literary
works? More than merely demonstrating that curriculum can be
meaningful and teachers supportive, the books show that the students
themselves can be agents of change in schools. Rather than passively
waiting for curriculum and schooling to happen to them, students in
the stories—like Dumbledore’s Army (Rowling, 2003)—take action to
open ‘‘revolutionary domains of possibility’’ (McLaren, 2003, p. 292)
for themselves, their teachers, and their communities. Even if the
teacher seems unaware of or uninterested in exploring these domains
of possibility, the students can create them. The literature shows that
classrooms and schools can and should be dynamic places.
Greene writes that we need to see things big rather than small. ‘‘When
applied to schooling, the vision that sees things big brings us in close
contact with details and with particularities that cannot be reduced to
statistics or even to the measurable.’’ We see ‘‘teachers who provoke
Jiménez, ‘‘The circuit’’
Flake, The Skin I’m In
Hill, The Year of Miss
Agnes
Crutcher, Whale Talk
Clements, The Landry
News
McLaren, Life in
Schools: All Introduc-
tion to Critical Peda-
gogy in the
Foundations of Educa-
tion
223

learners to pose their own questions, to teach themselves, to go at
their own pace, to name their worlds’’ (Greene, 1995, pp. 10–11). Our
goal in working with students to explore visions of schooling in lit-
erature was to help the students to see big—to experience visions of
schooling which ‘‘awaken others to possibility and the need for action
in the name of possibility... [and] communicate the importance of
opening spaces in the imagination where persons can reach beyond
where they are’’ (Greene, 1986, p. 430).
Implementing the Curriculum
Spring River School (a pseudonym, as are all names of places and
people in this paper) is a small public middle school located in rural
northern California. As in nearly every school in the state and nation,
reading and literacy is a primary focus throughout the school curric-
ulum. In fact, the school principal is a former reading specialist who
was delighted to have us (a university professor and a school librarian)
implement a literature project in her school. The class that partici-
pated in our project consisted of 26 fifth and sixth graders who call
their teacher Alan by his first name, and who view their overall school
experience in generally positive terms. The school environment seems
safe both physically and psychologically. In fact, Sylvia, a student who
had recently transferred from an alternative school, claimed to feel
alienated by this congenial environment. ‘‘I like reading books about
bad kids because I’m bad and I can’t relate to the kids here, because
they aren’t bad like me,’’ she said. (Of course, this same girl frequently
curled up at lunchtime on the bench in the library to read, so ‘‘bad’’
behavior is clearly relative.)
While reading is a major focus at Spring River, curriculum that ex-
plores those differences that empower and depower our students is
not. Most students, when asked, will tell you that they consider Spring
River an ‘‘okay’’ place to go to school. They are accustomed to the
teachers’ good-natured cajoling to behave and complete their assign-
ments; and teachers can generally count on students’ willing, if not
always cheerful, acquiescence on most curricular and behavioral
matters. The politically left-leaning faculty sometimes encourage stu-
dents to examine national and local political issues; but prior to this
project, they had never, as part of the formal curriculum, explored
political matters close to home.
Our goal for this project was to explore matters very close to home. As
Bigelow (1999) recommends, we wanted students to probe ‘‘the
invisible life of schools’’ and to connect their exploration to their own
lives. Literature was to be the vehicle for this exploration. Like Pinar,
we wanted our students to ask the questions, ‘‘What do I read and
Greene, Releasing the
Imagination: Essays on
Education, the Arts, and
Social Change
Greene, ‘‘In search of a
critical pedagogy’’

what intellectual or thematic relation exists between the reading and
the living? What seem to be characteristic responses to various
teachers, to various forms of work (writing, reading, library work), to
various types of work (philosophy, history, etc.), and what motives
can be inferred? And so on’’ (Pinar 1975, p. 409).
With this goal in mind, we collected a broad spectrum of children’s
and young adult school-related literature (listed at the conclusion of
this article), then from that list selected age-appropriate titles to share
with the 5th/6th grade class. As we read the books in preparation for
our first meeting with the students, we developed a system for cate-
gorizing the books; we planned to discuss the categories with students
to help them understand the range of visions of schooling available in
literature. At first, we used Sutherland’s (1985) categories of assent,
attack, and advocacy; but, the more we read, the more we saw further
gradations among the various works of fiction. Eventually, we adapted
his categories to create a taxonomy of five types of images of schooling
in the books:
1. Acceptance refers to literature that depicts traditional images of
schooling, from Anastasia’s annoyingly narrow-minded teacher
(Lowry, 1979) to Harry Potter’s (Rowling, 2003) typical secondary
school schedule in the halls of Hogwarts. As with Sutherland’s
politics of assent, which he characterizes as ‘‘an author’s passive,
unquestioning acceptance and internalization of an established
ideology’’ (Sutherland, 1985, p. 151), the dominant ideology of
schooling in acceptance literature is invisible: acceptance literature
presents the conventions of schooling uncritically.
2. Despair characterizes literature that portrays school as hopelessly
oppressive and destructive. As with Sutherland’s politics of attack,
despair literature portrays examples and events ‘‘that run counter
to [the author’s] concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, jus-
tice, fair play, decency, or truth’’ (Sutherland, 1985, p. 147); but
this literature focuses specifically on the brutal impact that
schooling can have on too many students. The physical abuse that
Roald Dahl (in Boy, 2001) suffers at the hands of older students and
his teachers, as well as the ceaseless persecution that Brother Leon
inflicts on Jerry Renault in Cormier’s The Chocolate War
(1974)—without any kind of retribution for the oppressors or
redemption for the protagonists—epitomize the types of circum-
stances that characterize literature of despair.
3. Subversion is our term for literature in which teachers or students
‘‘fly under the radar’’ to successfully change their classrooms and/
or schools. In Sahara Special (Codell, 2003), rather than making
waves in a school whose policies humiliate special needs students,
the teacher saves a student from participating in that program by
Pinar, ‘‘Currere: Toward
reconceptualization’’
Dahl, Boy
Cormier, The Chocolate
War
Codell, Sahara Special
225

telling a lie (in front of her students) to the special education tea-
cher; similarly, Professor Lupin secretly supports Harry Potter in
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling, 1999), but
does nothing to openly challenge the status quo.
4. Resistance literature includes books in which characters success-
fully confront oppressive teachers, administrators, other students,
or school policies. Examples of resistance literature include No
More Dead Dogs (Korman, 2000)—where a student defies a
teacher who insists he write a complimentary book review about a
story the student hated—and Whale Talk (Crutcher, 2001), The
Skin I’m In (Flake, 1998), and Standing Up to Mr. O (Mills, 1998).
5. Possibility, our favorite category, encompasses the variety of books
that portray whole new conceptions of schooling—visions that we
later characterized to students as ‘‘outside the box’’—such as the
home school in Surviving the Applewhites (Tolan, 2002), and the
little one-room schools in both The Year of Miss Agnes (Hill, 2000)
and The Wheel on the School (DeJong, 1954). We had a harder time
finding books in this category than in any other.
We introduced the project to the class by asking students what books
they could think of that took place, for at least part of the story, in a
school setting. Of course, the first books students named were from
the Harry Potter series; from there, their suggestions ranged from old
favorites such as the Ramona and Laura Ingalls Wilder books to con-
temporary titles like Flying Solo (Fletcher, 1998), Maniac Magee
(Spinelli, 1990), and The Secret School (Avi, 2003). Then we asked,
‘‘When considering all the juvenile books you have read in which
school appears, what is the most common vision or image of schooling
these books present?’’ After a wide-ranging discussion, we read aloud
excerpts from several books that exemplify various categories in our
taxonomy, countering fiction that explores and confirms students’
negative experiences in school, such as No More Dead Dogs (Korman,
2000) and Matilda (Dahl, 1988), with selections from books that offer
examples of curriculum that empowers students and teachers, such as
Sahara Special (Codell, 2003). Students then selected books from our
collection of fiction offering these multiple viewpoints of schooling,
with instructions to read as many of them as possible and to comment on
the books in their journals in the coming month.
Over the next three weeks, we met with the class once per week for
40 minutes to discuss the books, alternating class discussions with
small group dialogues and in-class writing assignments. At our first
small-group meeting, each student described what book he or she was
reading and what image of schooling it offered. The next week, we
asked them to compare their own experiences with those they were
reading about in the literature; then, to help students realize the
Rowling, Harry Potter
and the Prisoner of
Azkaban
Korman, No More Dead
Dogs
Fletcher, Flying Solo
Spinelli, Maniac Magee
Avi, The Secret School
Dahl, Matilda

variety of perspectives among all the books the class was sampling, we
introduced our taxonomy and asked them to classify their books
according to our categories. And in the final session with the class, we
asked students to write what they did or didn’t like about the visions of
schooling their books presented, in particular what they found to be
fair and unfair, and what they could do to change the situation.
At the end of the month, we collaborated with Alan on a culminating
multimedia project to create a model school, which would include
such characteristics as educational philosophy, curriculum, teacher
attributes, school and classroom rules, and physical layout. Our goal
was to help students synthesize what they had read and discussed with
what they had experienced in the past and could envision for the
future. Alan suggested to them that ultimately they might be able to
present a composite model school to the principal and the school
board. Because the school district was in the midst of consolidating its
K-4 school with its 5–8 middle school, this assignment provided the
perfect opportunity for the students to take what they had learned
from their reading, writing, and thinking—their ‘‘wonderings and
wanderings’’ (DeJong, 1954)–over the past month and make that
connection between the reading and the living by developing models
that would help them envision and, perhaps, create new possibilities
for their lives in school.
Student Responses to the Literature
From the very beginning, the students were excited about this project.
They couldn’t wait to start reading; and throughout the project, as
they finished their books, they were constantly asking for more books
to read from our collection, and sharing those they had read with their
classmates. A book that started out with one child might get passed
around to three or four others before making its way back to the
collection. Some students read as many as five books during the month
that we worked with them. Clearly, thinking and reading about
schooling was important to them. As our discussions progressed, their
thoughts about those books also evolved. In particular, two issues—-
what different sorts of learning takes place in school, and what is fair
and just in school—held great meaning for them, because they re-
turned to these issues again and again.
At first, when we asked what was the most common vision or image of
schooling they found in the literature, their responses were predict-
able: in the literature they remembered, school was ‘‘boring’’ and a
‘‘waste of time’’; the plot was rarely about a teacher, but teachers were
‘‘plodding’’; and there was ‘‘usually a bully involved.’’ For these stu-
dents, school in children’s literature was simply background—or as
227

Jennifer put it, ‘‘a way into the story.’’ Schooling itself was not the
story, and the patterns of a conventional school day presented in these
works of fiction—bells ringing, classes changing, teachers lecturing,
administrators whose purpose is strictly disciplinary or bureau-
cratic—were simply an accepted, uncontested part of young people’s
daily lives.
The vision of schooling that the students at first saw in the literature
mirrored their own educational experiences. Almost every student in
the class had read the Harry Potter series, so we asked them to compare
their schooling with Hogwarts, the boarding school that Harry attends
throughout the series. Mostly, the differences they listed were super-
ficial: Hogwarts students live at school; they get to have pets. And
although Hogwarts students study such intriguing-sounding subjects as
transfigurations and potions, they still have lectures and exams and
grades—as José said, ‘‘just like regular school.’’ And just like regular
school, some teachers are better or nicer than others. Yes, Snape treats
Harry unfairly, but the students agreed that, both in books and in the
real world, there’s a Snape in every school: that’s just the way school is.
The students argued that both in fiction and in reality what is important
in life happens outside of school. As Mary wrote about her book,
‘‘School is more of a background, an easy setting for the more com-
plicated events occurring outside it. ...I think that this is a generally
accurate portrayal of most schools, for the times you remember in the
best detail are the ones where you aren’t in the classroom.’’
But as they continued to read and converse about the stories, they
began to realize that a book which might not seem to be about
schooling actually is when you look ‘‘below the surface,’’ and that
much of what happens in those school settings directly affects the
students’ lives outside the classroom as well. For example, Rose noted
how the art teacher in Speak (Anderson, 1999) gets the main character
‘‘to speak her thoughts through art,’’ which eventually allows her to
begin to recover from the trauma she experienced the previous
summer. Two weeks into the project, students’ journal entries clearly
indicated that they were starting to see that the images of schooling in
their books played a more important role than they once might have
thought. In fact, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
(Rowling, 2003), schooling is, in Antonio’s words, ‘‘the main point’’ of
the whole story. Once the students realized that the fifth Harry Potter
book was all about the struggle for control of knowledge and infor-
mation, they began to point out power relations in other books, such
as Anastasia Krupnik (Lowry, 1979). In discussing Anastasia’s
encounter with her teacher who insisted that poetry had to rhyme,
Doug commented, ‘‘If a teacher only tells you what he thinks about
things, you wouldn’t really be learning what you need to know.’’

In their discussions about the books, the students began to consider
how much meaningful learning can actually take place in
school—learning that may have nothing to do with spelling, math
skills, or even transfiguration and defense against the dark arts, but
which might involve knowledge that is far more long-lasting and
important to them than the specific subjects usually associated with
schooling. Some of this knowledge might be unpleasant or unsettling,
but what students learn, they realized, also could be transformative. As
Kevin wrote about Flying Solo (Fletcher, 1998), in which the students
decide to run their own class by not informing the administration
when the substitute teacher doesn’t show up:
My feeling of this book is that it is trying to show that kids can take care of
themselves, and the characters in this book are having a very enlightening
experience. The kids begin to learn who their friends and classmates really were.
The kids also learn that there are situations where adults can be very handy but
sometimes can’t understand everything that happens to children.
Kevin recognized that the ‘‘struggle for meaning and a struggle over
power relations’’ taking place in his book is about more than just life in
this classroom, that it epitomizes adult/child struggles that take place
in every part of his life. In focusing on these school stories, students
began to see that school is a place where students can and should
examine, evaluate, and try to make sense of their lives.
Almost every discussion came around in some way to what was being
taught, how it was being taught, and what was important to learn in
school. They liked the way the teacher in The Year of Miss Agnes (Hill,
2000) taught the class about Italy, for instance, by playing opera re-
cords. ‘‘School should be interactive,’’ said Serena. And Benjamin ad-
ded, ‘‘We should learn practical things in school, like woodworking.’’
In considering all the Harry Potter books, students noted that, while
structurally the schooling at Hogwarts was similar to their own school,
Hogwarts was far superior because its curriculum was ‘‘much more
interesting.’’ As Jeremy argued, ‘‘They get to do experiments and we
just sit at desks and learn.’’ Rose commented wistfully that at Hog-
warts, ‘‘There is danger involved in learning.’’ Even detention can be a
learning experience: José objected to the way students had to sit
during detention in No More Dead Dogs (Korman, 2000), arguing that
the students would learn more from ‘‘picking up trash.’’ For all of the
students, experiential learning that is of interest and/or of use to them,
even if it results in getting sent to the hospital or picking up trash,
offered a more desirable alternative to the daily learning experiences
to which they are accustomed.
After the students had read at least two books each, we wrote the five
different categories of our taxonomy on the whiteboard and asked
229

where they would fit the books they had read. Student responses again
revealed that they were becoming more critical readers and, in fact,
that their evolving interpretation of the literature was quite different
from what we had expected. They surprised us, for example, in their
analysis of Ramona the Brave (1975). At our first meeting, they had
cited Ramona as an example of a book in which school is just insig-
nificant background to the real story. Like us, they had seen it as an
example of acceptance literature that reifies the status quo. But in
discussing where to fit it into our taxonomy, they argued for placing it
in the fourth category, because, they argued, Ramona is a character
who continually resists the status quo. They cited her refusal to write
the Q in her name the way her teacher insists she do, and her crum-
pling up of another child’s paper who has copied her work. But be-
cause she is punished for both offenses, they decided the book
belonged with the literature of despair. Using the taxonomy as a guide,
they realized not only that there are multiple interpretations of a work
of literature, but also that their original interpretation of schooling in
the Beverly Cleary books—that that’s just the way school is—was in
fact Cleary’s challenge, even condemnation, of that very reality. As
part of the process of becoming more critical readers, they were
coming to see that many of the books that they had originally grouped
with the literature of acceptance perhaps deserved a second look, and
that schooling and their interpretations of daily experiences in school
were considerably more complex than they had originally imagined.
Perhaps the most memorable example of students’ evolving under-
standing of the literature and of schooling itself is the ongoing con-
versation about social justice that the books stimulated. From the very
beginning, students noted the tendency of school stories to feature
bullies. Anna, in writing about Hoot (Hiaasen, 2002), stated, ‘‘School is
like an ordinary school. The kid doesn’t like school because he is
constantly being bullied. School gets worse and worse. He accepted
things as they are but hates them anyway.’’ To our students, ‘‘ordinary
school’’—both in fiction and in their own lived experience—features
school authorities who not only ignore bullying, but sometimes even
penalize the student being harassed instead of the bully.
This response to the literature surprised us. As mentioned above, from
our vantage point, the students seemed to feel safe and well cared for
both in and outside the classrooms at Spring River School. Yet our
students’ acceptance of the harassment and intimidation that takes
place in the stories as ‘‘normal’’—and their general agreement that
these dynamics are universal in schools—indicated that they are a part
of daily life even for Spring River students. In fact, Mary expressed
concern about the lack of adult awareness of power struggles among
students when she wrote about Stargirl (Spinelli, 2000), ‘‘I don’t like
Hiaasen, Hoot
Spinelli, Stargirl

the way teachers weren’t aware of what was going on around them.’’
She also lamented that the main character ‘‘could have told his parents
about the problem if they were there. But they weren’t even in the
story!’’ Because Mary herself has a strong family support system, she
could not understand why parents played no part in the lives of the
characters in Stargirl. But at least now, with the literature providing a
starting point, the students had found a forum in the classroom for
discussing such issues.
Anastasia Krupnik (Lowry, 1979) provided another opportunity for
students to discuss their concerns about fairness and social relations in
the classroom. Anastasia’s school is another one of those ‘‘ordinary’’
schools which the class at first dismissed as mere background to the
real action. On our first day with the class, after we read aloud the
excerpt in which Anastasia’s teacher publicly fails her for not rhyming
her poem, the class was absolutely silent for a minute, momentarily
stunned by the teacher’s unfairness. Yet when we asked for their
reactions, students had little to say. A couple of weeks later, however,
after we had introduced our five categories of schooling literature and
they had discussed various books which offer possible responses to
such injustices, they returned to this scene and discussed the ways
Anastasia (who passively accepts the teacher’s evaluation) could have
responded:
‘‘She could resist by causing trouble.’’
‘‘Or do it under the radar, like Harry and Hermione.’’
‘‘She could have lost her temper and exploded like Ramona does.’’
‘‘She could fight back, like Harry Potter does, casting spells.’’
‘‘But a spell against a teacher in Hogwarts could get you killed.’’
‘‘He still does spells, even when they are dangerous.’’
‘‘Anastasia should have stood up for herself no matter what, just like Harry does.’’
These and other such discussions showed us that student reflection on
the literature and their relationship to it had evolved considerably in
the few weeks we worked with them. In the first place, their discourse
was different: words and phrases like ‘‘resist’’ and ‘‘under the radar,’’
which had come from our taxonomy, provided a common language
with which to describe the situations and possible responses to
injustice in school. According to Gee (1996), the way we use language
is both constituted by and constitutive of the context in which it
occurs; that is, language in use not only represents perspectives, but
Gee, Social Linguistics
and Literacies: Ideology
in Discourses
231

creates them as well. Thus, our considerations of acceptance, despair,
subversion, resistance, and possibility in the world views presented in
the literature helped students to envision new ways of being in the
world.
Critiquing the actions of characters in the stories served as a starting
place for students’ conversations, which gradually began to extend
beyond the literature and into their own worlds. In the discussion of
Anastasia’s humiliation, their focus shifted from the events in the story
to what they themselves would do in similar circumstances:
‘‘I would say to the teacher, look up poetry: there are lots of other ways of
looking at things.’’
‘‘You can tell the teacher that it hurt your feelings and wasn’t right to grade in
public.’’
I would stand up to the teacher and say she was unfair.’’
Harste (2004) argues that the kind of social practice that reading
becomes is directly related to what discourses are made available to
them. By asking them to write about what was fair and unfair in the
books, and what they would do to change the situations, we made
available to the students an opportunity to explore a topic that was
important to them, but which they had previously considered outside
the realm of legitimate school knowledge. Here is a sampling from
their final written assignment:
‘‘I would change how Fudge gets his way in every situation.’’ [Double Fudge
(Blume, 2002)]
‘‘I would make it so there was another bully to pick on Bastion to make him
change.’’ [Flying Solo (Fletcher, 1998)]
‘‘I would have Tim come back to the school and have Stacie’s dad arrested.’’
[Friction (Frank, 2003)]
‘‘I would bring it to the attention of the faculty that some students were being
ignored because they were different.’’ [Stargirl (Spinelli, 2000)]
Greene writes, ‘‘There are no specific blueprints for a better society or
even a better school system. But we might well begin to shape our
imagining by exploring more images from literature’’ (Greene, 1995,
p. 48). The literature of subversion, resistance, and possibility pro-
vided virtually unlimited images from which to choose, images which
demonstrated to the students that they, like the characters in the
stories, had the creativity, the resourcefulness, and the right to coun-
teract cruelty, injustice, or, even, uninspiring teaching. We moved
Harste, Literacy: Making
our Classroom Critical
Blume, Double Fudge
Frank, Friction

from the reading phase of this project into the culminating activity
with the hope that students would shape their imaginings into
something solid and concrete: their model schools.
Applying the Readings: Students’ Model Schools
The two themes of curriculum and social justice, which dominated
student response to the literature, also provided the basis for almost
every group’s model school. When we had read excerpts from dif-
ferent books to the class on the first day of our project, students had
laughed aloud when they heard the daily schedule that Miss Pointy,
the teacher in Sahara Special (Codell, 2003), writes on the board:
Puzzling, Time Travel and World Exploring or Mad Science, Read
Aloud after Lunch, Read Together after Read Aloud, Read Alone after
Read Together, and Art of Language. At the time, it had seemed silly to
them, contrary to the daily school schedules to which they were
accustomed. But by the end of the project, when the time came to
design their own, model schools, the students demonstrated that they
had moved from laughing at to embracing alternative, albeit imaginary
visions of curriculum. The subjects they chose for their curricula
mirrored the free spirit of Miss Pointy’s schedule: Doodling, Field
Trips, More Walks Outside, P.E. Every Day, Reading (‘‘spread out over
a longer time!), Art Every Day, Foreign Languages, Cooking, Tourna-
ments, and Electronics. At the same time, all groups deliberately
sought equality in their school programs: most required ‘‘leveled’’
math classes so students could work at their own pace; most elimi-
nated the gifted and talented pull-out program, because, they ex-
plained, it wasn’t fair that the ‘‘smart’’ kids got to do special, usually
more interactive, projects; and they all listed among their values
‘‘treating each other with respect.’’ Even the subject of ‘‘Future
Telling’’ was an egalitarian one:
In this class kids learn to tell the future with tea leaves and dreams. It will allow
you to study for a test before the teacher announces it, but it will not help you
into getting a better grade than you are capable of.
With their focus on alternative courses of study and concern for social
justice, students’ model schools reflected the considerable impact that
the literature had had on their visions of schooling. But at the same
time, the structures of their schools varied little, if at all, from the
familiar. Students placed those alternative courses of study into
frameworks identical to their own daily schedules, with period after
period governed by the ever-present clock. Several groups worked out
intricate schedules to the nearest minute (i.e. ‘‘First Period 7:35–8:27,
Second Period 8:29–9:21,’’ and so on), allowing students in their
schools a mere two or three minutes to travel between classes.
233

Knowledge, in their minds, still fit into discrete categories, each dis-
cipline consisting of a series of particular facts and skills to master. The
daily schedules offered some slight variations on the norm—alternative
day schedules, ‘‘college schedules,’’ built-in field trip days—but few of
the model schools offered the learners any control over what they
would learn or when they would learn it. Visions of student-driven
inquiry, illuminated in books like The Wheel on the School (Dejong,
1954) and Regarding the Fountain (Klise, 1998), were either forgot-
ten or discarded. When we suggested that students consider alterna-
tive structures, Benjamin responded, ‘‘There’s nothing wrong with the
schedule we have. If you’re getting really tired of what you’re study-
ing, you only have it for a little while!’’
We found still more adherence to traditional schooling in the long lists
of rules that students created for their model schools. To be sure, some
of the rules—such as ‘‘not as much cussing,’’ ‘‘no fighting,’’ ‘‘no dress
code,’’ and ‘‘eating in class permitted’’—reflected their concerns
about bullying and fairness. But most of the rules were little different
from the rules in most public schools: ‘‘No drugs, cigarettes, or alco-
hol,’’ ‘‘no obscene clothing or language,’’ and ‘‘no unsupervised
climbing’’ (actually, we have no idea where that last rule came from).
The notion of a classroom environment in which the rules might
evolve out of community consensus (such as Flying Solo [Fletcher,
1998]) was never even considered. Almost everyone had been
noticeably impressed by the visions of possibility in books like Sur-
viving the Applewhites (Tolan, 2002)—‘‘Awesome school! ’’ gushed
Sylvia—and Regarding the Fountain (Klise, 1998)—‘‘I liked how free
the teacher let [the students] be,’’ wrote Katie—but their model
schools showed that they were not yet ready to take those visions and
translate them into reality.
Conclusion: Envisioning Possibility
According to Eisner, when writers’ skills are great, ‘‘they give us material
that helps us understand, paradoxically, what words cannot express’’
(Eisner, 1998, p. 19). Scholars and teachers often champion literature as
a tool for teaching in particular content areas, but rarely do they recog-
nize its potential for ‘‘seeing big’’—for reconceptualizing what Apple
calls ‘‘the commonsense reality in which students and teachers dwell’’
(Apple, 1975, p. 113). Literature can serve as a catalyst for the classroom
community, as Osborne and Barton advocate, ‘‘to build connections
between the theoretical construct of liberatory education and the lives
of teachers and students’’ (Osborne & Barton, 1998, p. 255).
The zeal with which students at Spring River School read and thought
and talked about the literature of schooling demonstrated their deep
Klise, Regarding the
Fountain
Eisner, The Enlightened
Eye: Qualitative In-
quiry and the Enhance-
ment of Educational
Practice
Apple, ‘‘The hidden
curriculum and the nat-
ure of conflict’’
Osborn and Barton,
‘‘This issue: Construct-
ing a liberatory practice
in school subjects’’

and abiding interest in exploring this commonsense reality; but the
model schools they developed bore less resemblance than we would
have liked to the literature of possibility they had read or to their
insightful responses to these books. Because their visions for model
school environments, if feasible, could possibly have been incorpo-
rated into the reconfigured Spring River School the following year, the
culminating activity could have provided the perfect opportunity for
the students to become true agents of change in their community; yet
they chose instead to create entertaining but somewhat trivial and
largely unrealizable plans. In fact, when we asked students whether
the readings had influenced their decisions for curriculum and school
design, most students replied, ‘‘Not really.’’ Mary, one of the most
articulate and insightful in the class, told us, ‘‘Most of my ideas just
came from my imagination.’’
Why did student projects fail to break ‘‘outside the box?’’ One logical
explanation might be that this unit was, for most of the students, the
first time that they had been invited to explore and develop new ideas
about what Apple calls ‘‘the paradigms of activity within their every-
day lives at school’’ (Apple, 1975, p. 113). How could we expect one
month (40 minutes per week) of conversations to significantly alter
the students’ conceptions of a system in which they had spent
180 days per year for the previous 5–7 years? Lortie (1975) uses the
phrase ‘‘apprenticeship of observation’’ to refer to the way people
learn to teach by watching their teachers over the course of their K-12
experience, and this phrase could just as easily apply to the way stu-
dents learn about their position and role in schools. Certainly, ongoing
critical examination of curriculum and schooling throughout students’
school careers—using not only literature, but film, music, television,
art, and scholarly writings—would enhance students’ awareness and
understanding of the issues that we introduced at Spring River School.
Still, Mary’s assertions notwithstanding, we found some compelling
evidence suggesting that the literature and the conversations we en-
gaged in for one short month may have induced a shift, however
subtle, in students’ perceptions of schooling. For example, the cen-
terpiece of one of the model schools was a beautiful fountain. It so
happens that one of its designers had read Regarding the Fountain
(Klise, 1998), in which a class battles with administrative bureaucracy
and corruption to get a drinking fountain at its school. Then there was
Keanu, a quiet, thoughtful child, who had read several of the books
from our collection, and pointed out that all those books had amenities
that Spring River didn’t have, like auditoriums and cafeterias and music
rooms. His model school had a huge auditorium right in the center.
And perhaps some of those clever but entirely infeasible course
offerings might in fact have been calls for true and meaningful
Lortie, Schoolteacher
235

alternatives to curriculum-as-usual. Sandwiched in between such cur-
ricular staples as ‘‘Textbooks,’’ ‘‘Lunch is one hour,’’ and ‘‘Pajama
Day,’’ we found plans like ‘‘Choose some of your periods’’ and ‘‘Dif-
ferent levels of testing and teaching.’’
Anybody who spends time with children and young adults either in-
side or outside the classroom hears frequent talk about their schooling,
and much of what we hear often involves complaints, suggestions, and
the same cries of unfairness that came up in our discussions with
Spring River students. But these issues usually hover around the
margins of school life, outside the realm of sanctioned school con-
versation. It was our goal to bring these issues into the realm of
legitimate classroom discourse. Harste writes that classroom discus-
sions of books should involve ‘‘opening up spaces in the curriculum
for starting some much needed new conversations’’ about social
practices which encourage students to ask ‘‘What is being taken for
granted and what other ways are there to think about this thing being
discussed’’? (Harste, 2003, p. 9) In their examination of schooling, the
fifth and sixth graders asked these kinds of questions and, in the end,
they provided some tentative answers for themselves. One group’s
description of its model history class shows just how powerfully a
vision of possibility can leave its mark:
In this class, we do not only teach the students the regular history as known in
other schools, we also make the students think of ideas to change the world.
Instead of just learning useless facts, we want them to extend their knowledge
and think out of the box and into the real world.
Such a vision of schooling is neither trivial nor unrealizable. It is a
vision that provides meaning and challenge to those who believe in it,
and it is well worth striving for.
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