In the spring of 2017, Nobles teachers who make up the Sophomore English “Core” gathered to address the fundamental conundrum of teaching American Literature: the dead white guys always seem to hog all the major texts in our curriculum as well as much of the classroom time… Hawthorne and Irving, Whitman and Thoreau, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, O’Neill and Miller. You get the picture, especially if you have ever taught, or ever taken, a high school American Literature course. As a colleague observing my class once stated: “I have probably taught The Scarlet Letter more than any other text.”

I have to admit that I love teaching The Scarlet Letter, and Long Day’s Journey into Night may well be my favorite work to share with students. But what to do about those authors that get “short shrift” when an American Literature curriculum lapses into an automatically accepted and easily justified selection of traditional Canonical texts written by white men? Does a three-day lesson on The Harlem Renaissance or a quick read of Ralph Ellison’s “Battle Royal” do justice to the African American experience? Does a short story by Gish Jen or Sherman Alexie “check the box” as adequate attention to Asian Americans or Native Americans? Does the immigrant experience deserve its own dedicated text? And do we ever treat those Mayflower folks as the immigrants they were: individuals and families that fled their home country for a reason… no different and no better than folks from China or Ireland, the Dominican Republic or Haiti?

So, the Sophomore English core got together, and, over coffee and babka and burritos for lunch, armed with Post-It-Notes and sharpies, we attempted to arrive at a curriculum of texts, themes, and questions that would provide a sophisticated and intellectually challenging course for our students and a more appropriately diverse inclusion of essential American authors. The process provided us with myriad opportunities to challenge students with cultural overlaps and aesthetic connections through which to explore American themes and “dreams,” as well as to reveal the barriers and privileges served up by race and ethnicity, by class and religion, by gender and sexual orientation.

Interestingly, pairing certain “new” texts with some more traditional texts also added relevancy and vibrancy to more familiar characters, settings, plots, and themes. We still read The Scarlet Letter, but Hawthorne’s text is followed by another novel that moves a female protagonist through seventeenth century “America,” and while in A Mercy Toni Morrison also notes the problematic rise of religious zealotry, she focuses primarily upon the colonies lurching through a slavery system that is not yet solely determined by race. The overtly white masculine tales of Twain, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald are countered by the sensationally powerful Fleur of Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, a young woman who wages a determined, if doomed, supernatural battle against the white men of an American society eager to ravage her land and her tribe as well as her. Willy Loman’s “American Dream” for Biff is complimented by the expectations and beliefs regarding success put forth by Troy Maxson to his son when we compare two plays that both earned Pulitzer Prizes for Drama, Death of a Salesman in 1949 and Fences in 1987.

However, it was not an easy discussion, nor did we arrive at a permanent curriculum, and certain favorite texts were left off… I lost Long Day’s Journey into Night, and The Great Gatsby was relegated to Summer Reading, oftentimes the academic resting place for texts deemed not quite consequential enough for a lengthy classroom commitment. But we did not leave Fitzgerald’s novel behind in that forgotten heap after the early days of September. Instead, the tale of Gatsby provided us with various “essential questions” to follow throughout the year.

For instance, why do we have this national obsession with an American Dream that simultaneously forges and corrupts identity, morality, and spirituality… and when did it start? John Winthrop’s opening to “A Model of Christian Charity” and Benjamin Franklin’s “little book” of “virtues” provide early signs of it. And can a student fully understand Death of A Salesman without seeing Willy Loman’s flawed aspirations as related to those tragic ones of James Gatz, or read Fences without realizing that these same national aspirations for success are not always available (even today) to all Americans? Or, how do the “vanished trees” of Fitzgerald’s “fresh green breast of the new world” connect to the Nature of Hawthorne’s forest that only temporarily offers Hester and Arthur respite and hope in the face of Puritan society, or explain other trees that tumble down upon the heads of lumber crews who have come to claim and to clear the woods of Lake Matchimanito at the end of Tracks?

Ultimately, what did we learn in our examination of how we teach American Literature to Nobles sophomores? Most importantly, we learned that we still have work to do. We recognized that we must continue to revisit our curriculum’s texts, authors, and themes in order to effectively present a selection of American literature that is a more accurate representation of both the diverse national identity and our evolving student and faculty communities. For while our curriculum dedicates significant time to the African American/Black diaspora, slavery, and survival, we need to better represent and explore the Asian and Hispanic experiences and the diversity within these cultures as they become “American.”

We also realized that we must take into account the Nobles Mission Statement as we craft a “core” English course; our Mission includes the following goals:

“(Nobles) generates critical, creative, socially conscious thinkers; upholds a commitment to diversity; develops character and intellect in deliberate conjunction; cultivates purposeful citizenship on local, national and global levels.”

In short, the Nobles Mission Statement requires us to move past a traditional American Literary Canon that can be limiting in its fealty to those “dead white guys” and discriminatory in its exclusion of the authors and texts necessary for a truly relevant American Literature course. A “new path” demands that new authors and new texts be raised to the same levels of discourse and task as those authors and texts that have always been held up as quintessentially American. We know that only by reaching a more balanced curriculum in concert with our stated institutional principles can we effectively teach American Literature to our students at Nobles.