Literature and Information

Why Pair Fiction and Nonfiction?

I have previously discussed the Common Core State Standards English Language Arts and Literacy demands for use of fiction and nonfiction in the high school classroom. The Common Core calls for what seems to be a significant increase in informational texts, but is that entirely true? While the balance of informational texts is 70% nonfiction and 30% fiction at the secondary level, the other content area classes share in this responsibility to make sure that students are reading more informational texts than fiction across the curriculum.²¹ That isn’t the only message we should take away from the 70/30 divide in Common Core for English Language Arts. This new distribution should encourage teachers to limit the amount of unnecessary literary works used in the classroom.

While reading for joy should remain our students’ purpose for reading, the literary texts we use in the classroom as instructional pieces should evoke rich discussions and deeper understanding of themes and content in all subgenre of literature used. They should also increase and improve students’ use of reading strategies when encountering any literary work. This is the perfect opportunity to hone in on the necessary works and skills students need to have in order to extend their learning and become lifelong consumers of literature. Therefore, pairing fiction and nonfiction enables teachers to meet several lesson goals in a shorter amount of time.

If teachers can teach skills that are present in both genres, they can help students make the connection between literature and informational texts. For instance, information about the real world setting of a literary work read in class can help deepen students’ understanding of the story itself and prepare them for learning about how setting evokes emotions in the reader. Incidentally, setting in dystopian literature is very important because it is the author’s way of painting a vivid picture of the culture in which the people of that society live.²² The setting alone can be very telling about the mayhem in a particular society. When students take special interest in specific topics read about in fiction (i.e. war, nature, society, government, etc.) they become curious about the real events that inspired those literary works. Helping students to make scientific or historical connections between topics in fiction and nonfiction helps students to deepen their understanding of the connection between all content areas in order to broaden and deepen their understanding of background knowledge and new knowledge.

Moreover, as students become older, it is expected that they develop the endurance to read longer works in order to synthesize a wide range of specific information or literary elements. This is best achieved with novels. However, not all novels have the broad and deep information students need to best understand the complex themes they examine. Because of this, it is important to supplement novels with other texts that are more informative or fill in gaps of information needed for full textual understanding.

Regarding dystopian novels specifically, it is true that they are of better use in the secondary classroom than simply having students read dystopian articles or shorter texts about utopias and dystopias. This is true because students need the full scope of events that are possible in a dystopian society, or even our society. For example, our society has never had annual televised events where the “Capitol” or government selects children to kill each other in a game of survival. However, societies around the world have engaged in forced warfare, decision-making influenced by social classes and power, and technological advances that have jeopardized citizens’ rights to privacy, all of which are present in the novels of this unit. In this respect, dystopian literature is important because it mirrors the harsh truths of our own society and depicts the reality that our society may one day become very similar to many of the dystopian societies we read about in fiction. In brief, dystopian literature is the bridge between fiction and nonfiction. It crosses freely between fiction and nonfiction, utopian culture being fictional and dystopian culture being more realistic, or nonfiction.