A History of Black People as Readers: A Genealogy of Critical Literacy

Content Objectives:

Literacy Instruction & Remediation

Literacy Elements & Scarborough’s Rope

Reading intervention is often divided into the “big five” elements: phonemic awareness (understanding of sounds), phonics (the connection between sounds and letters), fluency (the ability to read naturally and accurately), vocabulary knowledge, and overall reading comprehension. The metaphor of Scarborough’s Reading Rope¹ breaks these ideas down further into the skills that build basic “word recognition” and the skills of language comprehension. Students must have phonemic and phonological awareness—that is, the understanding that words are composed of syllables represented by letters. They must also be able to decode words by applying their understanding of sound and letter, and to instantly recognize common “sight” words that may not follow normal English patterns.

At the secondary level, teachers are rarely expected to review the basics of phonics, such as the principle that letters indicate sounds or the decoding of single-syllable words. However, some students will require direct instruction in breaking down words by syllable, in recognizing spelling patterns and their impact on pronunciation, and in general phonemic awareness. Successful interventions, especially at the secondary level, weave this baseline instruction into grade-level content.²

These foundational reading skills are necessary but not sufficient. Most students who have gaps in their decoding ability, and many more who are able decoders, will need support in the second half of Scarborough’s Rope. Scarborough describes these skills as students’ background knowledge, vocabulary, and understanding of language structures, verbal reasoning, and literary knowledge.

To engage productively with a text, students need sufficient background knowledge to situate it in their experiences, and weaker readers can use their background knowledge to help them decode.³ For example, a student-athlete who reads at a second-grade level might struggle to comprehend a current news article on biology; give that same student a critical analysis of a baseball team’s performance, however, and he may be much more successful. Some of that success will come from his increased motivation and self-efficacy in reading a text he is interested in. However, without the need to pause and consciously infer the definition of “a curveball,” “a home run” or “an error,” he can now devote all of his mental energy to parsing the sentences and following the author’s argument. Effective teaching for background knowledge might mean using high-interest texts for specific reading skills, and front-loading contextual information to students when emphasizing a particular text.

In a similar way, students must know or be able to credibly infer the meaning of the words they are reading. Detailed focus on vocabulary, word consciousness, and morphology builds students’ vocabulary knowledge,⁴ but does not necessarily translate to higher comprehension generally.⁵ A basic understanding of syntax, punctuation, and sentence structure is necessary for students to follow what the author is saying and understand the relationships between the words. Scarborough points out that students who lack the vocabulary, background information, or language structure to comprehend a sentence do not have a reading difficulty so much as an “oral language limitation.”⁶ For the secondary teacher, it’s vital to demystify this process for students; they should identify where and why their comprehension is breaking down. Cris Tovani, a longtime practitioner of secondary reading intervention, offers strategies for students such as visualizing their reading, retelling a concept to themselves, or relying on print conventions to identify key elements.⁷ Pre-teaching key vocabulary, modeling fluent reading aloud, and breaking down complex or unusual sentences with students are all ways to address these gaps in the course of normal secondary instruction.

Finally, students need direct instruction in the verbal reasoning and literary knowledge that is more likely to be covered in standard secondary English curriculum. Most secondary English curriculum will engage students in relying on background knowledge to support inferences, as well as review concepts such as metaphors to distinguish between literal and abstract statements. Literary knowledge is the understanding of genre conventions, fiction vs. nonfiction, prose vs. poetry, and text structures such as headings, titles, lists, etc. Literary knowledge is often applied in students’ writing as often as it is taught in reading, and reminding students to “read like a writer” can help them recognize authorial moves that improve comprehension.

As word recognition becomes increasingly automatic and language comprehension becomes increasingly strategic, students develop into more confident readers. But there is no magic bullet. The further “behind” secondary students are, the more desperately urgent it is to educate them on their own skills and give them control over what they do. A class of 34 ninth graders all reading below grade level will almost certainly need 34 different forms of help. One effective first step is to demystify the reading process while also engaging them in critical literacy. Gholdy Muhammad offers a compelling framework for this step.

Culturally & Historically Responsive Education

Gholdy Muhammad’s framework is called Culturally and Historically Responsive Education, or CHRE. Drawing on the historical practices of Black readers across generations, she groups the work of literacy instruction into five areas: skills, identity, intellect, criticality, and joy. Muhammad explicitly calls the five core goals of her framework “pursuits,” not standards, arguing pursuits are ongoing and lifelong.⁸ These five pursuits are active and necessary components of a well-rounded and well-founded literacy. In the lessons below, I will offer ways to integrate them into each historical study of prior readers, but first I will define them broadly.

Muhammad defines skills as the “cognitive acts of reading, writing and speaking.”⁹ This is one area in which existing curriculum and teacher training need only be refined, not created. The key adjustment I suggest in this unit is this: to define and teach all levels of literacy skills to all students, while empowering them to identify their own strengths and areas for growth, and to do this by learning from adult readers of the past.

Two additional areas of Muhammad’s framework are common in successful and supportive classrooms: identity and intellectualism. In describing the importance of intellectualism, Muhammad highlights that the reading of the 19th century was reading for a purpose, to gain academic and world knowledge. When William Whipper, a Black coal-heaver, spoke in 1828 at the first meeting of the first Reading Room Society, he encouraged his peers by pointing out that they lived in a time when “men studious of change are constantly looking for something new [to learn], and no sooner has the mind become gratified than new means of gratification are sought for.”¹⁰ He was describing the same positive feedback loop found in many classrooms today: a student with significant background knowledge on a topic can better read a text on that topic, thereby gaining additional knowledge, thereby improving their ability to read an even more difficult text on a related topic, and so on. Such intellectualism has been devalued in many districts that focused instead on the “skills” of reading for high-stakes tests. Muhammad’s work is a corrective to that trend, supported by a broad review of the research, ¹¹ and the case studies students engage in in this unit build their knowledge of local and national history.

Muhammad also argues that identity development is a crucial aspect of literacy development, and that reading was a way for historic Black communities to “make meaning of their many and complex identities.”¹² This is highlighted by research of the past decades emphasizing the importance of reading texts that can serve as “mirrors” to students’ experiences and “windows” to others’.^{13 14} In this unit, each case study includes suggestions for engaging students in discussions of their identities.

Muhammad’s last two pursuits, criticality and joy, are unfortunately embattled in many districts. She positions criticality in the historical context of these early literary societies, where men and women took an action that was illegal in other parts of the country. It was and is impossible, in Muhammad’s view, to fully engage students as readers without allowing them to “use literacy as the means to counter injustice.” Reading instruction that emphasizes criticality emphasizes “the capacity to read, write, and think in ways of understanding power, privilege, social justice, and oppression.”¹⁵ This pursuit may require more subtlety in some districts than others, but to avoid it is to dehistoricize and devalue the practice of literacy in the United States.

In Muhammad’s framework, joy is not merely fun or celebration, but “a sustained effort to recognize the honor of and beauty within the Earth…teaching our children to name the beauty within themselves and within humanity.”¹⁶ In my case, Philadelphia schools have few to no libraries, new curriculum in English Language Arts replaces creative final projects with repetitive essay structures, and schedulers were recently asked to remove arts electives from most ninth and 10th graders citywide in favor of more time with the test-preparatory curriculum. Pursuing joy in this unit means embedding music, art, and poetry in literacy, as well as thoughtfulness, introspection, and a recognition of what Muhammad unapologetically calls children’s geniuses. One straightforward way to do this is with a layered texts strategy, covered in more detail later, but the deeper need is for a fundamental shift towards centering student voices and student collaboration, which I address through students’ individual syllabi.

Historical Case Studies

This unit introduces students to five specific stories of literacy under fire. In each study, students use primary and secondary sources in order to:

1. Identify the specific reading skills that the readers demonstrated and demanded. This creates a space to explore the aspects of reading and apply Gholdy Muhammad’s five pursuits.
2. Recognize institutional barriers to this access and how those involved responded to enact temporary or lasting change.
3. Apply their learning to sculpting their own identities as readers and intellectuals by adding specific texts to their personal syllabi.

Self-Liberation through Reading: Antebellum America

First, students examine the challenges of primarily self-educated, enslaved readers in the antebellum South, in order to identify the nuts and bolts of reading. In chapter three of When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery and Religion in the Antebellum South, Janet D. Cornelius (1992) describes the relentless drive of many enslaved men, women, and children for education. Cornelius reviews how, despite laws in some states banning literacy instruction, and widespread punishment even where it was legal, enslaved people found ingenious ways to learn to read: engaging white children to unconsciously teach them, back-engineering understanding of the alphabet from memorized portions of the Bible, or attending secret night or Sunday schools. To build background knowledge, share with students some of the specific laws that outlawed literacy, such as the 1740 Negro Code of South Carolina, which expressed the fear that “the having of slaves taught to write, or suffering them to be employed in writing, may be attended with great inconveniences.” By 1800, as historian Heather Andrea Williams points out, this law had been expanded to prohibit all “mental instruction” and applied to both enslaved and free Blacks.¹⁷ A Georgia law of 1829 forbade teaching literacy to “any slave, negro, or free person of colour.”¹⁸ In 1830, North Carolina explicitly outlawed literacy among slaves because it would “excite dissatisfaction in their minds and…produce insurrection and rebellion.”¹⁹

To narrow the focus, Chapter 10 of “The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written By Himself”²⁰ is one readable, engaging text for secondary students. In this chapter, Douglass summarizes how he first learned to read from a sympathetic mistress, and credits the white master who tried to deny him literacy with giving him “the first decidedly anti-slavery lecture” young Freddy had ever heard. The angry Mr. Auld, in scolding his young wife for teaching Douglass the alphabet, declared, “If [Douglass] learns to read the Bible it will for ever unfit him to be a slave…If you teach him to read, he’ll want to know how to write, and this accomplished, he’ll be running away with himself.”²¹ Auld laid out what Douglass now understood to be “the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.” Douglass summarizes his master’s point as: “Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” Douglass’ determination to claim himself and his literacy provides an opportunity to ask students to think about how they define themselves as readers, writers, and academics.

As this is the story of Douglass learning to read, it offers an avenue to explore beginning reading skills such as phonics and phonemic awareness. Douglass, like many would-be readers, got his hands on a copy of Webster’s “blue-backed” speller. Published first in 1783 as “A Grammatical Institute of the English Language,” this basic text introduced students to English literacy starting from straightforward syllables up to complex and elaborate sentences. Cornelius points out that years after emancipation, former slaves would proudly exchange how far in a “Speller” they had progressed.²² Facsimiles of old spellers are widely available online. Asking students to decode the increasingly difficult syllable structures allows teachers and students to identify possible gaps in their phonemic awareness. At the same time, students are exploring a key primary source. A further text to include is Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem “An Ante-Bellum Sermon,” written in the voice of a Black preacher who reads Bible texts for liberation while piously, slyly insisting that he is speaking only metaphorically, “in a Bibleistic way.”²³ Dunbar imagines the preacher’s Southern accent in a way that might frustrate students at first but will serve as an excellent opportunity to practice the same decoding skills they have identified in the speller. A more straightforward introduction, prior to Dunbar’s poem, could be a review of Frances Watkins Harper’s “Learning to Read,” where she adopts the voice of a newly emancipated, elderly Black woman determined to gain literacy.²⁴

The final step in analyzing Douglass’ experiences is for students to ask themselves, “Who determines what you read, and why?” My students will explore the curriculum map for the next four years of their high school career and identify texts and authors they are excited to experience, as well as naming perspectives that are lacking. They will then begin their personal syllabi by adding biographies or autobiographies of individuals they want to understand better.

Claiming Academia: The Institute for Colored Youth

Several states away from Douglass, but less than five miles from my current school, a different but analogous claiming of education occurred with the founding and revising of the Institute for Colored Youth. My students will first explore this Institute’s founding documents. The Institute began with an 1837 bequest by the Quaker Robert Humphreys to found in Philadelphia a “benevolent society or institution…having for its object the benevolent design of instructing the descendants of the African race in school learning, in the various branches of the mechanic arts and trade, and in agriculture, in order to prepare and fit and qualify them to act as teachers in such of those branches of useful business as in the judgment of the said society they may appear best qualified for.”²⁵ A letter by a friend of Humphreys dismissed the possibility of Black youth in “learned professions.” However, once the Institute opened in 1852, the Black teachers quickly decided they were not here to train exclusively farmers and seamstresses. Instead, the Institute became the place to train the teachers.

The Institute became a leadership factory, with a rigorous classical curriculum including Latin, Greek, and Trigonometry, and final exams open to the public. Notable alumni included Fanny Jackson Coppin, born in slavery and later the first Black superintendent; Jacob C. White, first Black principal; and Caroline LeCount, a Philadelphia public school teacher and principal and one of the organizers, along with her fiancé and fellow alum Octavius Catto, of the civil disobedience that led to the desegregation of Philadelphia transit. The first graduate of the Institute, Jesse Ewing Glasgow, Jr., continued his studies at the University of Edinburgh before dying of illness at 23; an online exhibit about the Institute shares a story of Glasgow so effectively demonstrating his mathematics skills to a racist would-be author that “the book…was never published.” This exhibit is an excellent repository of primary sources for use in a jigsaw or gallery-walk activity, including final exam questions that will challenge students to translate Latin or solve complex algebraic problems. Lest these final exams seem overwhelming, teachers can also use a set of lessons from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania where a young scholar’s diary describes her early experiences as a student.²⁶ Her accounts of supporting a friend at a public spelling examination and waiting anxiously for a teacher to be hired for her own class are not very different, either in tone or spelling, from what any of my students might write.

In addition to the background knowledge of Philadelphian history, study of the Institute opens up space to explicitly instruct students on the role of Greek and Latin roots in building vocabulary, especially the kind of multisyllabic words that emerge increasingly in high school reading. Online programs such as Membeam²⁷ provide opportunities for students to expand their vocabulary and for teachers to review morphology and word structure. Since the Institute’s initial mandate was to train students in “useful” skills, there is space to engage students in critical debate on the fundamental purpose of education. At the same time, the stories of alumni and of the Institute’s transition from industrial school to academic powerhouse are opportunities to engage students in joy: how are they, in their own lives, countering stereotypes and celebrating their genius?

Resisting Assimilation: Carlisle Indian School

If the Institute for Colored Youth is a story of a minoritized population salvaging an educational institution, the Carlisle Indian School is a less straightforward narrative. Opened in 1879 in central Pennsylvania, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was founded by U.S. Army General Richard Henry Pratt, today (in)famous for stating the goal of this education as “Kill the Indian, save the man.” Study of this institution entered the public eye again in 2021, when the bodies of nine Sicangu Lakota students who died of various illnesses at the school were finally repatriated. Carlisle was the first Native boarding school, but prompted hundreds more, and was the major work of Pratt’s later life. Thousands of children attended over the school’s thirty years, obtaining a basic education in English and in industrial and domestic service training. Children sent or brought to this school were no longer called by their Native names, were punished for speaking their Native languages, and were explicitly being coached to abandon their culture and then return to Native society as ambassadors of the “superior” white ways.  Some of the Native student writers in this lesson speak positively of Carlisle, and students must understand that students faced physical and spiritual violence to enforce their assimilation. One way to illustrate this is to show students the online archive maintained by Dickinson College, and specifically the options in the search engine. The almost 8,000 digitized records include topics such as “Student Deaths,” “Student Criticism of the School,” “Keeping Money of Runaway Students,” and “Non-Consensual Enrollment,” or as at least one father called it, “kidnapping.”²⁸

In my lesson, students will focus specifically on one issue of Eadle Keatah Toh, the school’s paper for broader consumption, and the School News, an amateur monthly paper for students. Although both papers were largely written by students, they served three purposes that were clearly dictated by administration: exemplar, propaganda, and discipline. Student writing in the paper was often held up as an example. However, starting with the first issue, the paper was regularly disseminated by Pratt and his supporters as an example of their success in “civilizing” the students. The paper also served as an arena for public shaming of students who spoke their own language, misbehaved or did not progress academically. 

The first issue of Eadle Keatah Toh could seem positive, with a title in an (unnamed) Native dialect and an emphasis on family support for schooling, but a section where the school’s new academics are described will demonstrate assimilation for students. Explaining that instruction began before the arrival of a shipment of “white men’s clothes,” the writer blames an initial lack of progress on “gaily embroidered blankets” and “arms adorned with bracelets,” claiming: “All were eager to learn, but it was soon evident that the barber and the tailor must take precedence in the work of civilization. The daily sessions were short, and not much was effected until blankets had disappeared. Gradually the delightful vision of bedaubed faces, barbaric ornaments and picturesque costumes ceased to attract the gaping crowd, and now…it is fast assuming the characteristics of a well graded, well-organized public school.”²⁹  This text provides an opportunity for students to apply criticality, recognizing the power imbalance and the limits and dangers of an “education” that strips students of their humanity.

An issue of Student News from two years later provides a more in-depth view of student ideas. This issue is designated along the top of the second page as the responsibility of “Charles Kihega (Iowa Indian Boy), Editor and Proprietor,” and students can analyze the tension inherent in the juxtaposition of “Charles” with the proud claiming of the tribe. Other texts to draw students’ attention to include:

• A letter from Edgar G. Squirrel expresses gratitude for learning English.
• An “account” of “one boy” who the writer thinks should “Drop his Dakota book” because “Books in Indian language are of no account at this school.”
• Praise for a Julia Prior who is glad that she can now speak English because “there are no wild Indians to laugh at us.”
• An essay from Stephen K. White Bear that is entitled “Speak Only English” but that expresses some profound ambivalence about English, the school, and the desires of his classmates of all tribes to learn Sioux.³⁰

The extent to which the young contributors to this paper are or are not able to embed their battle against assimilation in even this public space will engage students in conversations of identity.

Fluency is defined in the National Reading Panel’s report as reading “with speed, accuracy, and proper expression.” Students who decode correctly but cannot put words together in a natural, rapid fashion “no matter how bright they are, will continue to read slowly and with great effort.”³¹ The writings of the Carlisle students in their second language provide an opportunity for my students to practice and assess their own fluency through guided oral reading with a teacher or peer. In addition to analyzing the word choice and arguments of the young writers, they will identify content by a youth writer, current or historical, to add to their personal syllabus. A key function of this case study is to encourage students’ joy and empowerment by asking how they can use their own genius to push back against school or community practices that underestimate their potential or force them into rigid roles.

Curricular Demands: Lumumba-Zapata College

A deep understanding of the campus movements of the 1960s is beyond the scope of this unit, but depending on their previous history instruction students will likely need a baseline review to establish this case study as occurring after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and during the Vietnam War. Two possible introductions to establish context are episode 40 of John Green’s “Crash Course: American History”³² YouTube series, which will give an extremely broad but student-friendly overview of campus activism specifically starting at 8:05, or episode 40 of Clint Smith’s “Crash Course: Black American History,” “Women and the Black Power Movement.”³³ Once students understand the nature of this campus activism that attempted to cut across national, racial and class boundaries, they can examine the founding of Lumumba-Zapata College, later Third College, now Thurgood Marshall College.

Less than a year after it opened with two colleges, in 1965, the University of California San Diego began planning for a third, interdisciplinary college focused on history and the liberal arts. The Mexican American Youth Organization and the Black Student Council, two student groups, formed the Lumumba-Zapata coalition to advocate for a new kind of college, one focused on student power and ethnic studies. (Students will need a brief explanation of Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the Democratic Congo and a victim of assassination in 1961, and Emiliano Zapata, a Mexican revolutionary.) Angela Davis, then a graduate student and key member of the coalition, described the initial mandate of the college in this way:

“We envisioned it as a college which would admit one-third Chicano students, one-third Black students, and one-third working-class white students. We had it all worked out! Or at least we thought we did…I learned that I did not have to leave political activism behind in order to be an effective teacher.”³⁴

Even with a supposedly supportive administration, the Lumumba-Zapata coalition faced significant pushback. Students will benefit from engaging with several sources, possibly in a jigsaw classroom format, prior to their close examination of the college’s curricular plan. At 13 minutes in to a documentary on political philosopher and then-faculty member Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis recounts a story of occupying the registrar’s office to restart the stalled process and the way in which Marcuse used his own status to protect the students involved.³⁵ A short, student-developed history covers the eventual naming of the college and its final transformation into Thurgood Marshall College.³⁶ A New York Times article from the November after the school’s founding expresses mild astonishment that in a place “led by Angela Davis, the black militant,” students were “[going] quietly about their classes in a cluster of Quonset huts and wooden barracks.”³⁷ The article goes on to give an uncritical description of fears about the college, allowing students to bring their own criticality to recognize the article’s biases and assumptions.

In this case study, students build their skills in recognizing text structures and genre knowledge. Prior to reading the student-generated “Demands for the Third College,”³⁸ available online at the UCSD library, students will need to recognize the impact of the headings, numbered lists, and repeated signal phrases like “In order to..” that guide readers through the reasons for each demand. Beginning with the declaration “We now seek to learn about ourselves from a minority perspective,” the unidentified writers call for an in-depth study of revolutions, economics, science, public health, development, “communication arts,” foreign language, and cultural heritage. Their final demand is for courses in “white studies” that will “emphasize the negative as well as positive elements of the history of Western civilization.”  This document is the closest real-world example of what students should themselves be developing. Key questions to pose include “What kind of student are you? What kind of learner are you? How are those things aligned or not aligned?” At the close of the study, and very possibly inspired by the demands of the Lumumba-Zapata Coalition, students should identify at least two concepts or ideas that their local curriculum does not address, and add those to their syllabi.

Black Lives Matter at School

In their final case study, students will examine the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement and, specifically, the Week of Action that takes place in participating schools the first week of each February. Although this is an issue that may feel like “current events” to adults, background is still necessary. Incoming ninth graders in the 24-25 school year were infants in 2013, when the hashtag was coined in the wake of George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the killing of Trayvon Martin. They were toddlers when Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and not yet in middle school when Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in 2020. A factual review of the goals and founding of this movement helps students situate it in history; one example exists in Encyclopedia Britannica.³⁹ As a transition into this study students can read an excerpt from Chapter 11, “Saved,” of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. In this chapter, Malcolm X describes the origins of his experience as a self-taught intellectual, and especially of the way in which reading history “opened [his] eyes gradually, and then wider and wider” to embedded and institutionalized racism.⁴⁰

Students can again engage with layered text sets to establish their background knowledge; locally, they can review video of a newly-wed couple who joined a 2020 Philadelphia protest,⁴¹ a skeptical article on the first Week of Action in Philadelphia⁴², a more supportive article on the Week of Action in Philadelphia in 2018,⁴³ the blog post announcing the first Week of Action and enumerating the thirteen principles⁴⁴, and Philadelphia’s local BLM campaign for educational justice.⁴⁵  Stories on local and national pushback to Black Lives Matter activities in schools specifically allows students to assess the perceived role of education in society, while also sharing their own memories and experiences with this movement and its impact, or lack thereof, on individual classrooms in Philadelphia.

Black Lives Matter At Schools began in Seattle in the fall of 2016, but quickly spread to Philadelphia. The Racial Justice Organizing Committee, a subset of a caucus of the teacher’s union, formed to “[shine] a light on the systemic racism and austerity that resulted in our children receiving less, year after year, stripping them of the education they deserved.”⁴⁶ The curriculum developed for the week focused each day on a few of the thirteen principles of Black Lives Matter. Anticipating and receiving local backlash, teachers and students involved in the organizing prepared a FAQ sheet to counter misinformation.⁴⁷ After several years, the various groups supporting the Week of Action coalesced around four key demands: an end to zero-tolerance, punitive school discipline, better hiring and retention of Black teachers, Black and ethnic studies curriculum from kindergarten through twelfth grade, and bringing District schools in line with a national recommendation of one counselor for every 250 students.⁴⁸ In reviewing the thirteen principles of Black Lives Matter and the demands of the Week of Action, students can engage in their own vision of a more equitable future.

In this study, students must evaluate the importance of background knowledge and identify how organizers for Black Lives Matter and Black Lives Matter At Schools prioritized the context and history of their movements. Exploring the crowd-sourced Curriculum Resource Guide⁴⁹ for Black Lives Matter At School reveals more resources across grade levels, content areas, and topics than could be taught in years. My local chapter of BLM also offers annual resource guides and calendars in a broadly accessible Google Doc, each resource tagged by the principle it espouses.⁵⁰ Students can review, evaluate, and borrow from these resources to update their own syllabi with texts that will empower them to make changes in their next four years of high school.

At the close of these case studies, students will have studied five different aspects of literacy from the perspective of five different groups of or individual readers and begun to generate their own, personal reading lists to shape their growth as intellectuals and activists. These personal syllabi will include how they wish their growth to be measured and will supplement (and, where necessary, counter) state or district mandates. By learning from the past, students will establish more control over their literary and intellectual futures.