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How to Create a Balanced Literacy Classroom

Literary canons are a fine literary resources for students; however, they are not fair and balanced. Too often our literary canons are upper-class, majority race and gender. Women writers are often left out of the literary genres. A literature class is lucky if just one ethnic writer is studied. It's very important that a teacher plans his/her curriculum with the goal of having a balanced literary class in mind. An instructor should keep a balance between writers of different religions, races, genders, sexual orientations, historical timelines and genres.

Instructions

    • 1

      Create a list of literary items for the course curriculum. Use other teachers' curricula as a resource or the state guidelines, if applicable.

    • 2

      Create a chart of the authors you listed. Include religions, race, gender, sexual orientation, historical timeline and genre as parameters. Check to see if your authors are evenly spread across the chart. If yes, then you can stop here. Your chart most likely will not be evenly spread.

    • 3

      Using literature resource lists, find adequate literary items that fill in the missing parts on your chart. Decide how many ethnicities you want to cover. For example, if creating a curriculum for an American Literature class, try to include the different ethnic writers who arouse out of the American immigrant experience.

    • 4

      Check the reading level of all the literary items. Approximatively one third of the books should be directly on the student's level. The other two thirds should be slightly above the student's level. These proportions will help you address the varying reading levels of all the students but also to challenge students.

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Literature

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