On a recent trip to Barnes & Noble, I was captivated by a display in the young adult section called “Read with Proud.” As I picked up a few new releases, I was reminded of my high school days, before smart phones and social media, when I would cautiously approach the gay and lesbian section of my local bookstore.
Each visit was an uneasy yet defiant act of self-discovery, a search for validation and visibility within the pages of a book I had curated for myself, where “Giovanni’s Room” “Zami: A new spelling of my name,” and “Two boys swimming” was pivotal in shifting my perspective and made me think more deeply about who I am, who I am becoming, and who I want to be.
Looking back, escaping into my chosen literature was probably the most queer and radical thing I could have done at the time. My reading experiences at school denied me understanding of my budding queer identity and limited my knowledge of other people who might have had the same experiences as me. I never saw this part of who I was becoming reflected in myself.
in “Mirrors, windows, sliding doors” Rudin Sims Bishop suggests that educators think of the reader-text relationship as a “mirror” or a “window” and highlight the reader’s identity and experience through critical discovery.
“Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading thus becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek a mirror of themselves in books.”
today, Censorship of books and Curriculum ChallengesBishop’s words remind me of one of the reasons I became a teacher: to foster the type of English classes I needed as a high school student by building a community where students had the space to explore and engage with literature that acknowledges and affirms their identities. Moving LGBTQ+ youth from a place of survival where their humanity is denied to a place of thriving where they are affirmed and celebrated is an important and necessary change.
Creating mirrors and windows
In my English classes, I strive to provide texts that act as both mirrors and windows for my students, empowering them to see their own lives reflected in the stories we read and to gain insight into the experiences of others. Over the past five years, I have built a dual-enrollment English Language Arts program Tricia Ebarbia, Lorena Helman, Kimberly Parker and Julia TorresEducator Team #Destroy text.
The program asks students to complete a reflection survey that focuses on their experiences in English classes and identifies perceived gaps. Students are then asked the following questions:
- Who writes the story?
- Who is not in the story?
- Who benefits from these stories?
This exercise is intended to help students reflect on and express what is missing in their school reading experiences, address issues directly, and engage in conversations that frame our inquiry together. We then use these responses to solidify the course syllabus as a living document that prioritizes voices and stories that have been missing from their previous experiences in the English department.
Each year, student responses reveal that they are troubled by the lack of reading material in school that reflects marginalized groups, including LGBTQ+ books and authors. Over the following weeks and months, I compile reading lists for students based on their survey responses, thus reinforcing and personalizing the reading objectives and empowering students to chart their own learning paths in more critical and creative ways.
As students engage with these texts, we revisit Dr. Bishop’s framework, explore how mirrors and windows appear to them, and reflect on the literary works they have selected. At times, students encounter clear and precise representations while realizing they have never read anything that reveals such parts of themselves and their experiences. Most importantly, the window functions as a language through which students can understand their own experiences and identities, and those of others.
By the end of the year, our classroom community had produced thoughtful conversations and college-level projects in which students had explored important aspects of genre and authorial craft, made connections to other literary and media-based texts, raised lingering and new questions, and identified important connections to current social, cultural, and political realities.
As a culminating exercise at the end of the course, students will design a two-week unit of study that addresses further gaps and silences through the mirrors and windows of literature. Drawing from primary and secondary sources, students will self-select and curate a project to be integrated into the freshman curriculum for the following academic year.
These learning experiences in the English classroom not only provide students with meaningful expression in their book choices, but also foster deeper intellectual and emotional practices: Students learn to engage critically, embrace curiosity and wonder, and imagine new possibilities for themselves, their peers, and their communities.
Affirming identity through literature
Given the wide variety of text types currently available, students’ identities should be validated through their engagement with meaningful mirrors and windows of their choosing. Providing a sufficient number of mirrors and windows means that teachers understand that it is important for students to access the curriculum to see themselves and understand others, fostering a more inclusive and affirming learning community.
As I browsed the shelves at Barnes and Noble that afternoon, I thought of myself and my students. My journey from anxiously visiting bookstores in high school to becoming an educator who advocates for more inclusive literature underscores the importance of culturally responsive instruction.
These experiences continue to shape my work in the classroom, emphasizing that teachers must recognize the full humanity of their students. By prioritizing literature that reflects the full range of identities, students can embrace their most authentic selves and be empowered to envision life-affirming possibilities through the transformative power of story.
