Choosing new texts to teach in the English classroom is always difficult. There are any number of “worthy” or “worthwhile” texts to teach and we often choose texts about difficult subjects, like racism, refugees, or the holocaust. While these sorts of narratives play a valuable role they are often far removed from many students’ experiences of life. We also often choose texts that “the boys will like”, again suggesting that some experiences of life are more worth learning about than others.
With teenage anxiety and depression on the rise, it is perhaps more important than ever to teach students uplifting texts: texts that show the ordinary, everyday problem of teenagers and also the ordinary, everyday ways that the characters learn to overcome these problems. That is, we can show students the many different types of resilience they will need in their lives through the texts we teach.
So the outcome of studying uplifting texts isn’t just the text response task at the end, but engaging with the wellbeing of students as we study a text. This means as students read through an uplifting text, they might keep a record of the challenges that are faced by the protagonist and reflect upon times they themselves have faced a similar challenge (or have seen a friend face a similar challenge). In this way, students will become more closely engaged with the text itself and can think about the different ways characters overcome (or not!) their problems. Students can do this by filling out a table like the one below and choosing words from the vocabulary list beneath it to complete the second and fourth column in the table.
Table:
Problem a character faces | Word to describe how this personal problem is dealt with | Similar problem I have faced (or have seen a friend or family member face) | Word to describe how this personal problem was dealt with |
Words:
avoids |
confronts |
argues |
schemes |
ignores |
pretends |
escalates |
mediates |
keeps busy |
distracts |
complains |
runs away |
obsesses |
talks about it |
plans |
enlists help |
asks for help |
freaks out |
gives in |
works harder |
And also…
Students can also engage with positive messages in a text by filling out bookmarks and inserting them into the text as they read it:
I admire the way… | I respect the way… | I understand what the
character feels here because I’ve also… |
Like this character here…
I think people could… |