Barmbrick-Santoyo, Paul and Stephen Chiger. Love & Literacy: A Practical Guide for Grades 5-12 To Finding Magic in Literature. Jossey-Bass, 2021.
It was a simple tweet. I posted a picture from the second day of school, showing my own annotations of a C.S. Lewis essay with the caption, “Teaching students annotation means modeling my own.” To my surprise, author Stephen Chiger responded that he taught the same, most notably in his book Love & Literacy published in 2021 for Uncommon Schools, a public charter network in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts.
Intrigued, I wanted to see if a design to foster reading and literacy in urban public schools might share some practices with classical education. The premise of the book is a true ideal: “This is what love in a literacy classroom looks like: a love for the conversation, love for the text, and love for the ideas they both spark. When that includes all students, magic happens.” I kept reading.
Bambrick-Santoyo and Chiger want students to move away from surface reading, but the caveat is that students can only love texts they understand. I immediately wondered if they would make the case for contemporary novels and poetry only. They do. To a point. In choosing “representative” works, they swallow the idea that students need to literally see themselves in what they read. Thus, the curriculum should include authors of cultures specific to the school where students “more clearly see themselves and a window through which we might better know others.” I do see the value in choosing books in this way, but I would also hope for more range of choice. And yes, the authors do disparage old books, saying that books from the 1800s are limited by their time period, those worldviews, and the predominance of white male authors.
Unsurprisingly, Bambrick-Santoyo and Chiger fail to argue for using those very limits as a point of discussion, fail to argue for humane learning where students recognize their own human nature in characters from any work, country, or chronology. I almost lost hope of finding something to agree with.
Thankfully, those were but a few statements in an early chapter. The absolute marvel is that they next argued for something called a “complexity curriculum,” text choices that actively build in complexity to push students’ development in understanding. This I agree with! The authors provide a number of curriculum charts to show how they intentionally choose literature for their schools. It is a marvelous blend of contemporary and canon, including Shakespeare. Yes, an old playwright! If the curriculum is too simple, they write, then the same voices, genres, and ideas pop up ad nauseam. Students need to be stretched because readers get better at reading by reading more and reading more challenging material.
Throughout these early chapters in Part I, Bambrick-Santoyo and Chiger provide multiple questions, charts, and examples to aid teachers with their curriculum selections. Wholly helpful, they offer questions like, “What do I want students to be able to say about this text? What tasks will require students to closely read the text to answer it?” Much of their explanation reminds me of Mortimer Adler and his syntopical reading process in How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading. Strangely enough, the authors never mention or credit him once, though many of the practical steps that follow parallel Adler’s process of inspectional and analytical reading.
Bambrick-Santoyo and Chiger’s goal is to help students draw on background knowledge, to read for claims, and to know when and how to analyze more deeply. The teacher should prepare to “drop” background as needed, things like literary or historical knowledge. Again, they provide working charts and practice passages any teacher could glean from. I admit I used to think this was an intuitive step for good teachers. Here, it’s expressly set out and includes acronyms to help students stay on track with their analysis. Consider the acronym MR. CUF: multiple meanings, repeated language, charged connotations, unexpected language, and figurative language. It easily reminds me of AP Language or Literature training and their use of SOAPSTONE, TPCASTT, or DIDLSS. The point is to train students to remember what to look for as they read.
By Part II, Bambrick-Santoyo and Chiger make a particularly strong case for students to respond to a text in writing first, and discussion second. Teachers monitor students interacting with a text and can see where they struggle because they truly monitor the room, not just circulate. Write first, talk second. Skip the regurgitation. I needed this reminder because I do ask my classes to paraphrase aloud from what was read, but the point is to have them interact with the text first on their own, shaping their own opinion. More importantly, teachers also show students how they interact with the text. They answer the same big idea or theme or figurative language question and reveal what they wrote to each other. It’s a system I plan to rely on more.
To aid the “Write first, talk second” principle, Bambrick-Santoyo and Chiger offer a specific system of annotation. When given a piece of writing, students must underline claims and counterclaims. They are trained to look for specific wording. Depending on the piece, teachers may have them look for other key parts and make margin notes. Again, the teacher monitors the work. What’s fun in this chapter is that Bambrick-Santoyo and Chiger mention classroom management and Doug Lemov in case you have students who want to do nothing for ten minutes!
From here, the authors demonstrate how to use these same annotations to generate discussions, discussions that are lightly facilitated by the teachers but easily seen as student-led, quite similar to the Harkness style. The teacher knows the difficulties of the text that lie ahead and steers students to “productive struggle.” What follows is dozens and dozens of sample class discussions that reveal helpful wording for the teacher. Whether we call it Harkness, Socratic, discussion circles, or in this case, discourse, these practical models are precise and perfectly leading because the goal is to “set the table,” not force-feed our students.
The final chapters burst with helps of every kind. The examples, passages, and questions are beyond valuable, especially to unseasoned teachers who need modeling in how to teach close reading skills and how to lead productive discussions. That Bambrick-Santoyo and Chiger include linked videos of classroom teachers modeling all of these practices is the icing on the cake. I’m delighted to use Love & Literacy as a resource for myself and for my new and seasoned Humanities teachers.
Christine Norvell lives and works in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, as a humanities teacher and as the Upper School Dean for Sager Classical Academy. She’s a senior contributor for The Imaginative Conservative and has also written for The University Bookman, Circe Institute, and StoryWarren. Norvell is the author of Till We Have Faces: A Reading Companion and writes on Substack.