What Do Swifties Have in Common With Literary Scholars?
Navigation, participation, and transformation in the modern English classroom
“Is our podcast good, Mr. Aleo?” two 8th graders asked, turning their laptop towards me. I smiled under my mask. “I don’t know girls” I replied. “What would your fellow Swifties say?” Despite numerous conversations about audience, purpose, and context my students still saw me as the sole arbiter of taste in the classroom. In some ways, that’s unsurprising. As the teacher, I’m seen as the expert and authority on matters of quality related to student work production. As a humanities teacher, it’s kind of my job to know a lot more about reading, writing, literature, media, history, theory, etc. than my students.
When it comes to Taylor Swift though? I’m a fan, but also an utter novice. In fact, there are tons of things my students know more about than I do (and their domains expertise are just as interesting and valuable as mine). With that in mind, I offered the students some feedback on their audio quality but could only answer their content question with a few questions of my own–what are the conventions of their favorite Taylor Swift podcasts? What topics are being discussed in their fandom? What kind of aesthetic tools and designs do they encounter in Swifty spaces? As experts and participants in a passionate, vibrant fandom my students were better positioned than I was to know how to best meet their audience’s needs.
If you’re finding this pandemic era anecdote out of sync with the visions of English I shared in my previous posts, just hear me out. Imagine this scene:
A group of passionate fans huddled around their devices. Their favorite outlet has just dropped the latest response to a hotly contested article that has divided their community. As the group reads through, they debate, discuss, inquire, and post in their chosen social network. They make reference to other similar works, cite compelling evidence, and have different perspectives on the future direction of their community. The content of the debate would likely be opaque to anyone outside of the community. As would the language, terms, and insider references used to articulate the differing interpretations and arguments offered by the range of community members.
Now, what kind of community did you have in mind during this scene? Were you picturing a group of teens debating the latest controversy from The Real Housewives? Hip-hop heads breaking down the Drake and Kendrick beef? Dungeons & Dragons fans hashing out the changes to a new edition?
What about a group of literary scholars discussing a new interpretation that challenges the consensus on a canonical text? Or media theorists debating an article articulating the relationship between social media platforms and emerging trends in storytelling? Or cultural critics deliberating the latest prestige TV series?
What if the vignette could be easily applied to any of them? What if, to truly teach English Studies in its most expansive and powerful form, we need to consider all of them? As Terry Eagleton (1996) puts it, the field of literary studies should include "the various sign systems and signifying practices in our own society, all the way from Moby Dick to the Muppet show, from Dryden and Jean-Luc Goddard to the portrayal of women in advertisements and the rhetorical techniques of Government reports" (p. 207).
Such a shift would require us to transcend traditional notions of literacy in the singular and embrace teaching literacies in the plural. Unfortunately, “traditional” approaches that treat reading and writing as a decontextualized set of cognitive processes and “progressive” approaches that assume reading and writing skills can be magically transferred to any text or situation, both fail to tend to one of the most salient features of literacy learning: context! Consider the implications shared in the figure below.
While my post last week focused on ways to invite students to participate in the Burkean parlor, to truly “become literary” we must also foster their ability to navigate the various sign systems and signifying practices Eagleton alluded to. This more expansive view of literature and literary practices invites a new plurality of voices to join the “unending conversation” of literary studies—musicians, artists, film-makers, content creators, and plenty more besides.
Furthermore, it acknowledges the fact that our students are already active participants in a range of other “parlors" with their own sets of patterns and conventions. Sociolinguist James Gee (2015) refers to these as discourses, or “ways of behaving, interacting, valuing, thinking, believing, speaking, and often reading and writing that are accepted as instantiations of particular identities” (p. 4).
To teach in this way requires us to understand that the way we interpret, represent, and create meaning cannot be separated from the social, cultural, and discursive contexts in which it occurs. As I mentioned last week, the processes and practices we seek to model for and cultivate in our students as English teachers were not chiseled into stone and passed down from the literary gods as The Way To Do English™. They are the socially constitutive conventions and patterns that scholars in the field have (mostly) agreed upon as the shared practices and tools that structure the discipline.
The same thing can be said for any community that’s, as Stanley Fish (1989) says, "made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions" (p. 89). These interpretive communities are sites where meaning is made, knowledge is generated, questions are posed, terms are coined, and texts are produced and shared. While the content and conventions of the Marvel fandom may vary widely from those used by Emily Brontë scholars, they can be framed in ways that have more structural similarities than you might think. Consider this chart from a recent English Journal article I published with my friends Sarah Jerasa and Brady Nash.
This reframing has allowed me to understand that, whether students are leveraging critical theory to critique gender representation in a canonical text or producing a podcast exploring the shifting aesthetics used in Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, they are taking up a set of practices from a distinct community in order to produce critical/interpretive knowledge in a particular domain.
Once I understood this, I began to realize that preparing my students to join in ongoing scholarly conversations and debates about literary studies was a necessary but insufficient condition for creating a class where we could become literary together. I also needed to equip them with a repertoire of literacies that will allow them to navigate a multiplicity of contexts, cultures, and discourses. This broadened horizon has allowed me to position literacy as a tool to navigate and reconstruct discursive boundaries in ways that move both my classroom and their communities towards education justice (and is a hell of a lot of fun).
That is why I now see my class as a hybrid interpretive community that weaves the practices of literary studies with the range of social, civic, and youth discourses that shape my learners’ lives. It’s why some days my class looks like a literary salon where we discuss Morrison and Marx and other days it looks like a content creator studio where students are glued to their laptops recording voice overs and splicing video clips.
If you’re curious to know what this looks like in practice, stay tuned to this Substack and check out the resources below. Next week I’ll discuss how I’m working (alongside other scholars in the field) to transcend the alleged binary between the literary tradition I detailed in my last post and the expansive vision of literary studies I shared this week. Have thoughts? Please share them below!
Recommendations
Books & Articles 📚
Fandoms in the Classroom: A Social Justice Approach to Transforming Literacy Learning
“What Would Other Swifties Think?”: Multimodal Composing with Communities in Mind
Who Does English? Learning from Youth and Professional Literarian Communities
Podcasts 🎙️
References
Eagleton, T. (1996). Literary theory: An introduction (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Fish, S. E. (1989). Doing what comes naturally: Change, rhetoric, and the practice of theory in literary and legal studies. Duke University Press.
Gee, J. (2015). Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses (5th ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315722511
I love the ideas here and aspire to make my classroom work in this direction. Thanks for writing!