American Lit has the potential to be an engaging, broadening, fascinating course. We're in what I consider an in-between era, where many schools are still providing the historical American lit canon to teachers, while other schools or independent teachers going around the system have moved into teaching a broader swirl of America's diverse stories.

The American Lit curriculum I was handed twenty years ago was 98% written by dead white men. Since then, I've learned about the impact on our students when they can (and can't) see themselves in the books they read.

When they can and can't see their identities. Their communities. Their problems. Their hopes.

I learned from Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop's call for books in which students can see themselves and learn to understand others in her appeal to our collective humanity in her landmark essay, "Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors."

I learned from Felicia Rose Chavez, author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, who shared her personal experience as a young reader: "It's startling as a young person of color to stare down the spines of literacy and note the neat annihilation of most of the world" (29).

I learned from Dr. Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica and Dr. Allison Briceño, co-authors of Conscious Classrooms, that using culturally relevant texts can improve student outcomes by helping improve their comprehension, motivation & engagement.

I learned more about pairing contemporary texts to the canon from the #distrupttexts movement, about "completing" the canon from Chavez, and about layering multicultural, multimodal texts from Dr. Gholdy Muhammad's Cultivating Genius.

For me, it feels so clear. And yet I still see so many curriculums either still cleaving to the classics for the most part or abandoning books altogether in favor of textbooks and " short selections."

So today I want to offer my American Lit dream. If I had an unlimited budget, and didn't have to worry about book challenges, this is an outline of the American Lit curriculum I would love to teach today. If you're an American Lit teacher, I hope you find an idea for a new unit or two or five that you'd be excited to try out. If you don't teach American Lit, I think you'll still get a lot of ideas about curriculum possibilities in terms of structure and balance from this episode, which you could remix with any authors you choose.

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Sources:

Chavez, Felicia. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop. Haymarket Books, 2021.

Bishop, Rudine Sims. "Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors." Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom. Vo. 6, No. 3, Summer 1990. https://scenicregional.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mirrors-Windows-and-Sliding-Glass-Doors.pdf Accessed November 2, 2025.

Graham, S., MacArthur, C., & Hebert, M. (Eds). Best Practices in Writing Instruction. The Guilford Press, 2019.

Hillocks Jr., G. Narrative Writing: Learning a New Model for Teaching. Heinemann, 2007.

Kittle, Penny. Micro Mentor Texts. Scholastic Professional, 2022.

Muhammad, Gholdy. Cultivating Genius. Scholastic, 2020.

Potash, Betsy. "Students Need Diverse Texts and Choice, with Dr. Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica and Dr. Allison Briceño." The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, Episode 204.

Resolution on Grammar Exercises to Teach Speaking and Writing. NCTE online: National Council of Teachers of English Position Statements: https://ncte.org/statement/grammarexercises/, Accessed January 2026.

Schoenborn, Andy and Troy Hicks. Creating Confident Writers. W.W. Norton, 2020.

Zemelman, Steven, Harvey Daniels and Arthur Hyde. Best Practice. Heinemann, 2005.

410: The American Lit Curriculum I Would Teach Now