I am teaching Antigone, a play written and performed around 2500 years ago in a society that many would regard as completely alien and remote.  And yet it is a play about standing up for what you believe is right, no matter the consequences; it is a play about honouring the dead in order to draw attention to the injustice that is ingrained in the laws of the living; it is a play about the suffering caused by tyranny and hubris, and about putting oneself in danger to make a stand against such tyranny.  In my first lesson with my Grade 11 class last week, we spent most of the time discussing the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests in the US.  Antigone was tangential to the discussion, but it was relevant. 

As educators, we know and often talk about how important it is for students to connect their learning to the ‘real world’ - for their learning to be ‘relevant’ and ‘authentic.’  At times, it can feel that these words are used so often they become ‘eduspeak’, losing their meaning and purpose.  The events of 2020 so far should remind us of this true meaning and purpose, and how vital it is we connect what students are learning in our classes to the challenges facing the world today.    

As Literature teachers, this may be easier for us to do than for teachers of some other subjects.  With this relative ease, comes responsibility. The conceptual approach of the new IB Literature course, along with its focus on global issues now allows us to be explicit in making connections between the texts we teach and the world we live in. Whatever texts you are currently teaching, there will be connections you can make: all literature is about human nature, conflict and empathy; all literature asks us to imagine an experience and perspective other than our own. As James Baldwin says in the interview cited above,”the world changes according to the way people see it.” We can and should use our subject to help our students understand and empathise with other people’s lives. 

Of course, this has implications for the texts we choose to teach as well as the way we teach them.  Like many IB Literature teachers, I am guilty of returning to familiar texts, which are often by white, western authors, rather than seeking to diversify and teach a range of texts more representative of the human experience across the world.  The new, expanded PRL gives us no excuse to continue in this way and one of my goals for next year will be to teach texts that are less familiar and comfortable for me, but are more representative of the many different people and voices to be found in the world.  

To finish, I am going to recommend a few articles that I have found via friends, colleagues and social media in the last week; all of these make connections between literature and current events.  I know that there will be many other great resources out there, so please feel free to share anything that has interested or inspired you.  Here is my small selection, all of which help to remind us that “literature is indispensable to the world.”  

'A History of Race and Racism in America in 24 chapters’ (from The New York Times). 

An anti-racist reading list from The Guardian

Also from The Guardian, an article about anti-racist books for children and teens.

Fascinated to Presume: in Defence of Fiction by Zadie Smith

‘Things Fall Apart’: the apocalyptic appeal of WB Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’, by Dorian Lynskey

Shakespeare’s Close Call with Tyranny, by Stephen Greenblatt