My favorite movies this year include Invictus, The Blind Side, Secretariat, and The King’s Speech. Aside from the fact that they are all improbable stories of going against all odds, do you know what these hit movies have in common? THEY ARE ALL TRUE!!! They are nonfiction. Hollywood has long mined literature as a source for new product and lately it seems that truth has more power at the box office than fiction. (I also liked The Social Network, but its image was tarnished for me when I found out that some of the truth of that story was embroidered.)
Yet when it comes to the teaching of reading and writing to kids, fiction rules. My colleague Penny Colman did an informal survey in 2005 when she collected the summer reading lists for children of all ages from 11 public libraries in northern New Jersey. All the books on the list were fiction. When she asked teachers to do an inventory of their classroom libraries there were six times as many fiction as nonfiction books. She debunks the myths that nonfiction is boring, that it won’t hook kids on reading, that it’s more appealing for boys than for girls, that it is not literature. Many fiction writers include lots of information about the real world in their novels. But the key difference between the two genres is in the constraints on the author. Fiction writers can make stuff up; nonfiction authors can’t. And whether or not something is really true seems to have added value, at least to Hollywood audiences if not for kids as well.
Nonfiction is far more important than fiction if one is to be literate in today’s society. It’s what we write in our tweets, texts, and blogs. It’s directions in a manual, or a recipe book. It’s explanations of how things work. It’s in understanding the collective product of human minds in science, law, history and engineering. In a seminal study 10 years ago, literacy researcher Nell K. Duke found that first-grade classrooms spent only 3.6 minutes a day reading/listening to expository text material, and this had a deleterious effect on reading in later years. Yet as children go from elementary school to high school, the percentage of nonfiction reading comprehension on assessment tests increases from 50 to 70 percent, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It seems that the main sources in many schools of nonfiction are basal textbooks — once-over-lightly treatments that are not designed to capture imaginations and make kids want to learn more. Kids are not reading the kind of material they’re being tested on! (Which happens to be excerpts from award-winning nonfiction books.) No wonder teachers are terrified. But does this scare them into teaching from high-quality nonfiction? If it does, it’s not showing up on my royalty statements.
When Penny asked teachers why they don’t teach from nonfiction books many responded, “I don’t know enough about the subject.” They felt inadequate when contemplating straying from prescribed texts. This response should make you stop and think about the role of the teacher. Is it the role of the teacher to be the source of knowledge, especially when a kid in the back of the room can easily check facts using Google? At the elementary school level a teacher’s authority doesn’t necessarily come from intimate knowledge of a discipline. Granted it’s quicker and easier to supply an answer when known (which shuts off all further inquiry) rather than ask the student what they could do to find the answer. Why can’t learning be a shared experience between student and teacher by reading a book that is for the uninitiated into the subject matter? Why can’t a teacher hand a book to a student and say, “I haven’t read this but why don’t you read it and let us know what you’ve learned?” Can you imagine how empowering it is to a student to teach the teacher and other students? The notion that students are empty vessels to be filled from a teacher’s font of knowledge is not in synch with the information explosion that the digital age has provided.
The new-style teacher models curiosity and that it’s never too late to learn something new, and that collaboration with students enhances learning process. These are the skills needed for twenty-first century workers. Teachers who try to sustain their image as “the sage on the stage” are so last century. And that’s the truth.
Thank you for eloquently highlighting the importance of nonfiction books in K-12 classrooms. When given a choice about which book to read, I'm told by many teachers & librarian, that youngsters typically select a nonfiction book.