Why Build a Cultural Toolkit with Your Students?

Bringing diverse voices into our classrooms and curriculum is essential. One of the most powerful things about literature is its ability to develop our sense of empathy, to highlight the humanity we all share while also developing our awareness of the wide variety of experiences each individual human encounters.

We used Perrine’s Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense (9th edition) as our core textbook for AP English Literature and Composition, and we loved the way the text explained the value of literature:

“[Literature] is a means of allowing us, through the imagination, to live more fully, more deeply, more richly, and with greater awareness. It can do this in two ways: by broadening our experience—that is, by making us acquainted with a range of experience with which in the ordinary course of events we might have no contact, or by deepening our experience—that is, by making us feel more poignantly and more understandingly the everyday experiences all of us have. It enlarges our perspectives and breaks down some of the limits we may feel.”

As English teachers, we are in a unique position to allow our students to see themselves on the pages of the books and poems we read in class, while also exposing them to lives they might not ever encounter outside these pages and lines.

There is no better way to create a sense of community in your classroom than by allowing all your students the opportunity to feel seen as a result of the texts they encounter in your class. Are we perfect at doing this? Of course not, but we are firm believers in the “know better, do better” school of life, and we are proud of the strides we made to increase representation in our curriculum during our years in the classroom.

What is a Cultural Toolkit?

At the same time, we came to believe we also had an obligation to provide our students with what we call a “cultural toolkit.” What authors (for better or worse) once presumed to be a common body of knowledge is increasingly less common: Greek and Roman mythology, the works of Shakespeare, the Bible, and even fairy tales written by the brothers Grimm, not Disney. Due to a number of financial realities and practical limitations, however, educators at all levels often return to a canon that relies on this “common” foundation.

When we came to class assuming students were familiar with this body of knowledge, we often discovered this was not the case. In addition to the many mythological and biblical allusions we’ve explained over the years, we found ourselves explaining that “mirror, mirror on the wall” in Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “Same Song” was a reference to Snow White, not Shrek and that Katharyn Howd Machan’s “Hazel Tells LaVerne” played with the traditional fairy tale “The Frog Prince,” not Disney’s The Princess and the Frog.

And in some ways, this is okay: diversity and contemporary voices are worth celebrating, and who says we all have to know these things, anyway? But in preparing our students to be college-ready, we have some responsibility to provide them with the tools, or basic body of knowledge, they need to navigate Western literature.

American college literature courses will include works from the “canon,” even as we debate what should be included in that canon. And we want our students, regardless of their cultural or religious background, to feel at home in these courses, not at a disadvantage when discussing literature with peers who grew up bathed in this culture. We even want them to laugh when they watch an episode of The Simpsons parodying a famous Shakespearean play or appreciate the resonance in a film that references a mythological and biblical figure.

Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor has become a staple in AP Literature classes, largely for this reason. Foster demystifies the process of reading, well, like an English professor, letting students into “secrets” of the common symbols, archetypes, and allusions they’re likely to encounter.

In his chapter titled, “Yes, She’s a Christ Figure, Too,” he writes, “no matter what your religious beliefs, to get the most out of your reading of European and American literatures, knowing something about the Old and New Testaments is essential. . . . Culture is so influenced by its dominant religious systems that whether a writer adheres to the beliefs or not, the values and principles of those religions will inevitably inform the literary work” (125).

Part of preparing our students to be successful in American society is giving them a working familiarity with the religions, mythologies, and body of literature that inform that culture, and we help to counter inequity in our colleges and universities when we give our students the opportunity to be on equal footing with their classmates when they approach a new text.

So, how have we tried to do this? We’ve assigned Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor. We started our year in AP Literature with a review of common mythological and biblical allusions. We made our focus for The Odyssey the hero’s journey archetype with our ninth grade honors students. By no means did these strategies make our students experts, but we provided them with tools they could use to navigate the challenging world of literary analysis, in our class and beyond.

How have you helped build your students’ cultural toolkits? What assumptions about common knowledge have you made that left you saying, “Oooh, we’re not talking about the same thing”? We believe this is an important topic, and we’d love to hear your thoughts: email us at [email protected] or reach out on Instagram @threeheads.works.