Using Literature as a Strategy to Promote Inclusivity in High School Classrooms

Abstract

Reports on school bullying of students who are different suggest that teachers need to be intentional about implementing strategies that promote inclusive attitudes and behaviors in diverse classrooms. Literature offers much to education in general, and it provides the pedagogic space to address issues of inclusion and exclusion, particularly of people with disabilities. Selecting literary texts that feature people with disabilities for high school students can be challenging, but once chosen, such texts can be used to promote inclusivity by developing sympathetic understanding, by addressing sensitive issues using the characters and context of the text, and by engaging in critical literacy that exposes power and positioning in texts. These strategies can be applied in classrooms through various written and verbal activities and can be used with a range of texts. One such text, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, illustrates how the strategies can be implemented.

Keywords

inclusivity literature high school students critical literacy sympathetic imagination

It has been said that “[c]hildren who learn together, learn to live together” (Heijnen, 2003). It’s true, in a sense. But reports on bullying and harassment in schools of students who are different in various ways (Dixon, Smith, & Jenks, 2004; Norwich & Kelly, 2004) suggest that it is not enough that diverse students learn together. Teachers have to be intentional about promoting inclusivity. Just as interventions are planned to address the additional support needs of certain students, so teachers have to plan and implement strategies that will address the need to expose students’ prejudices toward others and identify and address discriminatory and exclusionary attitudes, practices, and pressures that operate in schools and societies. In so doing, teachers can help to create inclusive classroom cultures (a) where diversity is valued, not just tolerated; (b) where all students are esteemed equally; and (c) where interdependence and cooperation are emphasized. Language arts teachers have a particular opportunity to tackle these issues by using literature and literacy teaching. They can select and encourage the reading of books that portray people and groups who society often misunderstands and misrepresents and who are marginalized or excluded as a result. There are many resources and there is much scope for addressing disability as an aspect of diversity. Bailey, cited in Jackson (2009), agreed, saying that using stories of children with disabilities could be an effective strategy for helping children understand and consider disability as just another element of diversity. Because much has been written to assist teachers of elementary and middle school students to find and work with books that portray people who are different, particularly people with disabilities, in affirming ways (Jackson, 2009; Kitterman, 2002; Landrum, 2001), the focus here is the high school classroom. After making some general observations about the possibilities that literature affords education, this article posits three ways in which literature that features characters with disabilities can be used in high school classrooms: (a) to develop sympathetic imagination, (b) to discuss and address sensitive issues, and (c) to engage in critical literacy. After a brief description of what these may entail and why they are important, suggestions are made for implementing these strategies in high school classrooms. Then, after recommending some books that could be used by high school students, these three approaches are illustrated with reference to a particular novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon (2003). Although the focus is on books, many of the strategies described could be used equally well with films and short stories that feature characters with disabilities.

How Literature Can Be Used to Promote Inclusivity

The Possibilities of Literature

Texts of various types are the mainstay of the language arts, and teachers and students of languages expect to engage with literature (e.g., fictional and nonfictional books, plays, films, poetry). In short, they encounter stories. Stories have the potential to contribute much to education. They can enable students to understand more about themselves and others (Landrum, 2001) by functioning as mirrors that allow students to reflect on themselves and windows through which students can imaginatively view people and worlds beyond themselves. Inquiry, investigation, and problem solving can be fostered using stories (Fisher, 2008), and stories lend themselves to classroom discussion that extends student thinking (Grossman, Schoenfeld, & Lee, 2005). Literary fiction can be put to work by individuals in identity formation and transformation (Vicars, 2007), and Womack, Marchant, and Borders (2011) described how social skills could be fostered using stories while meeting the demands of the academic curriculum. Nussbaum (1997, p. 85) saw in literature the potential for developing sympathetic imagination which is the capacity to “comprehend the motives and choices of people different from ourselves.” Teachers can harness these possibilities by deliberately selecting literature that can contribute to the promotion of beliefs and attitudes that are conducive to developing inclusive schools and societies. Lest teachers think that literature should not be selected with ideological intent, Simpson (1996) offered a reminder that selecting and teaching texts is never a neutral activity, and Nussbaum (1997) contended that it is not inappropriate to approach literature with a political agenda.

Developing Sympathetic Imagination

An important role of literature is its capacity to enable readers to imagine what it is like to be another. First person narratives, in fiction and nonfiction, may be particularly useful for developing sympathetic imagination, as these give immediate access to the “inner faculties of thought and emotion” (Nussbaum, 2010, p. 6) of characters and enable readers to see beyond characters’ disabilities to their hopes and fears. The capacity for cruelty in its myriad forms, particularly on the school playground, must be diminished by this imagination because the ability to imagine the other potentially mitigates judgment and scorn, promotes kindness and compassion and is, Nussbaum (1995) maintained, “a bridge to social justice” (p. xviii). Nussbaum (1997, p. 95) also contended that readers learn about “sameness and difference” as they encounter various characters. Finding sameness is important in that it creates an understanding of shared humanity as students learn about universal human attitudes and emotions. Difference is also important as it emphasizes the otherness of others and prevents people from inscribing themselves onto others, which is a form of domination. Suggestions for using literature that features characters with disabilities to promote sympathetic imagination are offered in Table 1.

Table 1.

Classroom Suggestions for Using Literature That Features Characters With Disabilities to Promote Sympathetic Imagination

Teachers should avoid:	Teachers could consider these activities that promote students’ imaginative engagement with characters:
• Positioning their students as “normal,” gazing with a mixture of curiosity and sympathy on a character who, by virtue of a disability, is deemed strange or different	• Designing the Facebook page that the character might use (this could involve consideration of how, if at all, the character’s disability would feature)
• The “unequal power transactions” (Davis, 1997, p. 5) that occur if literature is used to “sensitize” students about disabilities	• Composing diary entries, letters, or emails that the character might write
	• Role-playing the character’s appearance on a radio or TV talk show or interview
	• Projecting the life course of the character beyond the end of the story
	• Considering the impact of disability and disablism on a life
	• Finding as many similarities between themselves and the character with a disability (using a compare–contrast chart)
	• Describing imaginative interactions with the character at various points in the book

Addressing Sensitive Issues

Students with disabilities and additional support needs are assisted in the classroom in ways that are both visible and invisible to their peers. Although many teachers are able to use universal design and differentiate curriculum so that students needing support are not obviously identified, some instructional strategies, interventions, or supports provided to certain students are obvious and cannot, and should not, be hidden from their peers. But without the vocabulary or the social acceptability to ask questions about curriculum and assessment modifications and accommodations, or adapted behavioral expectations, students in inclusive classrooms may question what is fair and make assumptions that focus on the deficits of their peers and stigmatize those who need help. Issues of marginalization and exclusion are sensitive (Messiou, 2008), and teachers may lack an appropriate context to address these issues. Fiction that features characters with disabilities offers opportunities to explore disability concerns and expose prejudice and stereotyping without humiliating class members who themselves have disabilities. Research has successfully used hypothetical or fictional peers with disabilities to investigate attitudes and behavioral intentions of students toward peers with labels of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (Law, Sinclair, & Fraser, 2007) and autism (Swaim & Morgan, 2001). In similar ways, a fictional character with a disability may provide the context for discussing differences, and wider issues of discrimination, inclusion, and exclusion (Walton, 2011). Rather than an add-on of disability awareness in the curriculum, which can seem contrived or artificial, literature that features characters with disabilities offers a natural and relevant setting for addressing these topics. Instead of avoiding disability issues or silencing questions, it is valuable to consider in a classroom “how we want our differences discussed and responded to” (Sapon-Shevin, 2007, p. 23). Table 2 provides ways in which teachers can use literature that features characters with disabilities to address sensitive issues.

Table 2.

Classroom Suggestions for Using Literature That Features Characters With Disabilities to Address Sensitive Issues

Teachers should avoid:	Teachers could consider:
• Commercial documentaries about people with particular disabilities made with gratuitous detail for a voyeuristic audience	• Reading further, for example, by finding an autobiography by a person with a disability similar to that portrayed in fiction, or to seek out relevant media portrayals, like films and documentaries
	• Inviting parents of children with disabilities, or community disability activists to address the class and answer questions
	• Alerting students to the use of person-first language (like the person with epilepsy, rather than the epileptic)
	• Addressing the pejorative language that has been used for people with disabilities, possibly referring to Rosa’s law, which outlaws the use in the United States of the word retarded; President Obama’s words when passing Rosa’s Law that “what you call people is how you treat them” (cited in West, 2010) may be a fruitful topic for discussion
	• Guiding students to consider how their school or society is organized in ways that would prevent the character with a disability participating fully in the community; they could reflect on visible barriers like public transport and building access, and invisible barriers like attitudes and norms, and consider how these barriers could be removed

Exercising Critical Literacy

Critical literacy has its roots in the writings of Freire, who saw literacy as a means of emancipation from oppression (Clarke & Whitney, 2009; McDaniel, 2004). It cannot be described as a specific or unified strategy as there are many nuances and emphases with which critical literacy is taught and practiced (Behrman, 2006). A useful starting point for critical literacy in the classroom is the notion that texts are not neutral, either as they are read or as they are written, and that texts shape or construct versions of the world in the interests of a particular group, that is, they “work ideologically” (Luke & Freebody, 1997, p. 218). Texts also position their readers in particular ways and manipulate them through various textual devices. The role of the reader needs to extend beyond that of being a text decoder, user, or participant, to that of a text analyst and critic. This involves being aware of “how, why, and in whose interests particular texts might work” (Luke & Freebody, 1997, p. 218). Janks (2010, p. 22) called this “reading against the text” as readers recognize the text as a “selective version of the world,” as they resist subjection to the way the text positions them, and as they can imagine how the text could be changed to represent different interests. Drawing on Thompson’s (1990) ideas of how ideologies work, Janks (2010, p. 37) maintained that stories play a particular role making “socially interested constructions of the world” appear natural, noting how novels and films (among other texts) are examples of “the power of narrative to construct realities which represent the apparent order of things.” Novels offer teachers opportunities to enable students to identify these dominating conventions and imagine how things could be different. Critical literacy has transformative potential—for individuals and for society—and can be a means to social justice. It is difficult to read against texts that are congruent with or confirm our beliefs and views of the ways things should be. By learning “strategies for resistant reading” (Janks, 2010, p. 72), students confront their own ideas of the world, identify how these may incorporate dominating and oppressive discourses, realize that there are alternative ways of seeing and being in the world, and possibly change. Societal change then becomes possible on various levels: (a) as students become aware of injustice, they may work toward change (McDaniel, 2004); (b) as they become producers of texts, they may seek constructions that are more fair and just and that avoid silencing and marginalizing others; and (c) as a citizenry becomes more critical and resistant in their reading, it becomes more difficult to manipulate them to maintain unjust power structures. The effects of the collusion of power and language include oppression, silencing, infantilizing, marginalization, and exclusion of those deemed different or inferior because of gender, race, language, religion, and, as is the focus here, disability. Teachers concerned to develop critically literate readers could enable students to recognize various textual devices that may be used sustain dominant deficit discourses of people with disabilities. Strategies that may enable students to do this are presented in Table 3.

Table 3.

Strategies for Recognizing Textual Devices That Sustain Deficit Discourses of People With Disabilities

Strategies for recognizing textual devices	Examples
Consider linguistic features	• The passive voice deletes the subject and makes him or her the acted-on instead of the actor
	• The choice of words with connotations that lead the character to be viewed in a particular way (e.g., by considering the difference between “She uses a wheelchair for mobility” and “She is wheelchair bound”)
Examine the construction of binaries in texts	• The division of people into those “with special needs” and those without and those who give care and those who are cared for
Interrogate details and incidents that an author includes that are not vital to the progress or resolution of the plot	• Why are these details included in the novel?
	• What would be gained or lost had they been omitted?
Reflect on the way “normal” is constructed in the world that the text creates	• Who is considered to be “normal”?
	• What beliefs, social structures and practices, and actions are represented as “the way things are”?
Consider alternative ways that the story could be rendered	• Adding other voices or other viewpoints to the text
	• Substituting words or sections with alternatives
	• Deleting words or sections
	• Suggesting different endings or outcomes (Simpson, 1996)

Asking questions of and about texts is a valuable way into critical literacy and also a means to engage with wider philosophical issues raised by the text. The value of critical questioning, Simpson (1996) argued, is that it is a strategy that can be transferred across texts and contexts. Students can answer critical questions of literature that features characters with disabilities such as the following:

Why did the author create or describe this character as having a disability?

How does the author want the reader to respond to the character with a disability?

How does the author manipulate the reader to feel this way?

Which socially constructed conventions and practices that discriminate against people with disabilities does the author present as natural, or the ways things are (e.g., segregated and institutional settings for people with disabilities and restricted access to a variety of social goods)?

How might a different author have written the same story?

How might someone else read and understand the story?

Students, in turn, should be enabled and encouraged to ask their own questions that probe power and positioning in texts and also to ask questions that promote philosophical inquiry and discussion, in the tradition of philosophy for children (Cam, 1995; Fisher, 2008; Haynes, 2009). Literature featuring characters with disabilities could give rise to questions such as the following:

Why do humans discriminate?

Who decides who and what is valued in a society?

What counts as success?

Not all students will ask or answer questions in ways that teachers would prefer, and herein lies both risk and challenge as a thinking, questioning classroom “involves relinquishing power . . . and adopting a sense of openness and possibility” (McDaniel, 2004, p. 480). But teachers who are concerned to enable their students to live justly among diverse people in a world beset by inequality will not avoid difficult or sensitive topics (like disability) and will deliberately look for opportunities to foster critical attitudes toward dominating discourses.

The Challenge of Text Selection

Teachers wanting to use literature to address and disembed students’ discriminatory attitudes and behaviors have to select texts that lend themselves to this endeavor. There are, unfortunately, many texts that perpetuate prejudice toward and stereotyping of people who are deemed different. Much as literature may have the potential to effect personal and societal transformation as readers engage in “social practices that function for social justice” (Botelho & Rudman, 2009, p. 1), it can also reinforce the status quo (McDaniel, 2004). Particularly when choosing texts that feature characters who have disabilities, teachers should be alert to ways in which these characters tend to be portrayed, including their being pitiable victims of misfortune, heroes triumphing over adversity, and passive recipients of society’s munificence (Clogston, cited in Jones & Bentz, 2005; Farnall & Smith, 1999; Haller, 2000). Authors such as Landrum (2001) and Jackson (2009) have developed useful criteria by which novels with characters with disabilities can be evaluated. They focused on important issues of plot, characterization, and tone. To engage sympathetic imagination, address sensitive issues, and promote critical literacy in high school classrooms, the following additional criteria are suggested—ideally, a novel needs to be rated with mostly “yes” responses on the rating scale presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1.

A rating scale with criteria for text selection

Texts That Can Be Used to Promote Inclusivity

There are many books that feature characters with disabilities that are appropriate for high school students and that would rate positively on this scale. Such titles include Deafening (Itani, 2003) which features Grania, who is deaf; Flowers for Algernon (Keyes, 1966), the main character of which is Charlie Gordon, who has an intellectual disability; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Bauby, 1998), which is nonfiction and is the author’s account of locked-in syndrome that occurred as a result of a stroke; and Saturday, by McEwan (2006), which features Baxter who has Huntington’s disease. People with autism, and Asperger syndrome in particular, have featured prominently in literature and the news media in the past decade (Haller, Ralph, & Zaks, 2010; Murray, 2006), resulting in public consciousness of the condition (McDonagh, 2008). This is likely to increase with the publication by popular author Jodi Picoult (2010) of House Rules in which a teenager with an Asperger syndrome diagnosis is accused and must stand trial for murder. In 2003, Mark Haddon published the Whitbread Award–winning novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, about Christopher Boone, a teenager with many characteristics of Asperger syndrome. Haddon does not label his character as such, saying that “I simply tried to make Christopher seem like a believable human being, rather than trying to make him medically correct” (Dasgupta, n.d.). This has, however, been acclaimed as “the best novel with an autistic character” (Osteen, 2008, p. 40) and as a novel that “teaches a great deal about the disorder” (Freckelton, 2009, p. 163). The novel, which is part diary, part detective story, and part quest literature, is written in a first person narrative style depicting a narrator who, in the words of the dust jacket, “knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings.” Despite the frequent use of expletives and blasphemies in the novel (Christopher is a reliable narrator who provides a literal and uncensored rendition of people’s words), it is recommended as an example of literature that can be used to promote inclusive thinking.

The stark and relentless narrative in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (henceforth referred to as The Curious Incident) provides easy access to the inner workings of Christopher’s mind. The reader is compelled to view the world through Christopher’s eyes and understand what it is that upsets and frightens him, and what motivates him and makes him feel safe. In other words, readers can understand what it is like to be Christopher, and rightfully feel angry at the policemen and school principal in the story who don’t know what it is like to be Christopher and so respond to him with aggression and discrimination. Although Christopher behaves in some ways that might seem strange to high school students, there is much that they can find in common with him. A compare-and-contrast chart such as the one presented in Figure 2 would illustrate this.

Figure 2.

A chart for students to compare and contrast themselves with Christopher Boone

The Curious Incident is rich in possibilities for exploring topics of disability and discrimination, especially as Christopher raises the issues himself. In chapter 71, for example, he discusses his views on special needs. Although he thinks that the other children at his school are stupid, he knows he should not call them stupid, but rather say that they have learning difficulties or special needs. He regards these terms as stupid themselves as everyone has difficulty learning French or understanding the theory of relativity, and people who need glasses or hearing aids have special needs. He says, “[N]one of these people are special needs, even if they have special needs” (p. 56) and proceeds to explain how special needs has replaced spaz and crip and mong as taunts by the children from the school down the road. A passage like this opens the space to discuss issues of labeling, what (and who) are “special needs” and how the language of prejudice works. This can be extended beyond the context of disability, to an interrogation of the language of othering—the jokes, teasing, and pejorative terms that are directed toward those less valued in society.

Christopher, in describing his father’s efforts to convince the school that he should write the A-level math examination, raises another issue that teachers could explore: that of different treatment for different people. Mrs. Gascoyne, the principal, initially refused permission for Christopher to write the examination because she “didn’t want to treat me differently from everyone else in the school because then everyone would want to be treated differently and it would set a precedent” (p. 57). She relented, eventually, after Christopher’s father became “really cross,” and Christopher wrote and passed the examination. Using Christopher as a reference point, teachers can address issues of access rights and consider institutional and other barriers to participation that people with disabilities experience. They can consider these issues as matters of principle, or they can imaginatively relate Christopher to students’ school experience. Figure 3 illustrates how such a classroom discussion might proceed.

Figure 3.

A high school class discussion about Christopher Boone

The value of this book in promoting inclusivity is not that it offers a model of inclusive attitudes and practices. Although the reader may engage sympathetically with Christopher, there is also much scope for a critical reading of the world that the text represents using the strategies of critical literacy described previously. Two examples serve as illustrations. The first is a socially constructed practice that is presented as the natural order of things—the division of young people into ordinary and special schools. Christopher attends a special school, where he engages in a curriculum that includes life skills and painting and that is not designed to lead to university entrance. That this is the appropriate educational setting for Christopher is not challenged by any of the characters in the novel. A resistant reading would not only identify this, but ask questions about whose interests are served by separate special education. The second concerns details that the author includes about the scatological and gastronomical predilections of one of Christopher’s peers, Joseph Fleming. These Christopher describes graphically with a mixture of fascination and horror. Omitting this section would in no way affect the progress of the plot, so a critical reader should ask why it was included, and what value it has to the novel, except to confirm stereotypes about deviant behavior displayed by children with special needs. So The Curious Incident (and other literature that features characters with disabilities) should not be read uncritically. But in the hands of a teacher willing to work imaginatively with the novel while maintaining a critical stance, it may contribute to the development of dispositions that are conducive to inclusion.

Realizing a Vision

The intervention proposed in this article is best described as a plait: the intertwining of three strands. The first is a vision of inclusive classrooms and communities, characterized by diversity and respect and where all children and young people, particularly those with disabilities, participate and belong. To achieve this, though, requires the second strand, that of teachers who are active and intentional in creating pedagogical spaces in which to promote inclusive ways of thinking and being. One such space is where fiction and nonfiction stories are read and studied, making literature the third strand of the plait. The success of this endeavor may not be easy to measure, and it won’t change the world. It should, however, result in young people (a) who, as a result of engaging with literature that features people with disabilities, are less able to be unkind to others because they can imagine what it might be like to be the other; (b) who have reflected on and possibly changed their own assumptions about and prejudices toward others; and (c) who can recognize and resist ways in which they, and others, are positioned as language and power intersect. These young people, having learned together, may be able to live well together.

Footnotes

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interests with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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