Other Sources

Dyer, Mimi.  “Invitation to Anthologize.”  Making American Literatures in High School and College.  Ed. Anne Ruggles Gere and Peter Shaheen.  Classroom Practices in Teaching English, Volume 31.  Urbana: NCTE, 2001.

National Council of Teachers of English.  The Council Chronicle 13.4 (July 2004): 10. 

This NCTE 2004 Convention Preview issue announced that Alfie Kohn was to present at the Secondary Section Luncheon:

Even when talented English teachers assign terrific literature and create thoughtful writing opportunities, a class may fall flat if students have few opportunities to make decisions.

In his Secondary Section Luncheon address, ‘Reading, Writing, and Choosing: Democracy Comes to the High School English Classroom,’ at 12:30 p.m. on Saturday, November 20, Alfie Kohn will describe the rationale for designing classes WITH students rather than just FOR them, as well as why that’s often difficult.  Then he will invite attendees to brainstorm ways of putting students at the center of the learning process.

Kohn (http://alfiekohn.org) is the author of nine books, including Punished By Rewards; The Schools Our Children Deserve; and, most recently, What Does It Mean To Be Well Educated?: And More Essays on Standards, Grading, and Other Follies.

Since I could not attend this convention, I communicated with Alfie Kohn via email and received two replies.  In his first reply to me, dated November 12, 2004, Alfie Kohn wrote:

My remarks will be based on the ideas I discussed in a 1993 article called “Choices for Children” (www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/cfc.htm) and on pp. 150-53 of my book THE SCHOOLS OUR CHILDREN DESERVE – but neither of those sources deals specifically with high school English courses.  I’ve yet to write about that particular application.

After I wrote back to him to describe how I involve my students in choosing texts in my American literature classes, in his second reply to me, dated November 21, 2004, Alfie Kohn wrote:

You may want to reconsider the idea of voting, though, which is just adversarial majoritarianism.  The real learning comes from the process of discussing: having to articulate a reason for one’s preferences, listening to others’ reasons for  their preferences, hashing out a compromise, coming to consensus – this is the guts of democracy.  It’s also a way to build a sense of community in the classroom and, not so incidentally, to promote intellectual skills.  Moreover, the resulting list is truly “ours,” whereas private voting just leaves some individuals winners and others losers.