American Lit has the potential to be an engaging, broadening, fascinating course. We’re in what I consider an in-between era, where many schools are still providing the historical American lit canon to teachers, while other schools or independent teachers going around the system have moved into teaching a broader swirl of America’s diverse stories.
The American Lit curriculum I was handed twenty years ago was 98% written by dead white men. Since then, I’ve learned about the impact on our students when they can (and can’t) see themselves in the books they read.
When they can and can’t see their identities. Their communities. Their problems. Their hopes.
I learned from Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s call for books in which students can see themselves and learn to understand others in her appeal to our collective humanity in her landmark essay, “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.”
I learned from Felicia Rose Chavez, author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop, who shared her personal experience as a young reader: “It’s startling as a young person of color to stare down the spines of literacy and note the neat annihilation of most of the world” (29).
I learned from Dr. Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica and Dr. Allison Briceño, co-authors of Conscious Classrooms, about how using culturally relevant texts can improve student outcomes by helping improve their comprehension, motivation & engagement.
I learned more about pairing contemporary texts to the canon from the #distrupttexts movement, about “completing” the canon from Chavez, and about layering multicultural, multimodal texts from Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s Cultivating Genius.
For me, it feels so clear. And yet I still see so many curriculums either still cleaving to the classics for the most part or abandoning books altogether in favor of textbooks and “ short selections.”
So today I want to offer my American Lit dream. If I had an unlimited budget, and didn’t have to worry about book challenges, this is an outline of the American Lit curriculum I would love to teach today. If you’re an American Lit teacher, I hope you find an idea for a new unit or two or five that you’d be excited to try out. If you don’t teach American Lit, I think you’ll still get a lot of ideas about curriculum possibilities in terms of structure and balance from this episode, which you could remix with any authors you choose.
Core Texts: Pick Two
If I was going to teach two whole class novels in my American Lit curriculum, I’d choose between The Great Gatsby, Long Way Down, and Fahrenheit 451, depending on my students and what was happening the world.
If you’d like to explore activity ideas for these novels, check out the blog posts: The Ultimate Guide to Teaching The Great Gatsby, Long Way Down Lesson Ideas, and Dystopia Book Clubs.
Book Club: Identity
Beyond core texts, I’d want to have book clubs. I think every class should have a book club unit, offering students curated choice around a theme or the genre that the entire class can explore together. In an American Lit class, I’d be interested in doing book clubs around identity (possible texts to include The Poet X, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, Into the Wild, The Hate U Give, Catcher in the Rye, How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents and #notyourprincess anthology).
During this period, I would want to build in personal identity writing as well, working on a portfolio of narrative and memoir writing with students.
If you want to dive deeper on book clubs, check out past episodes like Using Book Clubs Successfully, Building Better Bookclubs, and How Caitlin’s Verse Novel Book Clubs Engaged Seniors ‘Til the End.
Book Clubs: Graphic Novel
Speaking of book clubs, I would want to fit in a graphic novel book club unit as well, examining visual vocabulary and exploring how this genre works. We’d start by looking at Gareth Hinds as an author, adapter, and artist who translates classic literature into graphic form. Then we’d choose from texts like Dragon Hoops, The Dark Matter of Mona Starr, Hey Kiddo, Maus, and Mexikid to explore in book clubs while also working on our own graphic stories together for a final museum exhibition across the walls.
Poetry Unit
As I have always done, I would build my poetry unit around a class poetry slam, exploring wonderful canonical and contemporary print poets and their craft moves, scoring and debating the merits of modern performance pieces, and workshopping pieces for the slam. I’d want to include Whitman, Dickinson, Hughes, Harjo, Olivarez, Limón, Gorman, and Abdurraqib, among others.
By the way, I learned about a lot of my favorite contemporary poets for the classroom from Melissa Smith over at Teach Living Poets – highly recommend! Start on her site by exploring her incredible “Walk the Poem” lesson for Hanif Abdurraqib.
During the poetry unit, I’d also be showcasing verse novels in my choice library and through my First Chapter Friday program.
Choice Reading
Speaking of which, now seems like a good time to say I’d want a robust choice reading program going all year long. We’ve talked about that here a lot in the past, so I won’t go deep right now, but check out the post, How to Squeeze Choice Reading into ELA (even if it seems like it’s impossible), if you’ve been wanting to get started with choice reading. And for another helpful perspective, you could tune into Fire up your Choice Reading Program, with Abby Gross.
Writing Notebooks
Speaking of ongoing programs, I’d want to implement Penny Kittle’s practice of mentor-based writing notebooks. Throughout the year, as we workshop identity pieces, poetry, and other writing forms, I like her model, shown in her book Micro Mentor Texts, as well as across her work, of choosing examples of great craft and then writing work inspired by that work with students. However, I’d keep in mind the warning from Felicia Chavez’s book, The Anti-Racist Writer’s Workshop, which suggests that providing mentors to students for them to model their work on can actually cause them to lose their voice, and if you’re not careful, to hold up the work of a single demographic as “the” aesthetic of great writing. Kittle does a great job – in my opinion – of carefully introducing mentors from a really diverse range of author voices in her book, but I know from Chavez that that is not always the case in workshop classrooms.
Writing for the Real World
Throughout the year, with the writing notebook as a springboard, I’d want to build in as much authentic audience for final writing projects as possible. Maybe we’d do a nonprofit pitch fair, a literary food truck festival, local restaurant reviews, book reviews online, mock trial or debate, etc.
We’d almost certainly do a podcasting unit, perhaps entering into the New York Times student podcast contest or the NPR Student Podcast Challenge or letting students have their choice.
Speaking of real-world projects with real-world audiences, we’d likely dive into the Ethical Use of AI research unit (see how one teacher landed at the podium of a press conference with hers right here).
Multimodal Exploration
Even if it was short, I’d want to find time for a multimodal unit toward the end of the year, after we’d explored podcasting, graphic novels, verse novels, poetry, reviews, argument, opinion, and more. I’d hope to look at Project 562, The Humans of New York Project, the poetry video “In the Dead of Winter We,” the incredible New York Times multimodal piece, “Snow Fall” (which I learned about from Andy Schoenborn and Troy Hicks’ book, Creating Confident Writers), some of Jason Reynold’s multimodal collaborations, like the children’s book, There was a Party for Langston, and the visual poem, Ain’t Burned all the Bright, and likely some short documentaries too. I imagine I might frame the final multimodal project either around “identity in America” or the American dream.
Drama: Excerpts + The Pulitzer Playwright Series
I love a drama unit, because I love doing acting games and acting scenes with students, and sometimes doing progressive performances or one-act festivals. But I’m not sure I’d have time or wish to give a full month to a full play in this curriculum.
More likely I would want to look at some scenes from canonical plays (and probably act them, or have groups act them back to the larger group), and scatter in exploration of Pulitzer-winners like Lin Manuel Miranda, Sanaz Toossi, and Lynn Notage. You can tune into a past episode on these contemporary playwrights (and grab the curriculum featured below) over here.
A Note on Grammar
Throughout the curriculum, we’d give nods to grammar as it came up in our writing projects. If the students were struggling with sentences that were too simple, we’d talk about options and do some sentence combining practice. If they couldn’t get the hang of they’re/their/there, we’d do a mini-lesson and edit for it. If they were focusing exclusively on one type of sensory details, we might explore using others, then immediately work on that inside drafts. The research is clear on grammar – you don’t want to teach it as an isolated separate track. In their book, Best Practice, Zemelman, Daniels, and Hyde seem to agree with NCTE’s position statement to this effect, stating that “grammar and mechanics are best learned in the context of actual writing” (p. 61), and suggesting that these types of lessons are best planned late in the writing process once students are fully invested in their work, hopefully writing something they actually care about (61).
Sources:
Chavez, Felicia. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop. Haymarket Books, 2021.
Bishop, Rudine Sims. “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors.” Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom. Vo. 6, No. 3, Summer 1990. https://scenicregional.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Mirrors-Windows-and-Sliding-Glass-Doors.pdf Accessed November 2, 2025.
Graham, S., MacArthur, C., & Hebert, M. (Eds). Best Practices in Writing Instruction. The Guilford Press, 2019.
Hillocks Jr., G. Narrative Writing: Learning a New Model for Teaching. Heinemann, 2007.
Kittle, Penny. Micro Mentor Texts. Scholastic Professional, 2022.
Muhammad, Gholdy. Cultivating Genius. Scholastic, 2020.
Potash, Betsy. “Students Need Diverse Texts and Choice, with Dr. Claudia Rodriguez-Mojica and Dr. Allison Briceño.” The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, Episode 204.
Resolution on Grammar Exercises to Teach Speaking and Writing. NCTE online: National Council of Teachers of English Position Statements: https://ncte.org/statement/grammarexercises/, Accessed January 2026.
Schoenborn, Andy and Troy Hicks. Creating Confident Writers. W.W. Norton, 2020.
Zemelman, Steven, Harvey Daniels and Arthur Hyde. Best Practice. Heinemann, 2005.
