English and History Teacher Kimberley Yates, PhD discusses the challenges and successes of teaching the Toni Morrison Senior Seminar and the decision behind including an end-of-year symposium to wrap up the course.
It’s hard to write about a course while you’re still teaching it in its first year. I hope to create an experience for students that is special - that puts them in awe of themselves and lets their light shine for others the way I’ve been seeing it all year. I can already see the fault lines and what I need to do more intentionally next year. This writing reflects the why behind the class, the intentional design of the course by planning backward, and what I am learning.
Why Toni Morrison?
In a student group last school year, I asked how many students had heard of Toni Morrison. Only maybe five students in a room of about thirty raised their hands. This moment sparked for me an opportunity in our curriculum. Morrison has won rare and prestigious awards like the National Book Award in 1977 for Sula, a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in the wake of her 1988 novel, Beloved, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She penned eleven novels; co-authored seven children’s books; has written, edited, or co-authored eleven more non-fiction books; and wrote two shorter fiction pieces. She has done countless published interviews, and, I hope that a course like this generates a new generation not just of Morrison readers and scholars but of readers and scholars.
“My favorite class at Field is the Senior Seminar on Toni Morrison. Going this in-depth into one particular author, studying her fiction and non-fiction work, her interviews, and the work other scholars have done on her writing, is something so unique for a high school class and makes me feel confident for seminar-style classes that I will take in college.” ~Colleen ‘24
She is one of the most significant writers not only of her time but of United States literary production, with writing that provides key insights into the nuances of U.S. society through an African American lens and exemplars of what we can make fiction and language do. I hope this course familiarizes all students at Field with at least Toni Morrison’s name and gives some students a rare opportunity at the high school level to delve into the canon of one author and produce original essays on their observations of patterns across at least two of her novels, considering her interviews, scholarship on her work, and potentially making connections to other external sources. I have structured the course so that another author could be the focus, but the combination of factors, in addition to her talent, made Toni Morrison the right choice at this point in history – the increasing banning of her books, my particular work with her writing over decades, and the expansion of elective offerings for seniors.
Why a symposium at the end of the year?
When I conceptualized and proposed the course, I included the end-of-year symposium (that will take place on April 22) because it seemed a logical outcome of a course that deep dives into one author and relies on students’ own insights. It is not uncommon for scholars to gather and organize literary societies around the work of a particular author. My mentor at Spelman was a former founder and President of the Langston Hughes Society, and I have been an active member of the Toni Morrison Society, either simply attending or actually presenting at three different conferences.
Studying the works of a particular author uncovers a different kind of reading. Morrison is a writer who can be found “hiding” events in plain sight - if you’re not paying attention. When I went to see her at Sixth & I on April 30, 2015, here in D.C. as she was promoting her last novel, God Help the Child, a man in the audience noted during the Q&A session that he loved her books, but, he complained, “I have to go back…” And Toni Morrison responded, “Oh well, that’s called reading.” And, so, we began our course this school year really understanding the process of reading (that it is more than simply inhaling words as you exhale across sentences): it is digging; it is uncovering; it is looking at what you have found, noticing it, asking questions of it, and making sense of it as you connect the dots within the novel, across novels, and in consideration of her words in interviews or forewords to her books.
"I’ve really loved getting such a deep understanding of Morrison’s work and thinking critically about a wide range of texts.” ~Mateo ‘24
In the first semester, students wrote, but we spent a substantial amount of time noticing details, asking questions, observing, and being patient. As students grew more confident in their close reading skills, having a better understanding of the kind of writer Morrison is, knowing that for her “[f]iction has never been entertainment” as she notes in the audio prelude to her 1993 Nobel Lecture, students were increasingly more independent in their reading. We spent September and October grounded in The Bluest Eye, but we only had two weeks plus spring break to read, discuss, and write about Tar Baby.
Knowing 1) the course’s end goal – the symposium where they would present their insights across Morrison novels, and 2) the beginning – that we would have to learn how to read Morrison novels, meant that I then had to scaffold the in-between – repeating the processes of reading and writing preparation, giving them opportunities to talk through and gain confidence in their insights and voices, and supporting them in the process of writing longer works. But, starting at the end, knowing the final project of the course was key and supported by multiple points of contemporary research, as noted in Grant Wiggins’ Understanding by Design, Project-based Learning as outlined by Boston University’s Center for Teaching and Learning, as well as a book that Field faculty is currently engaging, Standards-Based Learning in Action: Moving from Theory to Practice.
What have I learned?
“Although I was intimated by the fast pace and heavy workload that the course advertised, I found myself falling in love with the works of Toni Morrison, as she has become my favorite author. This course pushes me to critique my own biases and analyze deep societal controversies and how intersecting identities impact perspective.” ~Grey ‘24
Some of the benefits of this symposium have emerged across the year. Honing in on Morrison, I have seen what the deep study of one author can provide for students: literature teachers generally encourage and teach intertextual connections, but that vision is sharper and more organic when reading a specific author, particularly in publication order. It has also occurred to me that though this upcoming Senior Symposium is modeled off of the Humanities academic track, it is conceivable that at some point in their professional training and journeys, regardless of their field, students will be exposed to and potentially attend professional conferences where peers will be presenting their research and new projects. I imagine Field students will just as likely be among them, presenting their original insights as this course's closing symposium requires. If students write long research papers in 8th grade to prepare for high school, then 12th grade teachers can expose students to the kinds of reading, writing, research, and thinking skills and experiences that will benefit them at their next levels of education and professional careers. Once the Symposium concludes, students will spend the remaining classes polishing their papers, incorporating and addressing the authentic feedback they receive. By the end of this course, students will have, impressively, built nuanced analyses that they can be proud of, can submit for publication, and can continue to research later. Whether they publish or not, they will have had an opportunity to engage in the work of scholarship and present their original work in high school!
