Does Literature Count as Knowledge?

Tim Shanahan

Teacher question:

Our district and state are making a big push to develop social studies knowledge through reading. I appreciate that and understand the importance of social studies (previously we hardly taught it at all). Our ELA textbook still has stories – each of these is connected to social studies or science topics. We are being told that if time is tight (and it always is – we have so many things to teach now) that we can skip the stories and focus on the social studies selections alone. I always thought reading class was for literature and social studies was for geography, history, and so on. That no longer seems to be the case. Am I just hopelessly old fashioned or can you provide me with support for preserving the place of literature in my classroom (I teach the fourth and fifth graders)? Don’t stories do more to improve reading achievement than social studies articles? 

Shanahan responds:

You are correct that for years, literature – or stories, at least – dominated reading instruction. It was the rare selection that trod any other ground (most often an occasional story drawn from history, perhaps).

That has changed for several reasons.

Researchers have identified important differences between expository or informational text and narrative text. Too many kids were leaving elementary school able to read the latter reasonably well, but not the former. Makes sense to include informational text – with all its lexical and structural challenges.

Then there were the concerns about knowledge and its role in reading comprehension. Readers are advantaged by knowing stuff. Your experience with social studies is enlightening. Perhaps if social studies and science had received adequate attention previously, we wouldn’t be discussing this. But this neglect was common.

Given all of that, arguing for reading instruction from texts that carry information worth knowing seems like a no-brainer.

That said, I, too, am seeing/hearing that things may have swung too far in some locales.

The problem here is that too many educators think of stories as motivational or entertaining, rather than informative.

This misjudgment of the value of literature is so pervasive that scholars have felt the need to defend it – not with regard to reading instruction – but in terms of its contribution to intellectual thought, philosophy, and our daily discourse (Miner, 1976; Peels, 2020; Wilson, 1976).

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