"The stories that meant something": YA fantasy as a tool to improve high school ELA performance and for identity formation in traumatized and marginalized students

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationship between Trauma-Informed Pedagogy, culturally-responsive curriculum, and the ELA canon to best aid marginalized and traumatized students in motivation, classroom retention, and identity formation. I believe that critically analyzing, selecting, and implementing diverse texts in an ELA curriculum is a hefty and important topic of research that merits a separate, in-depth study amongst multiple districts, which is outside of the realm of this paper. Moreover, I also believe that, insofar as any one instructor has control over their curriculum and text selections, it is important to prevent just creating a "new" literary canon with a few "accepted" diverse texts. Rather, I would encourage instructors to evaluate their individual classes, respond to the interests of their students, and select texts on a more individualized basis. Genre fiction, and specifically fantasy fiction, is a currently untapped resource for ELA teachers to motivate students to become more confident and successful readers, and is a promising tool in the proverbial toolbox of Trauma-Informed Pedagogy. Indeed, fantasy fiction urges students to conceive of a world wherein they are empowered, where they might confront or escape from the often-traumatizing realities they live in, and "will be able to see that those futuristic and fantastical landscapes are actually closer than they first appeared to be" (Toliver, 2021, p. 30).