Keywords
fundamental reading skills, freedom documents, informational texts, literary standards
Submission Type
Research
Preview
The skill-based Common Core, as well as its Utah adaptation, raises the level of rigor required of students. The core focuses on skills that apply to literature and nonfiction of all kinds. A few standards name specific authors (Shakespeare’s name appears several times, for example), but the standards in general impose no prescribed list of works on teachers.
Yet Standard 9 of the Reading Standards for Informational Text curiously lists not only authors worthy of study, but specific works: “Analyze seminal U.S. documents of historical and literary significance (e.g., Washington’s Farewell Address, the Gettysburg Address, Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech, King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’), including how they address related themes and concepts” (“English Standards”)1. Those texts, which I have come to call freedom documents, are each exemplars from the core’s appendix: texts of the quality and complexity that the new standards expect students to tackle.
Recommended Citation
Handy, Michael
(2013)
"There Can Be No End Save Learning: Using Seminal U.S. Documents to Teach Fundamental Reading Skills,"
The Utah English Journal: Vol. 41, Article 9.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/uej/vol41/iss1/9