Over time, it has become clear to us that there is at least one other important factor that accounts for their success, what Angela Duckworth and others have identified as "grit," the stick-to-it-iveness that permits us to pursue and persevere to achieve very-long-term goals with tenacity and resilience. We were thrilled to see our experience with students borne out by Duckworth's research at the University of Pennsylvania, and we took a new look at our students with this characteristic in mind.
By considering grit and resilience, we were able to better predict who would succeed and in which environments — and, I think, better able to offer helpful advice to our students and families as they headed off to college. But we hadn't figured out how to teach grit, how to nurture the sort of resilience that we had determined was so important. Here, Duckworth was less helpful, candidly admitting in a 2013 TED Talk that we really have very little idea how best to teach grit in schools.
Shortly after watching that TED Talk with the faculty, we happened upon David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano's research, "Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind" published in the journal Science (18 October 2013: Vol. 342 no. 6156, pp. 377-380). In their much-heralded and oft-criticized article, Kidd and Castano report the findings of several studies that suggest that reading literary fiction (as distinct from nonfiction and so-called popular fiction) can contribute to improved theory of mind — the ability to recognize and empathize with others' states of mind. Whether or not you question Kidd and Castano's methodology — questions have surfaced about how the reading passages were chosen in the studies they used — it is hard to resist the tempting notion that reading can change us in fundamental ways. Serendipitously, we had hit upon an approach to teaching grit: We'd read stories of grit!
So, we set about developing a course — Grit Lit: Stories of Resilience — to provide students with a window into the gritty lives of characters in their reading. Because Eagle Hill is built on the principles of innovation, individuality, and intellectual autonomy, we did not develop an overly prescriptive curriculum or reading list. Instead, we asked teachers to choose texts and to develop approaches and activities that they thought would allow students the vicarious experience of resilience. The first few sections of our Grit Lit course got underway this winter. (Below is a list of texts that teachers have used or are considering.)
The texts, as you'll see, are incredibly diverse. What seems to be important so far is using texts slightly differently than we have in the past. Many high school literature courses treat texts as nothing more than grist for an interpretation mill, often one with a particular interpretive practice in mind: training young feminist critics or psychoanalytic critics or New Critics or post-colonialists. In our Grit Lit sections, we take another approach: we pay attention to the experiences of characters and try hard to imagine ourselves in their lives. We've done this with "grit journals" that ask students to identify the resilience of characters in their readings, to adopt the position of a character and imagine entering her or his situation, or to imagine literary characters reacting to challenging situations in their own lives. Some of us have experimented with poetry for two voices (see Lesley Roessing's article). In this exercise, students match their own lives against those of the characters in their texts and perform their original work in pairs, using two voices to highlight intersections and divergences. We've explored the differences among grit, stubbornness, and belligerence in our discussions and essays (is Milton's Satan resilient or belligerent?).
So far, it doesn't seem to matter much whether the characters are fictional or "real." My own students have reacted as strongly to Milton's Satan as to Carton de Wiart's tales of war. Reading about Louie Zamperini in Hillenbrand's Unbroken, one student quipped, "His 'mind is its own place'!"
What does seem to matter is offering classroom experiences that allow students and teachers to be fully themselves, setting aside the carefully crafted personas that all of us sometimes bring to class. Genuine empathy, even with a fictional character, requires a genuine self reaching out to another, and that can be intimidating for everyone involved.
As teachers, we've begun to think about ways to study, more formally, the outcomes of this coursework for students. It's too early to report any strong findings, but one exercise conducted with a very small group of students is encouraging. Using a common 25-item resilience scale that takes no more than ten minutes for students to respond to independently, I put students into two groups and asked them to do different short readings immediately prior to completing the scales. One group read Henley's "Invictus," and the other read Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est." (If you know these poems, you'll recognize that the two works have very different tenors: The "bloodied but unbowed" resilience in Henley's speaker contrasts Owen's disillusioned, "helpless sight.") In comparing the scales completed by these two groups of students, a striking difference emerged: Those who read Henley scored, on average, as significantly more resilient than those who read Owen. The Henley group scored in the "moderately high" range while the Owen group scored in the low range. Of course, this was an unscientific classroom activity designed in part to help students understand the concept of resilience or grit early in the course. At the same time, it has sparked some interesting discussion among faculty.
We've also taken to heart Alfie Kohn's critique of the popularity of grit in recent educational discourse. It is, of course, possible to impose unrealistic, wrongheaded, or unhealthy goals on our students and to suggest that failure to meet those goals is a character flaw, a lack of grit. It is perhaps even more dangerous to nurture a brand of grit that requires students to persevere in impossible situations toward truly awful outcomes. In this respect, we agree with Kohn's concerns about grit as an education panacea. However, when grit is developed in an environment of respect and trust and relied on in a struggle toward our own and common goals, we see it as an indispensable quality — and literary study is perhaps one way to nurture that quality.
A partial list of literature (in no particular order):
Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina
Yoko Kawashima Watkins's So Far from the Bamboo Grove
John Green's The Fault in Our Stars
Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One
Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
John Milton's Paradise Lost
Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Laura Hillenbrand's Unbroken
Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes
Adrian Carton de Wiart's Happy Odyssey
Richard Wright's Black Boy
Beowulf
Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner
Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
Geoffrey Canada's Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun
Selections from Brian Carpenter and Tom Franklin's Grit Lit: A Rough South Reader
Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage
Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy