Reading & Literature

Thoughts on Texas' 2026 Literary Works Requirement

Thoughts on the 2026 Texas Literary Works List The State of Texas just adopted a new policy where they are going to require specific texts ("literary works" as they call them) to be taught in all grade levels from Kindergarten through 12th grade. This is causing quite the backlash because there are biblical texts on this list. And, yes, requiring— requiring —teachers to teach passages from the Bible is problematic given the constitution that is supposed to protect the separation between church and state. There are ways to avoid saying that teaching things from the Bible has anything to do with the state mandating religion, and I think because it is not explicitly saying to teach religion, there are going to be some ways that teachers can subvert this. There are more egregious ideas at play here when you are requiring teachers to teach an entire list of specific literary works. It limits the ability of teachers to choose texts that are going to be relevant for their ...

Reading Between the Lines: Framing Texas' House Bill 3 Reading Practices

Reading Between the Lines: Framing Texas' House Bill 3 Reading Practices Texas House Bill 3 (HB3), passed in 2019, stipulates the Science of Teaching Reading (SoTR) requirement that new PreK–6 teachers must meet. For the past six decades, the "Reading Wars" debate ( Strauss , 2018) has been fueled by new developments in research ( Kim , 2008); all aim to find the most effective way to teach students to read which is often reduced to two approaches: whole-language versus phonics-based instruction. Texas' Science of Reading policy advances phonics-based instruction. Educators and researchers express concern that such a strict focus on phonics instruction "is being used to silence the voices of literacy teacher educators and teachers rather than invite the collective exploration of possibilities" ( Hoffman et al., 2020, p. S255). The Texas Education Agency ( TEA ) presents the policy of HB3 in a series of videos online . ...

Shoaling Book Bans: Resisting Censorship

The following is a manuscript I wrote in reaction to the 2021 list of banned books that Matt Krause published. I figured that in light of the recent required works list adopted by Texas, it was worthwhile to put out this more conceptual piece I wrote. Abstract In this conceptual paper I apply King’s (2019) method of shoaling to the bad faith narratives around book censorship in United States’ public education. I argue that the techniques of (neo)liberalism are inadequate to resist renewed efforts to ban books from the school curriculum. Through shoaling, I weave disparate scholarship together to create a lens that allows for the analysis of book bans from outside the epistemological and ontological assumptions of modern liberalism. Scholars of Indigenous studies, Black studies, Decolonial philosophy, and critical theory are rubbed together to imagine a pluriversal approach that allows one to envision an alternate means of analysis regarding book bans and education. I concl...

Ryan Smits

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