ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the consequences of high stakes testing for students’ engagement with literature in urban classrooms. The study of literature has long occupied a central position in the secondary English curriculum. Although the purposes of literature studies have long been contested, understanding literary texts remains central to our notions of literate achievement. In particular, substantively engaging students with literary texts is critical to developing students’ social imaginations. Over the past two decades sociocultural literacy research has illuminated the complex social, cultural, and political processes through which students construct meaning with and through literary texts as they navigate the social worlds represented in such texts and interrogate and construct their own social, moral and political stances towards these worlds (Knoeller, 1998; Langer, 1995, 1987; Schultz & Fecho, 2000; Wortham, 2001). Research that draws on Bakhtin’s (1981, 1986) literacy and linguistic theory has further documented the importance of students appropriating the social languages, or verbal-ideological belief systems and worldviews, available within literary texts and within students’ own social worlds (Hicks, 1996; Lensmire, 1994; Nystrand, 1997; Nystrand & Gamoran 1991).
