My Take: Why the Big Read matters

As we enter the first week of our Lakeshore’s Big Read 2022 program, I invite you to join me in reading our 2022 chosen books and exploring Greek Mythology, the Hero’s Journey, and what it means to be a hero in different times, places and cultures. Our 2022 chosen books: "Circe" by Madeline Miller, "Last Stop on Market Street"by Matt de la Peña and any of our middle read books, including Jason Reynolds’ "Miles Morales," offer readers new insights and different interpretations of traditional or classic stories, collectively exploring told and untold heroes.

Last year, as a sophomore, I transferred to Hope College from my local community college in northern Illinois. When I first heard about the Big Read, it was all but foreign to me. My community back home doesn’t have a program like the Big Read and I was immediately drawn to the ways that this monthlong, community-wide reading program encourages community members to read literature that represents alternative perspectives and reflects diverse cultural or life experiences.

I was first introduced to the Big Read last fall when I took Dr. Van Duinen’s Foundations of Education course. In this course, we talked about concepts such as “Social and Emotional Learning” and “Culturally Relevant Teaching.” These teaching concepts help shape the curriculum to be both “mirrors,” reflecting our individual culture and identity, and “windows,” revealing insights into cultures different from our own. This allows for engagement within an environment familiar to ourselves and the interest in learning how other people approach and live within their environments. We explored the ways that last year’s chosen books, "An American Sunrise"by Joy Harjo and "Fry Bread"by Kevin Noble Maillard, could be used within the classroom to better reflect and respond to students’ diversities of cultures and our changing global world.

Coming from my hometown high school with a strong Latinx student body, I craved and still crave experiences of reading classic literatureand also stories that reflect my own culture and the cultures of my peers. By offering literature with alternative perspectives to that of the original texts, we allow all students to engage fully with the text and give them the opportunity to see themselves as heroes. For example, I love being able to read Shakespeare’s "Romeo and Juliet" and Guadalupe Garcia McCall’s "Shame the Stars,"a retelling of Shakespeare’s play set in Texas at the turn of the 20th century with the central conflict still representing forbidden love but with the historical context of Mexican-American displacement of the time period.

It’s this desire to read diverse stories that motivates what I write as a creative writing major at Hope College. While I couldn’t see myself in a teaching position after taking the Foundations of Education course, I did gain a passion to help all readers have access to literature that reflects their cultural identities. Getting to help organize the Big Read and Little Read for readers of all ages also feels like a step toward the mission of my calling. It’s also why I love the pairing of this year’s Big and Little Read books so much and why I’m so excited about the Little Read author event with Matt de la Peña on Nov. 9.

As a writer, I understand how important words mean to an individual. I’ve catered my entire academic career to learning the craft of words and the influence of literature. Most of my studies include the deep reading of influential writers like Walt Whitman, John Donne, the notorious William Shakespeare, and others whose work has survived in academia over the ages. Their individual contributions to literature, plays, and poetry have established how modern scholars study the literary devices that now set precedent. There’s no English class that skips iambic pentameter and I’ve read a handful of poems from Whitman’s "Leaves of Grass."There’s no argument for how source material has inspired writers of today to create their own tellings of classic literature. It’s what we’ve based movies and television shows on. Literature captures the origins of storytelling and we can’t help but return to the familiar stories that warn us of forbidden love and the dangers of an odyssey.

The stories we read influence our manner and actions in the world around us. The books that our teachers hand us at formative ages matter. Being given books that don’t reflect ourselves or the communities around us limits our knowledge of our neighbors and the cultures that influence our environment. It also inhibits those of marginalized cultures from viewing themselves and the individuality of their culture in the curriculum they are presented with. It’s the Miles Morales of the classroom seeing himself as Spider-Man. Seeing himself as the hero makes the web-slinging adventures more fascinating to follow and hopes for the hero to win in the end.

The behind-the-scenes work on our Big Read team gives me a glimpse of how much dedication it takes to engage with the movement of culturally relevant teaching. I encourage you to join me and thousands of Lakeshore readers in reading “classic” Greek mythology and in reading stories that make us think about untold and overlooked heroes.

— Gabrielle Crone is a Hope College creative writing major from Harvard, Illinois.

This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: My Take: Why the Big Read matters