Honoring Students' Selections: Exploring Book Choice with Ethnically Diverse, Urban High School Students (Report‪)‬

Introduction I am a language arts instructor who teaches at an urban, multi-ethnic high school in Arizona. Ninety percent of our students are of Latino/Latina, Asian, Native American, or African American descent, and 64.2% qualify for free and reduced lunch. In the fall of 2008, I conducted a study on student book choice with one of my 12th-grade honors language arts classes. Admittedly, the study was initiated more out of necessity rather than intellectual curiosity. My school district provided me with 30 copies of an anthology of British literature that included brief excerpts of the classics including Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, John Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," and William Butler Yeats' "Sailing to Byzantium." Because of our diverse student body, I was surprised that the reading materials were so culturally limited. In my graduate courses we had been taught the importance of using ethnically diverse literature that is representative of students' unique perspectives and histories. Knowing that my class was as diverse as our school, I felt uncomfortable ignoring my students' heritages, and teaching only White authors (see Table 1).