Faculty Research Fellows Talk with Sarah Levine

Sarah Levine: "Who and What Are Our Kids Reading in English Class?"

Almost as soon as English literature emerged as a subject in U.S. high schools and colleges, education researchers have been trying to capture students’ experiences of that discipline through content analyses of exams, textbooks, and syllabi. Who and what are students reading in English class? And what does their reading suggest about national conceptions of the values and purposes of literature?

A hundred years ago, it was fairly easy to track those conceptions. Students read from a narrow, standardized collection of White Western male authors. What about today? Researchers have not made a content analysis of high school or college curricula since MeToo, Black Lives Matter, or a host of other social and political movements. Assistant Professor Sarah Levine and Postdoc Nichole Nomura attempt to do so in their current research. They will share ongoing manual and computational network analyses of thousands of high school and college course descriptions to outline who and what U.S. students are reading today and the role of gender, race, and class in our national conceptions of literature.

Sarah Levine is Assistant Professor of Education.

Clayman Faculty Affiliates are welcome to attend the lunch seminars.  All Stanford academics are eligible to become Clayman Institute Faculty Affiliates. Please RSVP to Lea Gottlieb (lgottlie [at] stanford.edu (lgottlie[at]stanford[dot]edu)) if you wish to attend.