What Do We Mean by "Informational Text," Exactly?

Much of the controversy surrounding the Common Core has been both nakedly political and embarrassingly provincial, the kind of "how dare those fat cats in Washington shove this down our throats" talk that gives the rest of the world an excuse to laugh at America. Within the language of the standards, though, is an odd inconsistency that speaks to a real dilemma about the purpose of language arts education and the ideology of literary analysis. From kindergarten through grade 5, reading standard 10 calls for students to read an appropriate range and complexity of "informational texts." Beginning in grade 6, however, the standards shift terminology without explanation; now students are asked to read an appropriate range and complexity of "literary nonfiction." Why the shift?

The Common Core declares its mission to be "preparing America's students for college and career." (This phrase is built right into the logo.) In terms of career readiness, the phrase "informational text," the phrase used only until 5th grade, is probably the better term. If informational text denotes a text meant to be processed for its content rather than its formal complexity, then surely the vast majority of workers read much more informational text than they do, say, poetry. Indeed, outside of language arts teachers and humanities professors themselves, it is difficult to think of a profession in which reading for formal complexity rather than information is at all common. I would prefer my airline pilot to have gleaned the key steps of the landing procedure from the manual before she proceeds to analyze the manual's sophisticated imagery.

What is perhaps more surprising is that "informational text" is the better term for college readiness as well. One of the biggest shifts from high school to university English is a shift from reading obviously literary texts (meaning, primarily, novels, poetry, and drama) to reading theory and criticism. It is not impossible (probably not uncommon) for a student to graduate high school never having read a word of literary theory, and then be faced on Day 1 of English 101 with Jacques Derrida (or, at least, Terry Eagleton). In English programs that work in the rhetoric or professional writing traditions, this bias toward informational text is even more pronounced. At Carnegie Mellon (where I taught for 2 years), the English 101 program is built around 8 weeks of argumentative and historical writing before the first introduction of a literary text. And the most common complaint is that incoming students have no idea how to approach criticism; they are used to John Steinbeck, not John Stuart Mill.

So, if informational texts will make up most reading for most people in college and in their careers, why does the Common Core switch to the narrower term "literary nonfiction" after the 5th grade? And why do they insist on it so strongly? Corestandards.org states directly in its "Key Design Considerations" for English Language Arts, that "Fulfilling the Standards for 6–12 ELA requires much greater attention to a specific category of informational text—literary nonfiction—than has been traditional." The Common Core is, in general, leery of directly mandating how its outcomes are to be achieved, so this comes as close to a direct order as anything in the Common Core Standards.

One possible reason is that literary nonfiction allows language arts teachers to appear to address the concerns of colleges and workplaces (that students do not know how to read difficult informational text) without really changing much. After all, if literary nonfiction is taken to denote primarily long-form journalism and historical writing, it is still narrative text. You can use all the usual techniques for studying a novel and simply add that these events really did happen. I'm not sure that a student essay on In Cold Blood would be much different if the class had been told the book was entirely fictional. If the goal is really to get students ready for college-level reading, shouldn't we be dropping the New Journalism and pushing students to read criticism and philosophy instead? (And there are ways to do just that. See Tim Gillespie's Doing Literary Criticism.)

But that is maybe too cynical an answer. Teachers wanting to push students toward informational texts need a path to get there, and literary nonfiction may be it. Literary nonfiction, as hybrid a genre as its name suggests, allows students to push into the world of informational text without suddenly losing all of the genre markers they are used to. In Tom Wolfe, we still have characters, settings, and plots; but we also have some actual historical events. In this sense, literary nonfiction may be the ultimate value-added teaching tool: you get everything you get with a novel plus it's true! (Or, at least, it claims to be true.)

Here, though, is where the ideological stakes get a bit higher. High school English programs are grounded in the formalist approaches of the New Criticism, and a bedrock assumption of the New Criticism is that it is the form of the text that matters. For the New Critics, we are not supposed to care whether MacBeth was a real king who did all of that stuff. We are supposed to care whether the pattern of clothing imagery holds together in an aesthetically pleasing way. To put it another way, truth claims are largely irrelevant to New Criticism. (The only truth claims that do matter are the very generic, "human nature ones"--truths about love and redemption and suffering.) If high school English abandons that position, it will be abandoning one of the key tenets of its own founding philosophy. 

This might be a great thing. An adherence to New Critical principles has certainly foreclosed a million interesting questions in high school classrooms over the years. Why not let students ask what Keats knew about the astronomy of that bright star or whether Upton Sinclair got the meatpacking details right? We might find some interesting answers to those kinds of historical, contextual questions, questions that go unexplored when teachers direct students to analyze metaphors and character development instead.

Those are interesting questions. But once you go down that road, you have a new set of problems. Because if we are no longer reading for form--if we are reading for history or philosophy or science--then what is the point of reading fiction at all? Why not just read great nonfiction? Because you can always analyze its form it you want to. Unless language arts teachers can answer those questions in a convincing way, the Common Core's slippery use of "literary nonfiction" may open up a path (at least a theoretical path) to the end of high school literature as we know it. And, in a world with far more great works of nonfiction than any of us will ever have time to read, maybe that's okay. If students graduated high school having read the essays of James Baldwin rather than Harper Lee's novelization of some of those same issues, would the world be a worse place? I am not sure it would.





References

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014). English Language Arts Standards >> Reading: Informational Tex t>> Grade 5. In CoreStandards.org. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RI/5/

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014). English Language Arts Standards >> Reading: Informational Tex t>> Grade 6. In CoreStandards.org. Retrieved  from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RI/6/

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014).  English Language Arts >> Introduction > Key  Design Consideration. In CoreStandards.org. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-  Literacy/introduction/key-design-consideration/

Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014). English Language Arts Standards >> Reading: Informational Tex t>> Grade 5. In CoreStandards.org. Retrieved      from http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RI/5/

Gillespie, Tim (2010). Doing Literary Criticism: Helping Students Engage with Challenging Texts.  Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers.