Why We Love and Hate Young Adult Fiction

Look, I get it: The Hunger Games is awesome. So is whatever angel/vampire/dragon love triangle/supernatural thriller/ordinary-person-is-really-the-chosen-one series you are currently reading.

I also really love doughnuts, but my wife tells me that the jelly in them does not constitute a full serving of fruit.

As high school teachers, we love to teach young adult fiction because of the high interest level. It feels really good to teach a text that our kids love and can't put down. We don't have to hear the endless whining about how boring Antigone is. (By the way, it's not, as evidenced by my previous articles on comparative mythology and civil disobedience.)

Sadly, we often lose rigor because most young adult fiction caps out at an eighth grade Lexile level. We do high schoolers a disservice when we sacrifice rigor for readability. But thankfully, it doesn't have to be that way if you are careful in your strategies for using young adult fiction.

Social Commentary as a Springboard

The thing that young adult fiction does best is play straight to your emotions. That's the source of its addictive power. The best fiction, however, also addresses social issues. Since dystopia are incredibly popular right now, series like The Hunger Games, The Uglies, Divergent, Maze Runner, and the Matched series all project a future with totalitarian governments. Whether it's a caste system like The Uglies or the Orwellian government of The Hunger Games, there are many comparisons to be researched and discussed. Some young adult fiction, like The Book Thief, actually addresses historical events, while others extrapolate from modern society.

It's not all dystopias, mind control, and class warfare. Books like The Fault in Our Stars address concepts like fate, destiny, and death (as well as a nod to Greek tragedy and hamartia). Other books like Speak address emotional turmoil following sexual assault, and Monster chronicles the internal conflict of a boy going through the juvenile justice system. 

Then again, in a classroom context, it's not enough to mention the social commentary in passing—it needs to be the goal and focus of the lesson. Use the social situations as the subjects for Socratic seminars, like this Hunger Games discussion. Generate opinions from your class before researching each subject in depth.

Promote Inquiry-Based Lessons

You've started reading the text, and you've had scintillating Socratic seminars that have helped each blossoming social commentator in your class. That's wonderful, but you're still just consuming a low-level text and giving what you already know through background knowledge.

That's where inquiry-based learning is useful. This is the crux of project-based learning, specifically STEM-related lessons, but it adapts well to an English classroom as well. Choose a driving question and give your class the freedom to research, support, and defend their stance on that issue. Keep the question open-ended so that the work is student-driven. For instance, with The Hunger Games, you could ask the question, "When is a government justified in using military force on its own people?" While this certainly fits within the scope of the series, it allows for a wide exploration of situations even within the US—like the Kent State shootings or the military assault on Waco. 

You've just taken an eighth-grade text and raised the rigor by giving your class the freedom to explore the ideas behind a text. Ideas don't have a Lexile level. 

Supplement Higher-Level Texts

Try a social experiment of your own: walk into your English classroom and hand them an article on genetically engineered organisms and monitor their reactions. At best, you'll have readers who complete the assignment for a grade. 

Now try this angle from the Learning Network where a discussion of the genetically modified animals in The Hunger Games turns into student-driven research on genetic engineering, which allows for open discussion and research, and most importantly, the consumption of higher-level texts in the form on nonfiction articles that integrate different content areas. High rigor and interdisciplinary learning—it's a teacher's dream.

In addition to non-fiction articles, there are a plethora of fiction texts that lend themselves to be compared and contrasted with current young adult fiction. Dystopias, totalitarian governments, and the use of technology to control the masses are hardly new concepts. Try pairing a young adult fiction novel with:

• 1984
• Animal Farm
• Brave New World
• The Giver
• Fahrenheit 451
• A Clockwork Orange
• Catch-22. 

Stories from authors like Philip K. Dick, Douglas Adams, and Kurt Vonnegut often darkly parody modern social systems, from the bureaucratic Vogons in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to the weapons race for ice-nine in Cat's Cradle.

Whatever you do, make sure that your class sees you as excited about all elements of your lesson. Don't undermine yourself by being excited about Maze Runner, but bored by Lord of the Flies. Both are exciting, engaging texts and useful in different ways and for different reasons. Learning to appreciate learning in multiple formats is the most important thing a student can learn, so show as much enthusiasm for articles on genetic modification as you do on The Hunger Games.

Lesson Planet Resources:

Hunger Games, Socratic Seminar, Inquiry-Based Lessons