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Introduction: Judith Ortiz Cofer in the Classroom:  A Woman in Front of the Sun
~by Carol Jago*


    For many of us coming of age is a long, long process. Maybe that is why I am such an avid reader of Judith Ortiz Cofer. Her characters remind me not only of what it was like to be a teenager grappling with the competing demands of home and self, but also what it means to “come of age” at any age. Rich in concrete images from her Puerto Rican heritage, Cofer’s work speaks to students of all ethnicities: Russian, Israeli, Persian, Salvadoran, Polish, Mexican, Nigerian, and Santa Monican. How she manages to do this is partly the mystery of art but I hope the pages that follow will help you help your students mine Cofer’s texts for insight into this literature as well as for insight into themselves.

    Including new authors like Cofer into the language arts curriculum has become increasingly difficult. Everywhere the cry for higher test scores and improved student achievement drives instruction. But what if including work by Judith Ortiz Cofer (and Nikki Giovanni, Alice Walker, Sandra Cisneros, Amy Tan) engaged your students in such deep reading and writing that their scores went through the roof? Suggesting that reading multicultural literature is at odds with skill development is a false dichotomy. No need to choose between Mark Twain and Amy Tan or Will Shakespeare and Gary Soto; students need both. Of course to make this happen students must read a great deal more than they currently do. We have to steel ourselves in this regard, demanding much more from all our students.
   
    A 2005 survey by Achieve, Inc. found that as many as 40 percent of the nation’s high school graduates say they are inadequately prepared to deal with the demands of employment and postsecondary education. The research indicates that preparation gaps cut across a range of core skill and knowledge areas – most notably “work habits, ability to read and understand complicated materials, and writing skills.” Nearly 65 percent of students in college report that they wish they had applied themselves more in middle and high school. 81 percent of recent graduates say that they would have worked harder if their school experience had demanded more of them. It is also possible that they would have worked harder if the curriculum included more multicultural literature. I don’t believe that the inclusion of writers of color in the curriculum is a panacea for closing the achievement gap, but it can be an important feature of coursework that both insures that students meet state standards and invites them to explore engaging contemporary literature.

    Anyone who works with teenagers knows that convincing students to work hard in middle and high school is a challenge. Students should be working in Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development where instruction is conducted the level where students can learn with the aid of a teacher or more knowledgeable peers (Vygotsky, 1962). In too many cases middle and high school instruction is not operating in this Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) but rather in the ZME, a Zone of Minimal Effort. In this instructional zone, the texts are as short as possible; every day’s lesson stands alone to eliminate reliance on students doing homework reading; and basic skills are re-taught ad nauseam. While I understand the reasons teachers find themselves working in this Zone of Minimal Effort, under such conditions students’ hearts and minds are dangerously shortchanged.

    Teachers can take heart from Achieve’s findings to reaffirm our own commitment to offering students a rich curriculum full of both classic and contemporary texts that push students outside the Zone of Minimal Effort. When choosing books for students I first look for literary merit. Without this, the novel or poem will not stand up to close scrutiny or be worth the investment of classroom time. Texts that work best for whole class study:
  Judith Ortiz Cofer’s work meets every one of these criteria. Her stories, like all good literature, deepen our experience, heighten our sensibilities, and mature our judgment. I believe that teenagers want to have these experiences but many have not yet realized that books can provide them.

    Reading is not a vaccine for small-mindedness, but it does make it difficult to think only of one’s self or one’s own ethnic group. You may not have a single Puerto Rican student in your school yet Judith Ortiz Cofer’s characters will teach your teenagers of any culture more about themselves and about others. If one purpose of education is to prepare students for the complex responsibilities of citizenship, I can think of no better preparation for these responsibilities than reading rich, multicultural literature. It is not a matter of matching percentages of books to the percentages of ethnic groups in your school. It is about broadening young people’s horizons. In Poetic Justice, Martha Nussbaum writes about her experience as a visiting professor in Law and Literature at the University of Chicago Law School. The university had determined that for these future attorneys and future judges to be fully prepared for the work that lay ahead, they needed to educate their imaginations. Richard Wright’s Native Son was required reading. Nussbaum argues, “If we do not cultivate the imagination in this way, we lose, I believe, an essential bridge to social justice. If we give up on ‘fancy.’ We give up on ourselves” (xviii).

    There is no simple fix for closing the achievement gap. This is not to say that there is nothing teachers can do to narrow it. We must treat every moment of classroom time as golden and insure that the curriculum is full of rich, engaging literature. The gap may not be closed in my lifetime, but with determined effort by parents, legislators, administrators, teachers, and students we can work towards insuring that the next generation leaves school with an education that has prepared them well for life. The alternative is a perfect storm.
 
 
* Reprinted by permission of the author.  This book is available from NCTE Publications.