The world is filled with countless great stories and texts,ranging from motivational sayings to life lessons. Yet the vast majority of these tales go untold. The Great World Texts Conference aims to bring some of these stories off the dusty bookshelves and into the hands of the next generation. English teacher William Brydon has brought his classes to the Great World Texts Conferences for the past three years.

“The program was organized by the University of Wisconsin-Madison over a decade ago to try to encourage high schools to engage with more challenging text that also tackled topics that were not traditionally tackled in the classroom from global authors,” he said. “It was designed to broaden horizons and get kids more of a college level academic experience at the high school level.”

Every year, UW Madison picks a new text focusing on global topics and issues. This year’s selected text was The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, a novel tackling the struggles of a white-passing black man’s struggle with his identity and race in 1920’s America written by James Weldon Johnson.

“This year’s text is technically an American text but has a global ripple effect,” Brydon said. The text was studied by English 3H students in both global and non-global sections.

The topics mentioned in the text are deeper and portray race in a raw light. Brydon noted that there was some controversy following the release of the chosen text.

“The text is inherently difficult, so I think students struggle to take apart an upper-level text and bring up difficult themes and parts of life,” he said. “It can be difficult to teach a text like this in 2022 in Wisconsin because other schools had to drop out due to complaints from various stakeholders that it wasn’t appropriate. I’m very happy that we didn’t have to go through that.”

Alongside the mature topics, Brydon believes other factors have a role in the low attendance numbers in this year’s conference.

“There used to be around 40 schools, and this year there were 20,” he said. “I think the pandemic and the hardships brought up by that might have discouraged some more schools this year.”

At the height of the Omicron variant surge, UW Madison announced that the conference would be going virtual. Brydon made a joint decision with Jason Cummings from Oshkosh North to take a different approach in presenting student projects.

“Mr. Cummings at North participated in the virtual conference that UW Madison hosted last year, and he noted that it was really hard to get that personal connection over zoom or display projects,” he said. “We wanted to have an experience near what UW Madison puts on but still feasible to pull off. He linked up with us at West and all North classes so that students could still have something in-person where students got to do poster sessions and hear from the keynote, so it really was just a smaller version of what Madison would have put on.”

Junior Tessa Whitcomb enjoyed the substitution.

“I was disappointed we didn’t get to go to Madison, but I think the way we did it was good,” she said. “It made it easier and more comfortable to present and talk to other students with the smaller size.”

Junior Maggie Kriege attended the conference and gave a presentation during the Plenary session with her partner, junior Rachael Weickert, on their timeline piano painting.

“We were confident in our idea, and we thought it would be cool just to share it out and see other people’s ideas and maybe get people thinking about how ours could impact theirs,” she said. “I loved when there was almost a subconscious battle where the ex-colored man was deciding whether or not he would take his black characteristics or leave them behind. Getting to see him discover his identity was really interesting.”

Brydon believes the conference has been a vital part of the junior curriculum and improved student development.

“The conference event of the program where students from all across the state could get together to showcase the best of the best from that school, so it was more of a collaborative equivalent to what you would do when you're in a masters program or a PHD program to go to a conference and show off your work,” he said. “Not everybody gets a chance to do that, so it's a way to work on your personal and analytical skills. You get to work on being proud of your work and showing it off, which you need to do when applying for jobs and colleges.”

Junior Lily Molash feels the experience has left her with more than just academic background knowledge.

“It was a real eye-opener for me to see how deeply it affects people on many different levels on racial identity and connections to family or heritage when you have to choose for passing for white versus not,” she said. “There’s so many more levels to it than I had realized.”

Senior Angelina Wang felt a personal connection with the unit and conference.

“I am an American-born Chinese living in a small town in America, and I definitely suffered from an identity crisis,” she said. “I do have those double sides of me because I’m Chinese but I’m also American, so sometimes when I look through myself it's hard to pick what side I want to show people or if I have to pick a side.”

Whitcomb acknowledges the challenges that came with the text and its topics but hopes the experience will help open the conversation and incite change.

“As a white person reading this book, trying to connect to the characters and even talking about racial identity is something that I wonder if I even have a place to talk about,” she said. “Truthfully, I’ve never connected to it, but the more people we have talking about it, the more people will feel talking about it and fighting against the stereotypes and discrimnation that come with race.”

By Hannah Chung

Oshkosh West Index Volume 118 Issue 7

April 25th, 2022

Great World Texts circumvent Covid to share academic experience