For the 2022 second semester, Tracy Anderson is bringing back the Pop Literature course. Pop Literature is about helping students discover who they are as a reader, and increase their fluency and reading skills.

Because of online schooling, Anderson didn’t teach this course last year.

“It’s really a class where you have to be in person,” Anderson said. “There’s something magical about being in a room with people who are reading. It’s kind of like everybody is entering and falling into these different worlds.”

In Anderson’s past research, she found that students’ intellectual confidence is tied closely to reading and math; when students feel poorly about themselves as readers, their academic confidence is negatively affected.

“[Pop Literature] is aimed at getting students to discover and celebrate who they are as a reader,” Anderson said. “And really to put [the act of reading] at the forefront of the curriculum. “It’s also about putting books down—picking books up and then putting books down.”

For students who have taken the class, other courses have been positively impacted.

“What happened was [this student’s] grade in history ended up skyrocketing,” Anderson said. “He had that practice of turning pages from all those books that he chose to read.”

Anderson thinks it’s important to have a mixture of grades and reading levels in this class. Students who come into the class out of a reading habit read, on average, seven to 10 books in the semester; the class average is about 15 to 18 books.

Anderson has noticed that students read different ways for different purposes. When they are being tested on the material, students aren’t able to enter the reading world. This self-driven class does not have tested readings to allow students to read for themselves.