The Road Out: A Teacher's Odyssey in Poor America

Educator Hicks (education, Duke Univ.) relates the intimate story of her experience teaching a literary workshop to young girls in a poor Cincinnati neighborhood. She explores the quotidian question of how to improve the results of public schools serving impoverished communities by focusing on seven initially third- and fourth-grade students in whom she invested four years of extracurricular literature and writing instruction to infuse a passion for these subjects that would produce a desire to learn more. As a mentor to girls whose backgrounds in many ways mirrored her own, Hicks started by explaining how literature has the power to expand one's horizons while she simultaneously focused on literature that depicts troubles all too familiar and that helped her students to make sense of the outside world. Hicks observed that a sincere desire for education could not alone guarantee that students would avoid truancy or earn a high school diploma.