The Road Out

January 15, 2013
A moving memoir depicting a teacher's experience leading a literary workshop for gifted young girls from a forsaken neighborhood in Cincinnati. "Though I grew up in small-town Appalachia and my students were coming of age in an urban ghetto," writes Hicks (Program in Education/Duke Univ.), "we were connected." Her students were descendants of Appalachian migrants who moved North for jobs that have since vanished. In 2000, while volunteering as a teacher, Hicks decided to experiment with an after-school and summer program that emphasized literature and creative writing for a small group of girls over time. Most of the girls in the class "had lost their mothers to drugs, neglect, and the debilitating effect of poverty," while fathers tended to be abusive or absent. Yet Hicks found them responsive to books and authors that explored the world via working-class or female protagonists (as well as the transgressive release of horror fiction, which the girls loved). She describes mentoring a core group of eight girls from ages 8 to 12; she reconnected with them at 16. Her carefully constructed memoir fleshes out the girls as characters, capturing their inner ambitions and innate creativity; yet this makes the economic forces stacked against them at their young ages even clearer, giving this tale a grueling, ominous undertone. "I began to realize... that there exists a shadow system of high school education for young people living in the margins of access and opportunity," writes Hicks. In the epilogue, she asserts that even though "the lives of poor and working-class whites have come under increased scrutiny in the media," a post-secondary education remains both challenging and vital for those looking to escape poverty and achieve social mobility. A valuable look at the intellectual lives (and fragile potential) of girls buffeted by American social realities, and an excellent reflection on the challenges of teaching.

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Starred review from April 15, 2013

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. VERDICT By illuminating this schism and depicting her students as vividly in words as in the included photographs, Hicks offers a testimony to the "teacher experience" and contributes a valuable resource to the national discussion on school reform. Highly recommended for educators and others studying American public education.--Marianne Orme, Des Plaines P.L., IL

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