Social Relevancy

Today's reading from Bomer's textbook, "Building Adolescent Literacy in Today's English Classrooms" reminded me of a discussion in my UTeach class about relevancy of texts. The major point taken from that discussion was:

If a text can't be related in some way to today's society, you should probably choose another text.

Bomer suggests that we call in other texts to relate to what we are teaching and to use the real world to relate to texts. While it's nice to read texts for fun, I think that the true purpose of literature and in turn, writing literature, should be to make some form of a social comment. I would like my students to be reading texts that are relevant to current social issues, so they can have something useful to form opinions on. 

We're blessed to be living in a democratic society and no matter how imperfect ours is, we are privileged to have the freedom of voice, and it is our job as educators to empower our students to contribute to our democratic society with the use of socially relevant texts.

At the same time, I would like my students to have opportunities to read just for fun, like the dessert books I mentioned in my last post. While I think that it's important for texts to be socially relevant, I don't want to destroy a student's interest in reading by only forcing them to read texts of my choosing. Maybe there's a way to guide them to choose texts on their own that can help them develop their own social commentary.