The southwest border is more than 1,000 miles from Green Bay, and yet Bay Port High School teacher Vicki Quinn had students in her class discussing complex issues like migration and family separation. This is because they read Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, which was the Center for the Humanities 2023-24 academic year’s Great World World Texts in Wisconsin selection. An educator for two decades at Bay Port, Quinn has taught previous Great World Texts novels. But this year, accompanied by fellow educator Amy Heusterberg-Richards and their International Baccalaureate English students, was Quinn’s first visit to Madison for the Great World Texts student conference.
Now in its 20th year, Great World Texts connects high school educators and students with scholars at UW–Madison through the shared project of reading a classic or contemporary piece of world literature. The highlight is a student conference when the author — including such past participants as Margaret Atwood and Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk — comes to Madison to discuss their work with students. Luiselli was the latest addition to this all-star lineup. She visited Madison in April to talk with students from 20 schools across Wisconsin about the projects they created in response to her novel.
“A major highlight for me was hearing from an author who explained their purpose and intention but also opened it up for the reader to find value in what they bring to the novel,” Quinn says. “It was a solidifying moment for the students.”
At the conference, students get creative as sculptors, performers, game designers, archivists and more. One of Quinn’s students created a painting from fingerprints — a means of identification — to show how important a single identity can be in forming an entire picture, which reflects a theme from the novel.
Like Quinn, Bohdan Nedilsky, an educator from New Horizons for Learning Charter High School, is a longtime participant in the program. At New Horizons, Nedilsky partners with community organizations to expand meaningful scholarship into the public sphere.
“We provide students a dynamic setting to not just view the world from the confines of a classroom but to experience the world around them,” he says. “Bringing higher education and secondary education together, similar to Great World Texts, is a recipe that is so impactful.”
Two of Nedilsky’s students created a mural with a painting of the Rio Grande River surrounded by a collage of news headlines to depict the many real lost children of the immigration crisis.
For Nedilsky, one of the highlights of the program is the curricular guide provided by UW–Madison faculty and graduate students. The guide is designed to be accessible for a range of learners. Educators like Nedilsky and Quinn attend a fall colloquium with lectures by faculty and community-building exercises with their peers from across Wisconsin.
“The power of Great World Texts is that it’s extremely adaptive for educators. It allows us to customize the fit for our students and equip them for this experience,” Nedilsky says. “That’s exactly how we learn through Great World Texts — by integrating rather than separating and by engaging rather than being passive recipients of information.”
Great World Texts is supported by the UW–Madison Libraries, the Cleary-Kumm Foundation, the Evjue Foundation, the Wisconsin Book Festival, the Anonymous Fund of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Friends of the Center for the Humanities and the Brittingham Wisconsin Trust.
