Beyond the Linked Text Set

The problem with the anchor text

Linked text sets — classroom collections of multiple texts unified around a central topic, theme, or issue — have become a staple of contemporary English language arts pedagogy. They offer breadth, invite comparison, and can bring a range of voices into a single unit. But most linked text sets are built around an anchor: one text, usually a canonical novel, that anchors the set and around which all other texts orbit.

That structure carries a hidden cost. When a canonical novel serves as the anchor, other texts are implicitly positioned as subordinate to it — useful for making connections, but not intrinsically valuable in themselves. Diverse and noncanonical texts are added to a unit, but the center of gravity remains unchanged.

"Diversification can become decorative rather than structural — a way of adding texts around a canonical center without challenging the logic that makes that center necessary in the first place." — Unowitz (2025)

The result is a curriculum that looks inclusive but still privileges the canon at its core. What would it mean to design differently — to build text sets where no single text is the anchor?

Toward an assemblage

This project draws on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of the rhizome — a model of connection and relation with no fixed center, no hierarchy, and no predetermined starting point. Unlike a tree (which grows from a root, branches upward, and implies a direction), a rhizome spreads laterally, connecting any point to any other point.

Applied to curriculum, a rhizomatic text set — an assemblage — abandons the anchor model in favor of a relational structure. Texts are connected to one another through shared themes, genres, and types. Any text can function as an entry point. Any text can serve as a hub of connection. None is inherently more central than any other.

"The linked text set assemblage abandons vertical hierarchy in favor of a relational, rhizomatic form — a structure capable of challenging inherited curricular logics that privilege the canon." — Unowitz (2025)

This is not simply a matter of adding more diverse texts. It is a structural shift: designing curriculum so that the relations between texts — not the prestige of any single text — determine how a unit is navigated and understood.

The Linked Text Set Map

The Linked Text Set Map is the practical expression of this idea. Every text in the database — novels, films, essays, poems, graphic novels, songs, video essays — appears as a node in a shared graph. Connections between nodes emerge from shared tags: genre, theme, and text type. Nothing else determines a text's centrality.

"A play by Shakespeare and a video from TikTok are rendered on equal terms — their legitimacy derived not from literary pedigree but from the thematic and relational connections they enable." — Unowitz (2025)

All texts appear as nodes of equal scale and status. There is no visual or functional distinction between canonical and noncanonical works. A teacher browsing the map might begin with Beloved, follow a "trauma & memory" theme to The Kite Runner, pivot to a documentary, and arrive at a personal essay — all connected, all on equal footing.

No single text serves as an anchor. Each one functions as a potential center, depending on the path the teacher follows. The map both represents and enables rhizomatic curriculum design.

Why it matters for teachers

For teachers designing units, this shift is practical as much as it is theoretical. The map makes it easy to discover unexpected pairings — texts that share a theme but differ wildly in form, era, or origin. It surfaces connections that no single teacher's reading list could anticipate, because it is built collectively, by many teachers over time.

Upcoming features — personal maps, sharable lists, annotation — will let individual teachers carve their own paths through the shared graph, building curriculum that reflects their students and their context, while staying connected to the wider community of practitioners who built the map together.

The goal is not to replace teacher judgment but to expand the field of possibility — to make it easier to ask: what else could go here? What connects to this? What have I never taught that belongs in this conversation?

Read the full article

The research behind this project is published in English Teaching: Practice & Critique (Emerald Publishing, 2025). The article develops the theoretical framework in full, traces the history of the linked text set in ELA pedagogy, and analyzes the map as a curriculum design tool.