I find myself, ten years into my teaching career in New Orleans, Louisiana,finally  facing censorship possibilities that have been creeping up more and more violently as realities. My state passed its own version of Florida’s sadly renown “Don’t Say Gay Bill” as my ninth year in the classroom came to a close, joining a growing number of states where anti-LGBTIA bills have passed. ​

These new restrictions put hate into action, demanding more creative ways to make sure all identity stories are told in schools, and requiring teachers like me to think more deliberately about the rationales of including texts, like George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir Manifesto (2020), in classroom conversations. One way is by consistently grounding the use of the texts in course standards. 

Johnson’s evocative All Boys Aren’t Blue lends itself perfectly to rhetorical analysis, whether an introduction to the concept with younger students like 9th graders, or a refresher on the rhetorical situation for students enrolled in AP English Language and Composition. The very first standard (1.A) for AP Lang is: “Identify and describe components of the rhetorical situation: the exigence, audience, writer, purpose, context, and message.” ​

When I’ve used Johnson’s memoir in the past, I’ve used the story “Smile” as an essay option with English I students who have just been introduced to the elements of the rhetorical situation, and who have previously practiced identifying those elements with various TED talks. Students then select an essay to present on, first identifying the elements of the rhetorical situation, then identifying three choices made by the writer to further their purpose, finally constructing a thesis statement making an argument about the rhetorical situation of their selected essay. 

In this reimagining of the project, I give students who have a similar exposure to the rhetorical situation as described above, six essays to read from Johnson’s text: “Identity” (chapter 2, pages 36 - 51), Honeychild” (chapter 3, pages 52-64), “Nanny: The Caregiver, The Hustler, My Best Friend” (chapter 7, pages 128-143), “Daddy’s Second Chance” (chapter 8, pages 144-159), “A Lesson Before Dying” (chapter 10, pages 182-192), “Setting Myself Free or Setting Myself Up?” (chapter 13, pages 224-239). These selected essays work beautifully with identifying purpose, context, and message, but are purposefully selected because they allow students to unpack Johnson’s identity in a multi-faceted way, layering his sexuality with his race, his family, and his home. ​

It feels important to acknowledge the gravity of the situation that many teachers are facing right now: choosing to expose their students to voices that are real and relatable over the safety of their careers. In this time, I find turning back to the why incredibly important. As Johnson notes in their text: “There were no books for me to read in order to understand what I was going through as a kid. There were no heroes or icons to look up to and emulate. There were no road maps or guidelines for the journey” (Johnson 295). How beautiful and important it is to be able to hand students texts that potentially give them a sense of understanding or, equally important, a sense of empathy for others. 

If you’re looking for ways to introduce the conversation of censorship in with your discussion of this book or author, I recommend starting with this NPR piece: “Banned Books: Author George M. Johnson on the need to tell all people's stories”.
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I choose to continue to try to find ways to put those mirrors in the hands of my students, whether through projects like these that meet core standards while diversifying the voices of the authors my students encounter, or by keeping these books on my classroom shelves.

Last month I completed my doctoral work and successfully defended my dissertation which, in part, focused on teaching the Holocaust in my eighth grade ELA classes using Gholdy Muhammad’s framework for culturally and historically responsive literacy. Of the five pursuits Muhammad includes, the pursuit of joy was the one my students clung to the most. Since COVID, my students have routinely commented on the desire to read books with more “happiness”. Admittedly, our eighth grade curriculum includes four anchor texts that explore heavy topics: Ghost Boy by Jewell Parker Rhodes, Yellow Star by Jennifer Roy, The Giver by Lois Lowry, and Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson.

​In the fall of 2022, I participated in a two-day workshop with Gholdy Muhammad when her book Unearthing Joy was on the cusp of release. Muhammad states in her book that to follow the pursuit of joy, “[t]eachers and leaders must understand how to connect beauty, aesthetics, wellness, wholeness, solutions to problems, and/or happiness to their curricular, instructional, and leadership practices'' (50). This is exactly what my students have been asking for.
 
During her workshop, Muhammad took the time to sit with me and talk about how to include the pursuit of joy in our Ghost Boys unit, and from there I have begun to incorporate the pursuit of joy throughout the school year.
 
The following is a glimpse at some of the ways we have started intentionally pursuing joy in one of our novel units in our eighth grade ELA classes.

Jewell Parker Rhodes’s novel Ghost Boys tell the story of 12-year old Jerome who gets shot by a white police officer while playing with a toy gun in a Chicago neighborhood. Inspired by Tamir Rice, Rhodes begins the novel with the shooting and has Jerome tell his story as a ghost who can only communicate with one living person: his shooter’s 12-year old daughter, Sarah. By also including the story of Emmett Till, Ghost Boys explores violence against Black boys in America for a middle grade audience.

Gholdy Muhammad and I quickly decided to elevate Black Boy Joy and Black Girl Magic during this unit as a way for students to explore their own joy and magic regardless of their race identity. We begin the school year with this book, so we are already doing lots of identity story-telling via poems and other writing. It was an easy transition to create prompts for writing and discussion that asked students to talk about what sort of joy or magic they bring to their world.
 
I also moved to Black Boy Joy and Black Girl Magic specifically by giving each student a sticky note and having them jot down a word or two that tells what they think of when they hear one or both terms. About a quarter of our student population identifies as Black and an additional percentage identify as mixed race with one Black parent. Many responses were personal: sticky notes with “Me!”, “my family”, “my friends”, “my little brother”, etc. written on them. Non Black-identifying students also gave positive responses: “my best friend”, “Lizzo!”, “Black kids who are happy and doing cool things”, and “their awesome hairstyles!”

We went on to list things that are associated with joyous Black culture (without falling into stereotypes): hiphop, dancing, fashion, hair styles, Juneteenth, food, etc. Students then looked back at their own writing to find specific examples of the joy in their own youth culture.
 
Students referred back to joy with all the young characters in the book: Jerome and Emmet Till for Black Boy Joy and Jerome’s sister Kim for Black Girl Magic, but also Sarah (the white cop’s daughter) and Carlos (his friend who he learns about el Dia de los Muertos from).
 
This allows us to look at the violence against Black boys as something that is extinguishing joy and magic from our collective culture of the United States. Students are able to think about our own reality in our small, urban school district and what might contribute to the destruction of their joy and magic.

We do not end the unit in despair, however. Jerome’s friend Carlos decides to memorialize Jerome via a Dia de los Muertos celebration bringing together his and Jerome’s families. Sarah decides to begin a website about Jerome and other Black boys who have been killed by bias-influenced violence. Both of these bring a sense of healing and joy to Jerome.
 
Joy in the face of violence and despair leads us into the idea of informed action and how they might identify similar issues of joy destruction and form ways to enact change.
 
We still have a lot of work ahead of us to completely reframe our curriculum to align with Muhammad’s five pursuits (identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy), but just shifting our focus from the destructive results of human injustices to the actual joy-filled humans is a healthy start for us and most especially for our 8th graders.

Works Cited
 
Muhammad, Gholdy. Cultivating Genius: An Equity Framework for Culturally and
            Historically Responsive Literacy. Scholastic, 2021.
Muhammad, Gholdy. Unearthing Joy: A Guide to Culturally and Historically Responsive
            Teaching and Learning. Scholastic, 2023.
Rhodes, Jewell Parker. Ghost Boys. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2018.

    Class Act (2020) is a sequel to Jerry Craft’s award winning novel New Kid, which Craft published in 2019. New Kid followed the storyline of Jordan Banks, a light skinned Black student who was new to the Riverdale Academy Day School, a wealthy and well-regarded private school in New York at which the student body is predominately white. Jordan’s story continues in Class Act, as he tries to navigate being younger than most of his peers, hitting puberty late, and finding a balance between meeting his parents’ high academic expectations with pursuing his passion for the visual arts. ​

However, the primary character of the novel is Drew Ellis, one of Jordan’s best friends. Drew is an intelligent student athlete who wants to do well in school, yet has to balance these desires with the expectations that he will perform as an athlete. Drew lives with his grandmother, who is a single parent, and faces microaggressions in part due to his tall stature and his darker skin. Jordan’s periodic comic drawing interludes show his empathy for Drew as he witnesses these experiences, and empathy is an important life skill for young adolescents to learn. Despite having different life experiences, Jordan and Drew both learn to feel empathy for their good friend Liam, who is white and wealthy, yet still feels isolated at times because of difficult family issues. ​

    The following scene below from page 169 shows how Drew and Jordan are both struggling to find a balance as they navigate middle school life: ​

Drew feels pressure to keep his grades up because of his scholarship to the school. However, as he discusses with Jordan, the hardest part of school is actually the social and emotional part of it, such as navigating relationships with friends, crushes, and teachers. Using Melissa Shieble’s (2014), concept of critical visual literacy, we can notice that the picture of Drew and Jordan walking on the school grounds looks like a maze or a labyrinth. For middle and young high school students, navigating social situations can feel like being in a maze: there are many obstacles, and sometimes, there is not a clear way out. Part of finding the solution, then, is continuing on the journey, even when it is challenging. ​

A large part of conversations in my classroom with my Grade 7 students is around one of their teachers, Mr. Roche. Mr. Roche is a well intentioned, but sometimes misguided white man who often ends up leading diversity awareness programs that he is not equipped to run on his own. This powerful scene from page 95 of the book demonstrates how Drew often feels invisible at some of Mr. Roche’s gatherings and events: ​

This particular scene takes place after Mr. Roche asked Drew to be a tour guide for students coming from the more racially diverse public sister school to the RAD day academy. Drew felt that he was chosen not because of common interests with the students, but because of his race, although he did manage to make a strong connection to one female student in particular. Mr. Roche is reflecting on the tour experience, during which he made a few missteps and left the students from the sister school feeling that they did not belong at RAD. He looked for solace, and while Drew might have wanted to give it, he just didn’t feel he could. The panel series of Drew fading away from the conversation exemplifies his feelings of invisibility in a way that words alone could not. ​

Later in the novel, Mr. Roche and some of his colleagues are preparing to go to a diversity conference, showing their commitment to learning new information about forming connections. As both Jordan and Drew point out, this commitment shows that Mr. Roche and his colleagues are trying, despite these occasional missteps. Through this part of the novel as well as in other key scenes, students can learn to be empathetic with the adults in their lives, as they also are learning. ​

    Before having these and other conversations related to diversity and identity in the secondary classroom, it is important to set up class norms related to civil discourse and respectful discussions. I have found that Essential Partners norms related to the dialogic classroom are helpful. Additionally, the fishbowl discussion technique, similar to Socratic seminars, is a productive way to involve all students, whether or not they are likely to speak up in a larger class environment. Some students need to be reminded to “move up” if they are more likely to be hesitant to speak or to “move back” if they are more likely to be vocal to allow a chance for quieter students to speak up. I’ve found this technique a rewarding way to ensure that all students have a chance to participate in the discussion about this important novel. The discussion questions are student generated, although I occasionally re-word or eliminate questions if they sound too similar to each other.  ​

Jerry Craft and Kwame Alexander are now collaborating on a middle grades book project called J vs K, which will be released in 2025. I look forward to reading that novel and seeing how I might bring it into classroom and writing spaces. Through its combination of relevant themes and visual techniques, Class Act by Jerry Craft has been one of my favorite novels to teach in recent years. ​

Students in 2024 have lived through a huge amount of trauma, whether first or second hand. Almost all have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent disruptions to their lives. In addition, most have access to first-hand accounts of genocide, racism, sexism, and violent crime through social media at any given time. Beyond these external pressures, research indicates that “approximately 25% of American children will experience at least one traumatic event by the age of 16” (The National Child Traumatic Stress Network, n.d.), be it an instance of gun violence in schools, the traumatic loss of a loved one, abuse, or any other of the myriad instances which can cause a person to experience trauma or grief. All of these facts indicate that in the average American classroom, at least one quarter of the individuals in that room have experienced, or will experience, trauma, either in the own lives, or by second-hand witnessing trauma. 

We know that there exists YAL on a wide variety of topics which could be labeled as traumatic. For example, there exists young adult novels on the topic of rape, like Speak, by Anderson (1999), police brutality, like The Hate U Give by Thomas (2017), and suicide, like All the Bright Places by Niven (2015), along with so many other texts, ranging in traumatic topics from the more commonplace to the more extreme. One need only visit the YAL section of a library or a book store to see the wide variety of traumatic topics on display within books for teens. Missing, however, seems to be a larger examination of how books on these topics, and books on other similarly traumatic topics, are used with alignment to trauma-informed pedagogy. In essence, how can, or should, a secondary ELA teacher utilize these books within an educational space to further a trauma-informed pedagogical stance?

While being somewhat new to the scene, trauma-informed pedagogy has a wide-reaching impact on the field of education at all levels. Defined by the American Library Association as “striv[ing] to understand how various forms of trauma may have impacted the lives of learners and us[ing] that understanding to accommodate learners’ needs, prevent[ing] further or retraumatization, and promot[ing] resilience and growth” (Zingarelli-Sweet, 2021), trauma-informed pedagogy is rooted within the idea that the behaviors of people are often rooted in traumatic experiences, and that by purposefully engaging in specific practices, an educator can help learners succeed on an academic, social, and emotional level. There is a great amount of literature and guidance about how to adopt such a stance within one’s teaching practice, and many k-12 and postsecondary institutes of education provide training or recommendations for practice. 

As a professor of literacy in the state of Maryland, my colleagues in the school of education have often discussed the expansion of trauma-informed pedagogy expectations at the k-12 level. Recent guidance provided by the Maryland State Department of Education (or MSDE), titled “A Trauma-Informed Approach for Maryland Schools” (2021) serves as the perfect example of the ways in which k-12 teachers are now being asked to include aspects of trauma-informed pedagogy in regular teaching practices. For example, MSDE recommends that faculty and staff within k-12 spaces utilize a trauma-informed care model as “a standard of care across not only health professions but in school settings, regardless of whether a given individual has reported or experienced trauma and without requiring school staff to know whether a specific individual has a trauma history” (p. 17). In this way, it is becoming an expectation in Maryland that all k-12 faculty and staff are “trauma-informed,” and are mindful in the ways in which students may express traumatic grief within educational spaces. 

Anecdotally, I know that many other states and education systems are having similar conversations, both with and without state guidance. The missing piece, it would seem, is guidance regarding the use of young adult literature within this conversation. To my mind, YAL seems to help bridge the gap between making such heavy content like gun violence in schools, with a teacher’s ability to help students process and reflect on traumatic incidents, perhaps in the hopes of change-making. However, again, an important element is missing: how, if at all, can teachers use YAL written about traumatic events in their trauma-informed teaching practices?

While organizations like Lee and Low Books (a recent recipient of the 2024 ALAN Award) have resources like a Trauma-Informed Diverse Reading List (2019) to support k-8 teachers, there seems to be a distinct lack of guidance or resources for ELA teachers in grades 6-12 with regards to best practices regarding the use of YAL in trauma-informed pedagogy. In the coming years of research on YAL, our field must explore the ways in which YAL on traumatic topics can be used within education spaces in a way that is responsible, trauma-informed, and beneficial to all involved. 

References

Anderson, L. H. (1999). Speak. Farrar Straus Giroux.

Bickmore, W., Rumohr, G., Shaffer, S., & Sluiter, K. (2020). Empowering English teachers to content with gun violence: A COVID-19 conference cancellation story. Language Arts Journal of Michigan, 35(2). https://doi.org/10.9707/2168-149X.2281

Brown, L. A. (2022). School Gun Violence in YA Literature: Representing Environments, Motives, and Impacts. Lexington Books.

Jensen, K. (2018). YA books about school shootings to build empathy, sympathy and understanding. Book Riot. https://bookriot.com/ya-books-about-school-shootings-to-build-empathy-sympathy-and-understanding/

Lee & Low Books. (2019). Trauma-informed diverse reading list. https://www.leeandlow.com/educators/reading-lists/trauma-informed-diverse-reading-list
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Lockhart, E. (2014). We were liars. Delacorte Press.

Maryland State Department of Education. (2021). A trauma-informed approach for Maryland schools.
https://www.marylandpublicschools.org/about/Documents/DSFSS/SSSP/MSDE-Trauma-Informed-Guidance.pdf

The National Child Traumatic Stress Network. School personnel. https://www.nctsn.org/audiences/school-personnel#:~:text=Research%20suggests%20that%20approximately%2025,and%2For%20behavior%20at%20school.

Niven, J. (2015). All the bright places. Knopf Publishing Group.

Raymond, B. (2021). Creating a safe space for students to explore trauma and build resilience through young adult literature, creative composing, and personal experiences. In M. F. Rice & A. K. Dallacqua (Eds.) Luminous literacies: Localized teaching and teacher education (pp.  71-83). Emerald Publishing.

Shaffer, S. (2016). Humanizing and understanding school shootings: How YA “school shooting” literature provides multiple insights. Dr. Bickmore’s YA Wednesday. http://www.drbickmoresyawednesday.com/weekly-posts/humanizing-and-understanding-school-shootings-how-ya-school-shooting-literature-provides-multiple-insights

Shaffer, S., Rumohr-Voskuil, G., & Bickmore, S. T. (2019a). Contending with gun violence in the English language classroom. Dr. Bickmore’s YA Wednesday. http://www.drbickmoresyawednesday.com/weekly-posts/contending-with-gun-violence-in-the-english-language-classroom

Shaffer, S., Rumohr-Voskuil, G., & Bickmore, S. T. (2019b). Contending with gun violence in the English language classroom. Routledge.

Stefan, H. C. (2021). Mad violence, white victims, and other gun violence fictions: The gap between school shootings and systemic gun violence. Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, 3(9).

Thomas, A. (2017). The hate u give. Balzer + Bray.

VanSlyke-Briggs, K., Rhodes, S., & Turner, J. (2020). The darkest themes: Perceptions of teen-on-teen gun violence in schools as portrayed in teen literature. Journal of Research on Libraries and Young Adults, 11(2). https://www.yalsa.ala.org/jrlya/2020/04/the-darkest-themes-perceptions-of-teen-on-teen-gun-violence-in-schools-as-portrayed-in-teen-literature/

VanSlyke-Briggs, K., Rhodes, S., & Turner, J. (2021). Pearl clutching and the normalization of school shootings in young adult literature. In K. VanSlyke-Briggs & E. A. Bloom (Eds.), Dress rehearsals for gun violence: Confronting trauma and anxiety in America’s schools (pp. 17-42). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
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Zingarelli-Sweet, D. (2021). Keeping up with…trauma-informed pedagogy. American Library Association. https://www.ala.org/acrl/publications/keeping_up_with/trauma-informed-pedagogy

However, I work at an HSI institution that has a newcomer center on our campus for the local community where more supportive activities occur than I most likely know. While I have somehow removed the immigrant experience from my life it is alive and present on the campus and in the schools where I work and collaborate. In addition to the immigrant narrative, it is imperative that we examine and have significant and deep discussions on what the Fourth of July and the American experience is and means for our indigenous communities.
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 All of this means that July 4th is a perfect time to reflect upon what it means to be an American and provide our students rich literary experiences through a diverse set of books that could be utilized in our classrooms. And while most teachers are not in a classroom around July 4th, the examination of the American experience and what it means to be a citizen in this country can occur anytime.
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