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Imagining the Past & Envisioning the Present through Young Adult Literature

9/25/2018

 
Jennifer Cameron Paulsen has been making the selections for Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday Weekend Picks for the month of September. They have been fantastic picks and focused on a different theme each week. I hope that you check them out. Jenny and I know each other through the ALAN Workshop. I know that a couple of times we have worked as door monitors together early on Monday morning as people arrive to pick up their books at the ALAN Workshop. By the way, if you haven't registered for the ALAN Workshop, I highly recommend that you get on it. It is time to go to the NCTE website and go to the registration page. One of my interests in teaching and researching Young Adult literature is how this body of literature can be used to combine the curricula of the Social Studies and English Language Arts. I am glad that Jenny has touched on several ways that this might be implemented in the classroom. Take it away Jenny.
I’ll be honest, when I agreed to this blog post months ago, I did not know I would be back in the classroom, teaching the amazing combination of Contemporary World Studies and US History to 1800 to 7th and 8th graders. So I can’t really share how I use YA because I am in a radically different environment than my English Language Arts past. So what I have here is both a mix of what I’ve done and what I hope to do using YA lit for social studies.
 Time Machine: To see and hear a place in detail helps one enjoy the reading experience, so I hope to create visual and sensory read alouds to help transport kids to unfamiliar times and places. Sometimes delightful fiction is the best path to reality. For example, the excellent book Woods Runner by Gary Paulsen depicts the forest, the immensity and aloneness of it, in a way suburban Great Plains kids can imagine. Learning that is pleasurable is more likely to stick.​
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Hook Them Into Inquiry: You don’t need to read an entire book. Carefully curated selections give kids a taste of a topic and invite them to explore and inquire more. In Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, a young Marjane introduces the idea that not all Islam is fundamentalist in telling us about the overthrow of the Shah in Iran. This is a perfect invitation to stretch into pursuing an understanding of a religion that they largely do not about in the Midwest, despite one of the oldest mosques in the United States being just an hour away in Cedar Rapids.

Make the Previously Invisible Visible:  In Roland Smith‘s book Peak about climbing Mount Everest, you imagine it’s going to be about the climbers.  But it’s also about Sherpas, who support the climbers getting to the top. It’s about their lives and troubles. That social studies textbooks leave out minority voices has been thoroughly established. YA literature is one way to address those gaps.
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Take Different Perspectives to Build Empathy: Having students read Laurie Halse Anderson’s Forge gives students the opportunity to walk in an enslaved person’s shoes and see why they might decide to fight for the British or the Americans. It is a treatise on the essence of freedom disguised as an amazing story of Isabel, Curzon, & Ruth.

Policy has Human Consequences:  An Uninterrupted View of the Sky, a beautiful book by Melanie Crowder, demonstrates the consequences of the “War on Drugs” declared by the US on the indigenous people of Bolivia. In Margarita Engle’s book of verse Silver People, even the trees have a voice, stressing the sense of disturbance of nature itself in building the Panama Canal. These kinds of stories force us to face that actions have consequences, that our world is truly interdependent. ​
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Appreciate Ambiguities: The world is complex in ways that don’t fit on tidy worksheets or captured in Powerpoint presentations. After reading aloud a selection from Torn by David Massey, my students had a better sense of the complexity of politics and war in Afghanistan. Walter Dean Myers’ powerful short story “Pirate,” about young Somali pirate Abdullah, also introduces the idea that right and wrong are not clearcut. Sometimes, there are no easy answers. Just more questions
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There are a number of other ways to use YA, these are just the ones I’ve decided to dig into first. I have a lot of work to do! I continue to seek more #OwnVoices texts, whether fiction or non-fiction or poetry to support my students in their pursuit of knowledge about the world and our collective past, so we can create a better future together for ALL of us.

I welcome your suggestions for my library!

In her 25-year career, Jenny Cameron Paulsen, has been an English teacher and an instructional and technology coach. She currently teaches middle level American history and world studies in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Reading YA hooked her in 7th grade when her best friend gave her a copy of The Outsiders. Teenagers are her chosen people.

Jenny can be contacted at [email protected].

​
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10/2/2018 07:36:49 pm

Before anything else, I want to thank Ms. Jennifer Cameron Paulsen for coming up with these literature and sharing her knowledge to us through the books that she wrote. I appreciate authors who have been very generous when it comes to sharing their personal thoughts about the books they write. They would either do it in a very obvious or a subtle way, as long as they will be able to deliver their message to their readers. Being a writer is definitely cool!


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    Dr. Steve Bickmore
    ​Creator and Curator

    Dr. Bickmore is a Professor of English Education at UNLV. He is a scholar of Young Adult Literature and past editor of The ALAN Review and a past president of ALAN. He is a available for speaking engagements at schools, conferences, book festivals, and parent organizations. More information can be found on the Contact page and the About page.
    Dr. Gretchen Rumohr
    Co-Curator
    Gretchen Rumohr is a professor of English and writing program administrator at Aquinas College, where she teaches writing and language arts methods.   She is also a Co-Director of the UNLV Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature. She lives with her four girls and a five-pound Yorkshire Terrier in west Michigan.

    Bickmore's
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    Meet
    Evangile Dufitumukiza!
    Evangile is a native of Kigali, Rwanda. He is a college student that Steve meet while working in Rwanda as a missionary. In fact, Evangile was one of the first people who translated his English into Kinyarwanda. 

    Steve recruited him to help promote Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media while Steve is doing his mission work. 

    He helps Dr. Bickmore promote his academic books and sometimes send out emails in his behalf. 

    You will notice that while he speaks fluent English, it often does look like an "American" version of English. That is because it isn't. His English is heavily influence by British English and different versions of Eastern and Central African English that is prominent in his home country of Rwanda.

    Welcome Evangile into the YA Wednesday community as he learns about Young Adult Literature and all of the wild slang of American English vs the slang and language of the English he has mastered in his beautiful country of Rwanda.  

    While in Rwanda, Steve has learned that it is a poor English speaker who can only master one dialect and/or set of idioms in this complicated language.

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