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. |  |
 | 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. |  |
 | 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].
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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