Reading Race Alongside our Students: Ghost Boys in a Rural Middle School Written by Fawn Canady Featuring the work of Jessica Gentzler and Sarah Deering

I first met Fawn when I was interviewing at UNLV. She was a new graduate student who had done some adjunct work for the department I would eventually be joining. She was an excellent teacher and an important asset to our undergraduate English Education program. Before too long we were treating her as a valued colleague. She did such a good job, that secretly, I think that many of us hoped she would stay around. Reason, however, prevailed and we pushed her to finish. 

I want to make it clear that I have sat in on several excellent doctoral defenses (not including mine) that were informative celebrations. Fawn's defense was a completely different experience.  Fawn's presentation not only covered the project of her research, it began to critique her own product. She had clearly spent the two weeks since she had turned the finished work over to the committee examining the limitations of her research. In most cases she had accurately anticipated our question--not concerns mind you--just ideas we wanted to discuss. The defense was an enlightening experience. I am not at all surprised that Fawn found and excellent job. I am also not surprised that teachers in her area would seek her to help with collaborative projects. 

Reading Race Alongside our Students: Ghost Boys in a Rural Middle School Written by Fawn Canady
Featuring the Work of Jessica Gentzler and Sarah Deering

“Dedicated to the belief that we can all do better, be better, live better. We owe our best to each and every child.”
​(From the dedication of Ghost Boys, by Jewell Parker Rhodes)

This year, the word “unprecedented” has been thoroughly worn out. So much so that the Oxford English Dictionary described 2020 “as a year which cannot be neatly accommodated in a single word.” This. This, the year of a global pandemic, emergency remote instruction, #BLM, and a divisive presidential election. This, the year of 8 minutes, 46 seconds that came to symbolize a long, long history of systemic violence against Black and brown bodies. All of this was the backdrop of a shared book club reading with 6th, 7th, and 8th graders of Jewell Parker Rhodes’ Ghost Boys. Books like this one create the space for us to process moments like those of 2020 and dialogic interactions plant the seeds for change.

Ghost Boys is the story of Jerome, a young black boy with a toy gun who is shot and killed by a police officer who “feared for his life.” But that is both the beginning and the continuation of a story that is sadly all too familiar. Jerome is not able to move on from this world and is visited by Emmet Till and other ghost boys– Black boys who died too young because of racial violence. A heartbreaking distortion of Peter Pan, which is a motif used throughout the book of children robbed of the chance to grow up. Like the other ghost boys, Jerome must bear witness: “Everyone needs their story heard. Felt. We honor each other. Connect across time,” Emmet tells Jerome. And who is the only person that can see Jerome? Communicate with him? The officer’s daughter, Sarah. Why? Because as Rhodes tells us, “Jerome says, ‘Only the living can make the world better.’” ​

This blog post is an exploration of learning to talk about race with young people through literature. I’ll start with the genesis of the project, talk about what I as a teacher educator did, and could have done better, to prepare preservice teachers for this work. Then, I will share some of the things the kids’ teachers, Jessica Glentzer (English) and Sarah Deering (Social Studies), did to lead them through the history and the stories.

Just a few months ago, a forwarded email came through my inbox: “Book Club PBL opportunity?” It was from Jessica Glentzer, a middle school English teacher, who with Sarah Deering, the social studies teacher, was preparing to conduct an interdisciplinary, project-based learning unit centered on middle-level YA books on race and implicit bias. Because of the constraints of remote instruction, including limited class time with students each week, they were writing to enlist the help of college students from Sonoma State’s School of Education to read alongside students in Zoom book clubs. They sought students who could model the following skills: a) strong reading and inquiry skills, b) constructive discourse, c) being able to speak about personal experiences around bias/racial tensions and social justice, and d) brainstorm ideas for projects to “build ELA skills, but more importantly empathy...and social awareness.” The email ended with, “I look forward to hearing from you!”

​I jumped at the chance to give my teacher candidates (TCs) more interactions with kids. I am an assistant professor of Adolescent and Digital Literacies at Sonoma State University. One of my primary roles is to prepare secondary English teachers. Our pre-service teachers are currently in virtual placements but have only limited time with students. Some of my TCs only see students for two 30 minute synchronous sessions a week. Interactions with students was an unexpected gift. What’s more, the TCs didn’t have to prepare lessons: their role was to enjoy the book with the students and model what it looked like to be engaged readers. It was a great opportunity to learn more about how students interact with books, what they know and can do with literature. Lastly, Jessica and Sarah’s objectives for the book clubs also align with our critical work at SSU. Advancing justice is literally part of our mission and vision, and is integral to our teacher preparation courses across disciplines. Ghost Boys became required reading in my English methods course. Jessica and Sarah secured a grant to buy a copy for each of their students.

Fawn

Sarah Deering Guerneville School

Jessica Glentzer Guerneville School

The TCs in my methods course were excited to participate in the book clubs...until they read the book. Many of them were nervous about talking not just about race, but violence against Black children. A few questioned whether it was appropriate to require this book in middle school. To prepare, I required or recommended several different texts:

• Sherman Alexie’s “Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood” 
  
• Ghost Boys author, Jewell Parker Rhodes on her Inspiration for Ghost Boys, in which she tells the story of being approached to tell a story about young men of color assaulted because of racism or racial bias. Rhode’s immediate response? “No. No way.” Watch to see why she changed her mind and find out how she approached writing the novel so that she could tell the story.
  
• Ashley S. Boyd and Jacinda Miller’s “Let’s Give Them Something to Talk (And Act!) About: Privilege, Racism, and Oppression in the Middle School Classroom.” This article was the topic of the NWP Marginal Syllabus and examines how to engage students in discourse about race and privilege.
  

There were also questions that surfaced early in methods about YA in general, not just this book. This condition stems from what I remember Steve Bickmore calling “English Majoritis,” or acute suffering or withdrawals from the Western canon. So, I invited Steve to speak about Why YA Literature? I also used this opportunity to ask my students to read two posts in addition to a few of their choice:

1. “The Unbearable Darkness of YA Literature” by Steve Salerno who supposedly attended the YA Summit at the University of Las Vegas in 2018. In this article, he reduces the “socially aware” books featured at the Summit as books on “sexual abuse, dysphoria, racism, gang life, domestic violence and school shootings” and wonders what’s happened to young adult literature.
   
2. Followed by “Finding Light and Hope in Young Adult Literature: A Response to the WSJ’s Unbearable Darkness and Misappropriated Commentary” written by YA author Chris Crutcher, Kelsey Claus, Amanda Melilli, Kia Richmond, Stephanie Toliver, Louse Freeman, and with final remarks by Steve Bickmore. These responses were a forceful counterpoint from authors, librarians, scholars, and teachers to Salerno’s piece.  ​
   

As part of SSU’s focus on practice-based teacher education, we worked with TeachingWorks’ eliciting and interpreting student thinking decomposition to consider how to advance justice through discussion moves that center students’ ideas and brilliance in the service of learning objectives. Of course, we could have done more. Looking back, I wish I would have had more time to bring in experts, like my colleague Lisel Alice Murdock-Perriera, to talk about race and racism with students (upcoming presentation). I also recommend rehearsals or peer-run-throughs in leading discussions for preservice teachers. This would have given us more time to practice with sensitive topics and difficult questions before they came up with students in book clubs. 
Jessica and Sarah did a lot of work setting up students. For example, they started with A Look at Race Relations through Children’s Eyes, research conducted by CNN that, in the same vein as Alexie’s piece, found that young children are aware of race and racial bias at an early age. They do think about and experience racism– and they pick up on cues from adults and society at an early age. Students used a Padlet as space for students to post questions for book clubs using Costa’s Levels of Questioning. The students created art, wrote and recorded multimodal reversal poems, and created found word poems like the two below, in which students literally lift words from the page and arrange them:

Remembering the past
Bear witness
Maybe remember me?
More beautiful than I ever thought
The dead are close
She lights candles 
We were a threat, a danger, a menace.
Black people were killed. 
Tell this tale
Again

Bullying
Prejudice
Scared
Brace myself
For pushing
I run
Everyone gets scared sometimes
It could have been you

The reversal poem was a great opportunity to take the feelings students were wrestling with and develop a counterstory of hope and agency. As a friend and Holocaust scholar Alan Rosen once told me, “Lead them in gently and lead them out safely.” I can’t share those poems with you now, as they are videos of students, but watching the students read lines that start, “Experts tell me that being separated is the way to go” transform, when read backward, to “It’s not true in my era that experts tell me that being separated is the way to go” was so moving. Use this template to encourage students to respond to texts through counterstory. Finally, Jessica and Sarah are currently working with the students to research a historical aspect of racial bias in America and then write a children’s book that will be read by the student authors and posted on the local library’s website.

 Ghost Boys Reversal Poem 7th Grade Student 

I'm a bad person. 
And I refused to believe that 
I'm happy. 
I realize this may be a shock, but
I had a good life is a lie
people of color are hated. 
In 30 years, I will tell my children that 
I have my priorities straight because 
race is more important than personality. 
And I tell you this, 
once upon a time, 
we were created equal, 
but this will not be true in my era. 
People of color are discriminated against. 
Experts tell me, people are treated the same. 
I do not conclude that everyone’s born the same, 
It will be evident that
In the future, everyone will be treated differently. 
No longer can it be said that we're all just human. 
It is foolish to presume that we are all the same. 
And all of this will continue
unless we reverse it.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We are all the same. 
We are just humans. 
No longer can it be said that 
everyone will be treated differently. 
In the future, 
everyone's going to have the same advantages 
and not conclude that people are treated the same. 
And experts tell me, 
people of color are discriminated against. 
But this will not be true in my era. 
We were created equal once upon a time. 
And I tell you this, 
personality is more important than race. 
I have my priorities straight 
because in 30 years 
I will tell my children that people of color are heeded. 
It is why I had a good life. 
I realize this may not be a shock, but
I'm happy. 
And I refuse to believe that 
I'm a bad person.

In the end, my students and 100% of Jessica’s and Sarah’s students recommend that kids read Ghost Boys in school. It wasn’t easy. There were a lot of silent, black boxes in Zoom most days. My TCs were feeling like they were holding book discussions in the chatbox only. There were also times when they didn’t have answers. But, in the post-survey administered to middle schoolers, Jessica and Sarah saw a significant shift in students’ understanding of the world they live in. Students reported changes in thinking from increased empathy for kids who are bullied to “better understand[ing] the real amount of lives lost because of implicit bias.” The students also valued the space afforded by Zoom to have SSU students read alongside them. This wouldn’t have been possible when we were in-person because of the nature of rural districts. Several of the middle school students named the SSU book clubs as the best part of the project, such as the student who said, “My favorite part was when we would process information on fridays (sic) in book clubs. It helped me understand the book more.” Even when you think they aren’t listening, they are.

My TCs also saw the value in reading this book with students. One of the skeptics started by saying they were “astonished that teachers in middle school would assign such reading to twelve-year-olds” but ended up a convert. It was not only the students that changed their mind, it was the second reading of Ghost Boys that brought out the thoughtful, nuanced, truthful, and hopeful writing by Rhodes. The pushback Jessica experienced when she first assigned the book ended positively too. A middle school student thought it was “super sad,” but the student’s parent told Jessica “it was one of the best books their child read as it engendered amazing conversations for them.” Finally, another 6th-grade student’s anonymous response in the post-survey encapsulates the near-unanimous sentiment among adults and kids alike:
“I have to say that after reading the book, I would recommend this as a ELA (sic) required reading. If you had asked me this in the first survey we took on Ghost Boys, I would have said no after reading just Jerome's death. If you can't already tell, I take everything I read to heart (I have tried and I can't read books like Anne Frank or Old Yeller), but this book really made me want to "live and make it better." I think it inspired others too.”
End with other books (images) I’d love to teach alongside:

• Stamped
  
• Monday’s Not Coming by Tiffany D. Jackson
  
• Dear Martin
  
• Black Enough: Stories of Being Young and Black in America
  
• Out of Darkness
  

Until next time.