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Unleashing the Possibility Through Inquiry and the Color Blue by Dr. Becki Maldonado

1/25/2023

Dr. Becki Maldonado is a ninth-grade English teacher at Parkside High School in Salisbury, MD. She is a committee member of the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children. Her scholarship and research focus on arts integration, nonfiction text, text selection, and developing and exercising teachers’ critical consciousness, along with the use of critical dialogue to develop social awareness in education and the community. She is also the editor of Arts Integration and Young Adult Literature: Enhancing Academic Skills and Student Voice.

Unleashing the Possibility Through Inquiry and the Color Blue by Dr. Becki Maldonado

As a Marvel enthusiast, I tend to make a lot of connections to Marvel comics and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. When I received this book, my first thought was, “Wait! The heart-shaped herb is real?” In Black Panther only the royalty, who were destined to be the Black Panther, could drink the indigo liquid from the heart-shaped herb. Publishers were sending us what were supposed to be nonfiction books to read and deliberate about for the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children; yet, there on the cover of the book sat a girl grinding a blue-purple substance in a bowl with dark indigo iris in the background. Honestly, I was really hoping the publisher accidentally sent me a Shuri picture book, but that wasn’t the case. It ended up being a book more valuable and important than anyone would imagine. But before I get into that, let me give you a brief historical run down about the Orbis Pictus Award.

A Brief Histography of the Orbis Pictus Award from 1658 - Present Day
In 1658, John Amos Comenius, a Czech educator and social reformist, wrote the first children’s textbook with pictures – Orbis Sensualism Pictus, “The Visible World in Picture.” Having lived under the oppression of the German feudal lords, Comenius believed “all the knowledge and all the scientific achievements belong to all people and all nations, and that everybody should be enabled to get to know them, and in this way, by possessing knowledge, have the power” (Lukaš & Munjiza, 2014, p. 34). From this belief he advocated for children, holding fast to the understanding that students “were born with a natural craving for knowledge and goodness, and that schools beat it out of them” (Moravian University, n.d.). While his pedagogical influence grew in Europe, his influence did not span over the Atlantic Ocean until the early 20th century when Orbis Pictus and the Great Didactes hit the shore of the United States.

In 1989, NCTE created the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children, named after Comenius’s Orbis Sensualism Pictus, credited as the first picture book written specifically for children. This award “promotes and recognizes excellence in the writing of nonfiction for children” (NCTE, 2023). Each year one nonfiction children’s book, written for the K-8th grade audience, is granted this prestigious award. The Great Little Madison by Jean Fritz was the first Orbis Pictus Award winner. Over the decades a diversity of nonfiction books have been given this distinguished award: Through My Eyes by Ruby Bridges (2000), Quest for the Kangaroo Tree: An Expedition to the Cloud Forest in New Guinea by Sy Montgomery (2007), The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia by Candace Fleming (2015), and Between the Lines: How Ernie Barnes Went from the Football Field to the Art Gallery by Sandra Neil Wallace (2019).

The 2023 Orbis Pictus Award winner embodies Comenius’s belief that all people should be able to have knowledge and scientific achievements through exploring the history of the color blue. Blue: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond takes the reader on a journey through time, traveling throughout the world to rediscover the rich history of the color blue. From the discovery and use of the rock, lapis lazuli, in Afghanistan, to the squeezing of snails and the growing of Indigofera, the reader gets to relive the innovations used to harvest the coveted blue dye, including an inventor being awarded the Nobel Prize for creating a blue chemical dye. From reading this book it is easy to see the impact, for better or for worse, the color blue has had on every society throughout the world.

Brew-Hammond (2022) concludes:
Maybe because blue has such a complicated
history
of pain,
wealth,
invention,
and
recovery,

it’s become a symbol of possibility,
as vast and deep as the bluest sea,
and as wide open and high as the bluest sky.

Unleashing the Possibility Through Inquiry and the Color Blue

While the book may not be the next Shuri picture book, the book holds the possibility for students to learn about their own culture and others’ cultures through inquiry and the impact the color blue still has in society today. Responding to questions through words and images, students can discover unknown facts about themselves and others that can lead to the celebration of similarities and differences found within different cultures.

After reading Blue as a class or individually, have the students respond to the following instructions on one paper in both written words and drawings:

Describe what you think of when you see the color blue.
What are two ways the color blue is used in your everyday life? What does the blue represent? If you do not know what the blue means, you can use your resources to research and discover what the blue means.
What are two ways in your home is blue used? What does the blue represent? If you do not know what the blue means, you can use your resources to research and discover what the blue means.

Once the student has answered the question for themselves, have the students use these three questions to interview a classmate and a family member, using a separate paper for each interview. Students should then compare and contrast the possibilities found in the color blue from the three interviews.

This is also an fun exercise that can be done with educators to build a positive community within schools and districts. When a positive community is built, unknown possibilities are released, allowing both students and educators to thrive.
“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy”
- bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

References
Brew-Hammond, N.E. (2022). Blue: A history of the color as deep as the sea and as wide as the
sky. Alfred A. Knopf.
Lukaš, M., & Munjiza, E. (2014). Education system of John Amos Comenius and its
implications in modern didactics. Život i škola: časopis za teoriju i praksu odgoja i
obrazovanja, 60(31), 32-42.
Moravian Univeristy. (n.d.). John Amos Comenius. Moravian University.
https://www.moravian.edu/about/college-history/john-amos-comenius
NCTE. (2023). Orbis Pictus award. National Council of Teachers of English.
https://ncte.org/awards/orbis-pictus-award-nonfiction-for-children/

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Exploring Place and Social Class in YAL

1/18/2023

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Dr. Chea Parton is a farm girl and former rural student and high school English teacher. She’s currently an assistant professor of instruction at The University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation “Country-fied city or city-fied country?”: The impact of place on rural out-migrated literacy teachers’ identities and practices (2020) won honorable mention for the American Educational Research Association’s rural education special interest group’s dissertation award. Her research focuses on the lived experiences and identities of rural and out-migrant students and teachers as well as how they’re (in)visible in classrooms and YA literature.

Exploring Place and Social Class in YAL

I spent a lot of December buying Christmas presents. And I realized that I didn’t have to think very much about how much money I was spending. I didn’t make a budget because I’m fortunate and privileged (now) not to have to do that. And everytime I made a purchase, I thought about my Uncle Leroy talking about how it killed my Grandma Nellie not to have money for the kids’ Christmas presents. How grateful she was when folks would donate an orange for each of their stockings.

I also thought about the years we did “recycled Christmas” with my dad when there wasn’t enough money for new presents. Essentially, he would gift us things of his that he knew we loved. It wasn’t until I was telling my friends at school about it that I realized it wasn’t something that everyone did and that it meant something about my social class. I recognize now that this was class injury, something I experienced affectively and emotionally as I was reminded of our working-class status.

Now, I live stuck somewhere between these two identities. For example, I have cultivated the habit of never going to the doctor unless something is seriously wrong because of its expense and haven’t been to a primary care physician in a decade. I can’t stand food waste, so I strategically prepare less food than I actually want to eat because I know that I’ll end up eating whatever my kids leave on their plates. But I also had no problem buying all those presents.

These experiences with class injury, class mobility, and identity feel more visible now because of my recent work with place and class in YA literature. As part of Drs. Sophia Sarigianides and Amanda Thein’s special issue of English Journal, I began thinking through class representation in YA as well as how to teach it in classrooms. An extension of that work (thanks to Dr. Sarigianides’s generous invitation!) resulted in an exploratory comparative content analysis of the representation of social class across rural and urban places in YA literature.

One of the things that Dr. Sarigianides’s ongoing current research demonstrates is that we often have trouble figuring out where and who we are in terms of social class (to learn more, see our pre-recorded NCTE presentation), which I don’t think is an accident. So, learning how to have conversations about social class and how we experience it in our lives is powerful and important. One way we can do that is through our reading and discussion of literature. For this post I wanted to briefly outline what I found through my analysis and make some suggestions for how to address social class, especially as connected to place, in an ELA classroom.

For my analysis I chose Funny How Things Change by Melissa Wyatt, a rural book (which you can learn more about and hear me talk with Wyatt herself on the Reading Rural YAL podcast), and Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff, an urban book because they depicted working class experiences across those places. I read and marked passages where place was prominent and salient, wrote memos about those passages focusing on how class is represented and connected to movements of power, and then compared/contrasted them.

There were more similarities than I expected to find. For example:

Remy, Jolly, LaVaughn all have jobs as teenagers that are more than a slush fund.
Remy and LaVaughn have special (though different) connections to their places.
All speak a nonstandard variety of English
There is an understanding that it's up to them (rather than the system) to make lemonade

But there were also some important differences connected to place:

Remy doesn’t feel like he needs college to get out of Dwyer but LaVaughn sees college as her ticket to a good, middle-class life.
LaVaughn lives in a high-rise building in public housing and Remy lives in a trailer.
Remy is used to the switchbacks and turns of the mountains and knows how to read the weather by feel.
LaVaughn knows bus routes and stops and not to go into the laundry alone

If they traded places, neither one of them would know how to navigate and be in the other’s place—even though they occupy similar class positions. And despite their shared class positions, the differences in their places lead them to be stereotyped in different ways. There are important differences between the assumptions that people make about “trailer trash” and folks from “the projects.” The intersectional identities assumed to belong to each and the way they are connected to power and privilege offer important opportunities for critical examinations of systems of power and the ways they interact to position people within society.

So, we should let students have that chance. And one way we could do that is through book clubs. If I were to do it, it’d look something like this:

Introduce the concept of social class through the crayon activity. (You can learn more about that here as well as listen to Antonia talk about it in our pre-recorded NCTE video.)
Discuss how place shapes those classed experiences. Using Jason Reynolds’s Time 100 talk would be an excellent resource here.
Run book clubs where some students read class-salient rural books and others read class-salient urban books.
Ask students to keep readers notebooks where they take note of any mention, description, or illustration of class and/or place, jotting their thoughts and reflections in their notebooks.
Have students talk across their books, essentially performing a comparative analysis similar to the one I describe (albeit briefly) here.
Ask students to complete a project that allows them to use what they’ve learned to continue to explore social class in their lives and be activists in their community and the world. Possibilities include:
- Writing their own autobiographical/fictional, multivocal, poetic examinations of their class position(s), movement(s), and/or injury(ies).
- Examining community supports for folks experiencing lower SES social class positions and proposing ways to do it better.

Helping students better understand and talk about social class can be facilitated through YA literature in ways that can lead to the kind of social action and activism that we need to make our world a more equitable place.

If you’d like more detail on any of the ideas found here, please check out our pre-recorded NCTE session, read the social class issue of English Journal, and don’t hesitate to reach out to me with questions at readingrural@gmail.com.

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January 11, 2023

1/11/2023

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This Wednesday post is brought to you by Leilya Pitre. Leilya is an Assistant Professor and English Education Coordinator at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond, LA. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses for English and secondary English Education majors. She is interested in everything about teaching English, linguistics, literacy, young adult and multicultural literature.

Raising a Hope Nation: Learning about Hope from
Personal Experiences of the YA Authors and Their Literary Characters

When I just moved to Louisiana, I taught at a public middle school. After the winter break, as usual, I assigned the first daily journal prompt to my eighth graders asking them about their holidays. I walked around the classroom anticipating joyful stories about the holiday gifts my students received, adventurous family trips, visits with friends, and other exciting activities they experienced in two weeks I hadn't seen them. Surprisingly, just a couple of students volunteered to share their journal entry. That evening reading those journals at home, I cried and felt so helpless. Jaylen wrote about his cousin who was caught in a drug related operation and got detained. Dee explained that most of the time she had spent reading to her Dad. She had known that they had just a few days left together because of his terminal illness, and it was her "sweet Daddy" who had taught her to read when she was a little girl. Nick's uncle was shot, and Mary's brother got into a car accident. There were other stories full of pain and despair. Being new to the community, I was caught off guard and felt heartbroken.

I believe other teachers may have encountered situations similar to the one I described. How do they come to class the next day and look in the eyes of these students who are so deeply hurt and lost? How do I find a way to connect to them? How do I help them rediscover love and hope? How do I make them believe the future, the better future is possible? These questions were tearing me apart. I also know that I have to find hope myself and only then I will be able to project it onto my students showing them that sad, dark moments may define the concrete situations and experiences, but they do not determine the future.

I thought about their journal entries and how to respond to them because I had no right to simply write “I understand,” or “I feel your pain.” It would be superficial. For my next class, I brought Jane Yollen's "Birthday Box," a short story of a 10-year-old girl who lost her mother to cancer, felt angry, empty, and hopeless until she found strength to return to writing and fill her life, and the box, with new, more hopeful stories. I could relate to this story because I had lost my first husband and parents by that time. For me, as a new teacher in the US, it was also a moment, when I exposed my vulnerabilities to students. We cried together reading the story, shared our losses, and ways we managed to cope with them and heal.

Later, when I was introduced to the YA literature and began reading it abundantly, I became even more convinced that we could help students find strength and resolve in the darkest places by looking up to other people who were able to deal and overcome struggles. Since then, I look for hope in every adolescent novel I read. That is why I share young adult stories and novels with my students regardless whether I have time to teach an entire book for a couple of weeks or just have a book talk at the end of class to point students' attention to characters, their challenges, and how they face them. Books contain these uniquely storied life experiences that not only mirror adolescents’ struggles, but point to the ways out of the murkiest places.

It is also vital for our students to know that YA writers are live human beings, who themselves experience pain, loss, betrayal, despair; it is being close to such tragic encounters allows them to become effective storytellers and help us rediscover hope. If you haven't heard about Hope Nation (2018), edited by Rose Brock, give it a chance. The collection presents readers with stories from Atia Abawi, Renee Ahdieh, Libba Bray, Howard Bryant, Ally Carter, Ally Condie, Christina Diaz Gonzales, Gayle Forman, Romina Garber, I. W. Gregario, Kate Hart, Brendan Kiely, David Levithan, Alex London, Marie Lu, Julie Murphy, Jason Reynolds, Aisha Saeed, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Jenny Torres Sanchez, Jeff Zentner, and Nicola Yoon. The authors, included in this volume, represent diverse racial, religious, and economic backgrounds; their family makeup and stability, experience, age, country of birth, and sexual orientation are various, and they all defeated obstacles to their dreams through hope.

Rose Brock, an editor of Hope Nation

In the introduction to the collection, Brock emphasizes that these are “stories of resilience, resistance, hardship, loss, love, tenacity, and acceptance — stories that prove that sometimes, hope can be found only on the other side of adversity.” The authors generously share flashes of light in the darkness and assure readers that hope is a decision people make to be able to cope and prosper after pain, loss, or struggles. Hope also requires work, and taking an action is the first step and an integral part of healing.

Among hundreds of the YA novels about hope, I would like to suggest a few of my favorite novels with diverse characters:
A Time to Dance (2014) by Padma Venkatraman
All American Boys (2015) by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely
Long Way Down (2017) by Jason Reynolds
I have Lost My Way (2018) by Gayle Forman
The Poet X (2018) by Elizabeth Acevedo
Internment (2019) by Samira Ahmed
Furia (2020) by Yamile Saied Méndez
I Must Betray You (2022) by Ruta Sepetys

There are ample opportunities for discussions while reading the novels, which can be completed in small groups or with an entire class. After reading, enrichment activities would add to understanding and analysis of the theme, and what it is about hope students learn from any of the chosen novels. In the second volume of Teaching Universal Themes Through Young Adult Novels: Exploring Relationships and Connections to Others (2021), Mike Cook and I offer a teaching unit focused around the theme of dreams and hopes. It consists a possible unit scope and sequence with detailed descriptions of activities and tasks that would enhance students’ critical thinking, analytical, and writing skills.

Here is one final activity from this textbook.
A Tree of Hope
On the last day of the unit, students together with the teacher celebrate their achievements. By this time, they have completed a variety of activities and two culminating tasks to explore the theme of dreams and hopes. Their final task is to create a Tree of Hope. This tree will host leaves of dreams and hopes that are refined as a result of all the work completed by this point. To make the collective project more engaging and challenging, the revised dreams and hopes will be in the form of a haiku, a three-line Japanese poetry form.
If needed, the teacher may conduct a mini-lesson on haiku writing and model an example. Students and the teacher will create a haiku, and then partner with another student in class to exchange and review each other’s haiku and provide suggestions. After revising their poems, students will write a clean final copy on a leaf. The teacher and students will share their haiku poems and place them on a poster with a tree template.

As seen in the example, it is an unusual tree with different leaf forms and colors as a symbolic representation of different voices, backgrounds, and perspectives in the classroom. One of the poems on this tree written by my student reads:
Re-gifted mercy,
A home for all who claim it.
Let love teach you how.
I would like to conclude this post with this beautiful and uplifting message.

Thank you for visiting the blog post!
Till next time,
Leilya

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January 04th, 2023

1/4/2023

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We are thrilled to have Dr. Fawn Canady as our first post for 2023! Dr. Canady is an Associate Professor of Adolescent and Digital Literacies at Sonoma State University in Northern California. She is a former high school English teacher. Her interdisciplinary interests include multimodality, adolescent literacies, and teacher education.

Winter is the Time for Storytelling by Dr. Fawn Canady

“In winter, when the green earth lies resting beneath a blanket of snow, this is the time for storytelling…”
--Robin Wall Kimmerer

For those of us in school, it’s Winter Break. The winter solstice, the longest night and shortest day of the year, is behind us. From here, the days grow longer. Imperceptible at first– but each day now, our days will be lighter and longer. Still, it is winter and the time for storytelling. So, in this post, I will center YA novels that evoke oral storytelling traditions.

What Distinguishes Storytelling from Written Stories?
Storytelling, particularly oral stories passed down through generations, connects us in myriad ways. I hear my old English professor proclaiming the purpose of storytelling as “to instruct and delight!” From stories, we learn. They serve an aesthetic purpose. Stories are also vehicles for collective memory, conveying our past. Stories have the power to shape our identity, inform what kinds of people we hope to be. And, stories situate us in time. All of these reasons have drawn me to oral histories, too.

Recently, NCTE released the Teaching Storytelling Position Statement, which defines storytelling thus:

Oral storytelling is different from personal narrative writing such as memoir or autobiography in that it is told in front of a live audience (of one or more), it involves at least some improvisation, and it utilizes the extra dimensions of dialect, vocal shadings, audience response, and accompanying facial and body movements (Simons, 1990). …The performance aspect of oral storytelling adds an extra layer to the already complex act of narration found in genres more familiar to the classroom, such as memoir. When done well, the craft of oral storytelling actually produces oral literature; good oral stories are verbal art, but deeply entrenched ethnocentric and elitist biases have established an image of them as formless, simple, and plebeian (Bauman, 1986, p. 7). Allowing students to perform stories in their own, personal language can legitimize and honor their individual ways of speaking in a way school spaces usually don’t.

I quote this nearly in full because the following books include examples of characters telling or listening to stories or the authors adopt the cadence or styles of storytelling. Additionally, the following YA novels remind readers of the “verbal art” that students are invited to “perform…in their own, personal language.” In English language arts classrooms, we want to encourage students to create as well as read. Furthermore, each of these novels “legitimizes and honors [students’] individual ways of speaking in a way school spaces usually don’t.” In a time when teachers look to engage students' lived literacies and further linguistic justice (Baker-Bell), YA novels that emphasize storytelling invite students’ community cultural wealth (Yosso) into the classroom. It also creates a space for them to lean into the stories central to cultures different from their own. Lastly, in this spirit of Xito Institute, it invites all of our ancestors into our learning spaces.

The Last Cuentista: Storytelling for the Future of Humanity
The Last Cuentista, by Donna Barba Higuera, is an award-winning YA sci-fi novel in which storytelling, specifically Mexican folklore, plays a key role in shaping the future of humanity. The story begins in the near future, with 12-year-old Petra Peña and her Abuela, Lita, sitting near a piñon fire in the desert in the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico. Lita is telling Petra the story of the Fire Snake nagual (also known as Haley’s comet), which is on a collision course with earth. The only hope for humankind is to leave the planet earth. This is one of many, many stories that Lita has told her children and grandchildren. This one, however, she “makes her own '' and encourages Petra not only to remember the stories, but to make them her own when she arrives on her new planet. Her new home.

Petra’s family has been selected to leave earth to save humankind. Three ships will launch farmers, scientists, doctors, and others deemed essential to the new colony. It will take over 370 years to arrive, so they will be in stasis. Monitors and their descendants will watch over the sleepers until arrival on Sagan. As they sleep, En Cognito Downloadable Cognizance, a kind of futuristic, super Wikipedia of specialized knowledge, will be loaded in their brains as they sleep for hundreds of years. Petra’s parents have chosen botany and geology (their expertise) for her. But, for her “elective,” she chooses mythology and stories. She wants to be a storyteller like Lita.

So as not to spoil the story, I’ll simply say that there are some on the ship who believe that peace and harmony are possible for humanity but at great personal sacrifice for the greater or collective good. And thus, Petra is awakened early to a nightmare scenario. She must find a way to preserve the stories of humanity against the Collective, which sees individuality and difference as dangerous to the common good.

There is so much more to say about this book, but in this post, I’m focusing on the storytelling tradition. Petra soon finds that of all of the “useful” arts and sciences, storytelling is the most powerful tool for hope and change. The traditional Mexican folklore, beginning with familiar or patterned phrases such as “Érase que se era…” or “In the beginning,” or “Once upon a time,” can be used by Petra to shape a more humane future for people. Beloved stories, such as La Llorona and indigenous creation stories tied to place are modified to reflect her surroundings. Thus, while stories retain their core meanings, they can also adapt to new places, new situations. In other words, the stories passed down orally over time have the power to guide people through time and space.

In the Teaching Storytelling Position Statement, storytelling is presented as essentially universal. It is a practice of sharing space with another, where there is a certain kind of reciprocity between the teller and listener, just as Lita and Petra do in the first chapter. Storytelling in Cuentista is the vehicle through which identities are shaped and connections are made between ancestors and families. Storytelling is about sensemaking–and also about living in a way that, as Petra and her brother say in the book, has the potential to be momentous: “Everything we do from this moment on will bring great pride or great sadness to our ancestors.”

Storytelling is a collective memory and is also individual. Memory is important in Cuentista. Memory is triggered by stories and by objects that evoke stories of individual experiences. For example, a children’s story beloved by Petra’s little brother, Dreamers (Morales), triggers his memory. Much of Cuentista is reflected in Dreamers. For example, there are items that the space travelers brought with them, such as pendants, wedding rings, images, baseball cards, kitschy sweatshirts, and toys… all things that are rich with meaning for their person. In Dreamers, the young mother in the story packs her precious belongings in a backpack. It makes you wonder, if you had to leave the planet, never to return, what would you bring? What memories and stories would be revived by those things? What would your stories communicate to the future?

Stories Reflect Knowledge Collected Over Time
The knowledge prized in Cuentista comes from STEM fields and stories are seen as a threat. Yet, stories also contain other kinds of knowledge passed down from ancestors. In Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants, all living things provide knowledge and gifts. These teachings are conveyed through storytelling. Botanist Dr. Kimmerer, along with author Smith and artist Niedhardt, shows young readers how scientific knowledge is not necessarily different from, and certainly not necessarily superior to, the wisdom reflected in stories about the natural world. This is a book that reacquaints, or tunes our senses, to learning from the land. This restorying begins in “An Invitation to Remember,'' at the beginning of the book, where we are invited to “remember another way of being in the world, in kinship. To be in relationship with all living things, our relatives” (p. 10). Importantly, we have agency, an opportunity to imagine the future we want for all of creation:

“We are in the time of the Seventh Fire, a time prophesied by my Anishinaabe ancestors. A sacred time when our shared remembering transforms the world. A Dark time and a time filled with light. We can choose to live in the dark or the light. We remember the oft-used words of resistance, ‘They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we are seeds.’

Braiding Sweetgrass is a perfect pairing with Cuentista. They complement each other through the role of storytelling in carrying teaching and wisdom, but also in shaping the future.

Stories are Magic. Stories have Power.
A few other books come to mind when I think about the role of storytelling across time. A Snake Falls to Earth tells the story of Nina, a Lipan Apache girl in the future who believes in the old stories. Darcie Little Badger writes in a way that evokes Lipan Apache storytelling. In other words, the cadence of oral storytelling adds to our reading. In the story, two worlds come together to reveal that the old stories are true in a way that they haven’t been in recent memory. Readers will think about the Fire Snake and other stories shared by Lita and Petra in Cuentista. Similarly, When You Trap a Tiger shares the themes of storytelling and connections to family. It is about a Korean folktale that is closer to truth than fiction. I say that with a qualifier, thinking of a friend, Alan Rosen, who reminds us that fiction can also communicate essential truths. Even through sci-fi, magical realism, and speculative fiction, each of these stories ask us to examine the ways we make distinctions between fiction and reality or “truth.”

Centering storytelling encourages us to honor the oral traditions passed on through time. These stories present storytelling as essential not only to our identities but to living our best possible lives in kinship. Storytelling is a practice that young people engage in all of the time. I am also reminded of the resurgence of Spoken Word in schools, or of drama or poetry– dramatic retellings. Each of these invites us to consider the ways that storytelling has influenced the language arts. Students can also create audio or multimodal stories that reflect participatory storytelling practices. Or, they can simply settle in and tell a good story. It’s the perfect time for it.

References
Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. Routledge.

Higuera, D. B. (2021). The Last Cuentista. Levine Querido.

Keller, T. (2020). When you Trap a Tiger. Random House Books for Young Readers.

Kimmerer, R. W., Smith, M. G., & Neidhardt, N. (2022). Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants. Zest Books.

Little Badger, D. (2021). A Snake Falls to Earth. Levine Querido.

Yosso*, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race ethnicity and education, 8(1), 69-91.

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Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday has a new Feature-- A YouTube Channel

Unleashing the Possibility Through Inquiry and the Color Blue by Dr. Becki Maldonado

Exploring Place and Social Class in YAL

January 11, 2023

Raising a Hope Nation: Learning about Hope from
Personal Experiences of the YA Authors and Their Literary Characters

January 04th, 2023

Dr. Steve Bickmore
Creator and Curator

Co-Edited Books

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Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday has a new Feature-- A YouTube Channel

Unleashing the Possibility Through Inquiry and the Color Blue by Dr. Becki Maldonado

Exploring Place and Social Class in YAL

January 11, 2023

Raising a Hope Nation: Learning about Hope from​Personal Experiences of the YA Authors and Their Literary Characters

January 04th, 2023

Dr. Steve Bickmore​Creator and Curator

Co-Edited Books

Archives

Categories

Blogs to Follow

Raising a Hope Nation: Learning about Hope from
Personal Experiences of the YA Authors and Their Literary Characters

Dr. Steve Bickmore
Creator and Curator