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Cynthia Leitich Smith is Coming to the UNLV Summit by Rebecca Chatham-Vazquez

5/27/2021

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Cynthia Leitich Smith is Coming to the Summit!

The UNLV Young Adult Literature Summit is pleased to feature Cynthia Leitich Smith this year. Smith is an enrolled citizen of the Muskogee (Creek) Nation who landed on the Young Adult scene with Jingle Dancer in 2000, and she’s been changing our lives with her work ever since. As a teacher and writer, she centers young people - particularly Native youth - their lives and their thoughts in all her work. 
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She has been recognized by YALSA, the ALA, and the Texas Library Association, among several others. This year she was named 2021 Neustadt NSK Laureate (Winner of the NSK Prize for Children’s Literature). Her novels have won numerous awards, including the American Indian Youth Literature award for Hearts Unbroken and the Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection for Ancestor Approved.

Ancestor Approved,
edited by Smith and published in 2020, is an anthology of stories and poems contributed by several authors (including Smith) who collaborated to create intersecting stories that take place during an intertribal powwow. Thanks to the collaboration of all the contributors, all of the stories weave together to give readers the feeling of the powwow and to show Native joy and the beauty of community, as people from many nations join together in the celebration of their heritage. Read an excerpt here.
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Most excitingly, the Heartdrum imprint, a Native-focused imprint of HarperCollins, has launched this year with Smith as the author-curator! The imprint focuses on publishing the work of Indigenous writers and illustrators for children and young adults. There are picture books, chapter books, middle grade novels, and young adult novels. The future of Native American children’s and young adult literature looks very exciting!
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For more from Smith, see her interview with Publisher’s Weekly OR this conversation from From the Mixed-Up Files of Middle Grade Authors
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Ethics of a Digital Age in Young Adult Literature by Amy Piotrowski

5/26/2021

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Amy Piotrowski is one of the people who comes to mind when I need help with anything associated with English Language Arts and the Digital Age.  We are pleased that she had the time to offer up a guest post on ethics in and around YA literature.

Ethics of a Digital Age in Young Adult Literature 
Amy Piotrowski


Digital tools have changed how we live and communicate as well as literacy teaching and learning.  I remember when my family got our very first home computer, and now I can’t imagine life without my smartphone.  Email, video calls, and streaming movies are all part of my regular routine.  I even teach courses through video conferencing to students in different locations hundreds of miles from each other.  Today’s technologies, including internet connectivity and artificial intelligence, claim to be able to improve our lives.  But are we asking ourselves whether and how we can use these technology tools ethically?  We would be wise to be critical about our use of digital tools.

Digital tools must be employed for humanity’s good rather than evil.  Otherwise these tools become what Safiya Umoja Noble calls “algorithms of oppression.”  Digital technologies are not neutral - they are tools developed by humans with human biases.  W. Kamau Bell shows in a recent episode of CNN’s series United Shades of America how inequities in the design and use of digital tools can enable techno-racism.  Digital technologies can enable harm to marginalized communities.
The NCTE Definition of Literacy in a Digital Age calls on teachers to “participate effectively and critically in a networked world” and to “examine the rights, responsibilities, and ethical implications of the use and creation of information.”  One way to examine our responsibilities in a digital age is through young adult science fiction depicting different technologies and how these technologies might be used in the future.  Young adult literature can spark much needed critical conversations in the classroom.  As Lindblom, Rivera, & Radice (2020) point out, “Literature possesses the power to imagine a future and, in so doing, engage readers in questions of ethics in otherwise unthought-of scenarios.  Through reading and critical discussion, English teachers offer students emotional and social questions, enabling them - we hope - to face their future dilemmas with intelligence, empathy, and autonomy.”

​Here are some novels that can spark discussions about the ethics of technology:

Feed by M.T. Anderson

Titus and his friends, like most people in Anderson’s future society, all have the feed - an implant in the brain that connects the user online without the need for a device.  With this device, one can go online, chat, and purchase items.  Advertisements can come through the feed into one’s vision based on where they are.  During a spring break trip to the moon, an old man, who clearly dislikes the feed, causes Titus and his friends’ feeds to malfunction.  One of the other teens affected by the old man’s feed hack is a girl named Violet.  The novel follows Titus and Violets’ relationship as Violet rebels against the feed.
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This novel explores how instant and constant connectivity can result in disconnection.  Rather than bringing people together, the feed provides non-stop stimulation that leaves people in a disjointed existence.  Using the feed for advertising and buying things is valued more than the humans who use the feed.  The feed ends up alienating people from each other.
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Lifelike trilogy by Jay Kristoff
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In the aftermath of a devastating war, Eve Carpenter lives with her grandfather in what is left of California, a place known as Dregs.  She pilots machina (a machine that requires a human operator) in WarDome fights that pit machines against each other.  During one fight, she takes down a logika (a machine that operates using artificial intelligence) by just looking at it.  She flees home to avoid groups that see this ability as deviant.  On the way, she sees a plane crash and, rushing to the wreckage, discovers that the pilot is not a human, but a lifelike - a rbot made to be just like a human.  Lifelikes were banned years ago after they led an uprising that killed their creator and his family.  What is this lifelike doing in Dregs?

Kristoff’s series asks what might happen if artificial intelligence overtakes human abilities and then rebels against their makers.  The lifelikes are supposed to be bound by Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, but when they are not bound by the Three Laws, they turn to Milton’s Paradise Lost to justify their uprising.  And when the lifelikes find out about Eve, her life is in danger.
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Arc of a Scythe trilogy by Neal Shusterman

Shusterman’s trilogy depicts a future society where artificial intelligence has solved almost all of humanity’s problems.  There is no illness or hunger, and any injury can be healed.  Death isn’t a part of life anymore, thanks to the benevolent A.I. known as the Thunderhead.  While teens Cita and Rowan work through their apprenticeship to become scythes, the appointed administrators of death to cull the herd of humanity, the Thunderhead becomes concerned about corruption among the scythes.  The problem is that the scythedome is the one place the Thunderhead must stay out of.
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I find the Thunderhead to be the most interesting character in the series.  The Thunderhead runs the world wisely and says it wants to do what is good for humans.  It sees itself as on the ethical high ground, even as it uses loopholes around the laws governing its behavior in order to influence events that it cannot directly intervene in.  Throughout the series, people seem to follow the Thunderhead’s guidance without question.  People accept that what the Thunderhead says and does is what is for the best, but is that the case?  I am left wondering how humans make choices and act on their own agency and how A.I. can shape human behavior.
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Warcross duology by Marie Lu

In the future, everyone connects online not through a smartphone, but through a set of smart glasses called the NeruoLink.  On the NeuroLink, the most popular pastime  is a video game called Warcross.  A teen hacker named Emika Chen finds a way to hack into the opening game of the annual Warcross tournament, an event people all over the world watch.  When Emkia starts getting calls from the NeruoLink’s CEO, Hideo Tananka, she thinks she’s in big trouble.  Instead, he offers her a job - find out who is behind a plan to disrupt the Warcross tournament.

Emika ends up in the middle of a plot to use the NeuroLink to control the world’s population so that people cannot commit crimes.  Arguably, this may sound like a laudable end.  But Emika cannot support this, calling removal of people’s free will, including their free will to commit criminal acts, “taking away something that makes us fundamentally human!”  For Emika, free will is a key part of what it means to be human.
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Girl of Flesh and Metal trilogy by Alicia Ellis

Lena Hayes is the daughter of the leaders of CyberCorp, a company that makes cybernetic limbs as well as androids.  When Lena loses her arm in a car accident, she gets a cybernetic arm from CyberCorp.  She hates the idea of the new arm and its artificial intelligence.  She hates it even more when the children of CyberCorp start turning up dead.  Lena knows that she was sleepwalking at the time of the murders.  Did she commit these horrible killings?

This series is a hybrid of science fiction and mystery.  Lena is skeptical of technology, yet finds herself with a cybernetic arm.  She has serious doubts about the new androids her parents’ company is about to sell.  The first book sets up more mystery in the second book, which was published last month.  The third book in the trilogy will be published in the fall.
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Hard Wired
by Len Vlahos


Quinn is a fifteen year old boy who has fun playing video games with his friends, has a crush he doesn’t quite know what to do about, and mourns the loss of his father.  Or at least that’s what Quinn thinks until he sees something strange in the video messages his father left for him, and then his father reappears.  Quinn is told that he isn’t a boy, but rather an artificial intelligence.  The man he believed was his father is really a university professor running the experiment that is Quinn.  Quinn sets out to determine if he can run his own life, without his father.
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Quinn wonders who he is and how he can connect with others.  He tries to make friends with other computers as well as humans.  He sues his father for the chance to make his own decisions.  Vlahos’s novel asks if A.I. robots should have rights.
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References
Lindblom, K., Rivera, A., & Radice, M. (2020).  Future Perfect? Exploring Artificial Intelligence through Young Adult Literature.  English Journal, 109(6), 73-80.
​Dr. Amy Piotrowski is an assistant professor of English education at Utah State University.  She teaches undergraduate courses in English education and secondary education as well as graduate courses in literacy.  Her scholarly interests focus on digital literacies, young adult literature, and teacher education.  Before going into teacher education, she taught middle school Language Arts, high school English, and college composition in Texas.  Her chapter “Flipping the Teaching of Young Adult Literature with Preservice Teachers” was published in the book Towards a More Visual Literacy: Shifting the Paradigm with Digital Tools and Young Adult Literature.
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Amy Piotrowski
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Reading Choices of Future Teachers: Plant a Seed and Watch It Grow by Leilya A. Pitre

5/19/2021

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I need to have Leilya Pitre write for the blog more often. Every time I do, I am reminded about how much I have learned from her. We had several opportunities to work together at LSU while she was working on her PhD. Some of my favorite publication were collaborations with her. Now she is making her way on her own and has recently published a volume with Mike P. Cook entitled Exploring Identity Development and Self. After you get done reading her post, take a minute to order the book. 

Reading Choices of Future Teachers: Plant a Seed and Watch It Grow
by Leilya Pitre

In the previous blog post of Dr. Bickmore’s YA Wednesday, Tara Anderson Gold confessed: “I love young adult literature and I wanted to experiment with new ways to connect students to great books.” We—teachers, librarians, educators—are all doing this for similar reasons. While Tara shared her lessons from teaching a high school English class, I would like to talk about an undergraduate course on YAL and its influence on cultivating students’ reading choices. 

It is no secret that aspiring English teachers are driven by their love to books and want their students enjoy reading as much as they do. However, when novice teachers finally get in the position to teach, they often find their hands tied by school policies and district curriculum mandates. In Louisiana, for example, they have guide books for every grade of secondary English outlined with themes, topics, concepts, and texts detailed for public school teachers. There is not much flexibility that may find its way into the year-long curriculum under the circumstances; yet, when teachers are well-read, they will use any chance to introduce readings beyond the prescribed titles. This is when they remember a course on young adult literature (YAL) they have taken in college and skim the syllabus for some titles that might be fitting into their classroom.
For this reason, teaching this course, titled “Adolescent Experience in Literature” in our English Department, my hope is they will learn about the texts that are contemporary, relevant, engaging, and still of high literary quality.  I want “to plant a seed” and strengthen my teacher candidates’ belief in young adult texts: if YAL makes adolescents think, reflect, and build knowledge and skills necessary to succeed, it is worth introducing to students. As in the previous years, the major course goal is to expose students to a variety of diverse YA novels that mirror daily experiences and challenges of adolescents and illustrate how these texts might be helpful within and beyond academic school setting. We also discuss staying power of YAL – what kind of literature may stay and become a part of YA canon. 

This spring, each of the students read 12 novels assigned to them and one novel of their choice. While they read only 13 books, new titles are mentioned during each class, so their reading list is consistently expanding. Here is the latest list of the required novels:
  1. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson (1999)
  2. Freaky Green Eyes by Joyce Carol Oates (2003)
  3. American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (2006)
  4. Mexican WhiteBoy by Matt de la Peña (2008)
  5. Hate List by Jennifer Brown (2009)
  6. My Name is Parvana by Debora Ellis (2012)
  7. Crossover by Kwame Alexander (2013)
  8. All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely (2015)
  9. The Memory of Things by Gae Polisner (2016)
  10.  Love, Hate, and Other Filters by Samira Ahmed (2018)
  11. I Have Lost My Way by Gayle Forman (2018)
  12. The Music of What Happened by Bill Konigsberg (2019)
Preparing for the course each semester, I replace two or three novels with newer choices, yet keep in mind a variety of topics, themes, social issues, and diverse representation of characters. This year I finally let go of The Cather in the Rye (Salinger, 1945) and A Separate Peace (Knowles, 1959). Both novels are the staples of early YAL, although Salinger’s novel has never been branded as such, and carry important lessons, but it’s time to give new titles a chance. Instead, we have read Mexican WhiteBoy (de la Peña, 2008) and Love, Hate, and Other Filters (Ahmed, 2018). I have also added The Crossover (Alexander, 2013) to examine structural peculiarities of this verse novel, in addition to thematic explorations. The end-of-semester survey illustrates which novels have resonated with my students the most; it also shows which novels I will most likely replace next year. 
As it is clear, Bill Konigsberg’s 2019 novel The Music of What Happens wins the prize in a class of 13 undergraduate English Education majors with Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson (1999) and Freaky Green Eyes by Joyce Carol Oates (2003) closely following. American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (2006) and All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely (2015) are sharing the third place. 
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Summarizing the course readings, students emphasize that the major themes of all of the novels, in addition to identity struggles, are focused around adolescents facing challenges and rediscovering self-worth, love, and hope. As one of the students, Alexa, clarifies, “Knowing who they are and learning to accept themselves creates new possibilities for love, friendship, and hope. I want to believe my future students will be able to do just that.” Sara, another student, sincerely discloses that this is the first English course in her life that allows reading novels “about today’s young people,” and KC is simply happy to know that novels like The Music of What Happens “may find their way into the secondary classroom soon.”
​To further foster love for YA literature and possibilities it offers, each student is tasked to explore an additional novel and present it to class. I have to mention that I provide a list of recommended novels for this assignment, in case students aren’t familiar with recent YA titles or do not know where to start looking. I draw their attention to various Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) and other young adult book awards. To begin a parade of choice novels, I introduce a few novels; these spring I have  acquainted them with two novels representing diverse characters and exploring pressing issues of social justice, equality, and immigration--American Street (Zoboi, 2017) and Dear Martin (Stone, 2017). 
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Throughout the course, I have reminded how important it is to include diverse literature into the secondary English classrooms because we want our students see themselves in the books they read. Together we’ve watched some video clips where popular YA writers promote We Need Diverse Books movement (diversebooks.org). Fortuitously for me, this group of students embraces YAL wholeheartedly and has no trouble choosing a novel on their own. Their choices feature a wide variety of adolescent experiences in literature portraying characters of different cultural, racial or ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds as well as gender and sexual orientation. The exciting part is that three of the presented novels are written by the YA authors who will be speaking at the 2021 UNLA online Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature—shout out to Steve Bickmore, for such a wonderful line up of guest speakers (http://www.yawednesday.com/2021-unlv-online-summit.html). These titles contain Burned, a verse novel by Ellen Hopkins (2006), Pinned by Sharon Flake (2012), and Read Between the Lines by Jo Knowles (2015). 
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Among the other choices are the novels published within the last twelve years:
  • If I Stay by Gayle Forman (2009)
  • He Said She Said by Kwame Alexander (2011) – two students chose this one;
  • Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz (2012);
  • Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell (2012);
  • The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (2012);
  • Wonder by R. J. Palacio (2012);
  • Three Dark Crowns Book by Kendare Blake (2016);
  • We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson (2016);
  • Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds (2017);
  • Opposite of Always Justin A. Reynolds (2019);
  • When You Were Everything by Ashley Woodfolk (2020)
Interestingly, only three novels come from the recommended list, and the rest are identified by my students on their own. As one of my students, Richard, clarifies, he is fond of Alexander’s The Crossover, and it has driven his decision to read He Said, She Said to learn more about the author and his writings. The same story is about Jamie’s choice of Reynold’s Long Way Down after reading his book All American Boys co-authored with B. Kiely. Lily’s choice of Wonder by Palacio is justified by the fact that the novels we read in class are mostly for high schoolers, and none of them deals with special needs children. Jacob explains that When You Were Everything (Woodfolk, 2020) has attracted him because of “diverse and nuanced characters—African American, Bengali American, Islamic, LGBTQ+, etc.”—and the novel examines “mature and relevant subject matter, especially considering the transitional nature of adolescence.”

To conclude, I’d like to bring up one more of my multiple students’ testimonies about the course value. It is Jacob again, and he admits: “I always thought that young adult literature was just that—“young,” somehow juvenile … because the category itself is relatively new, so I wasn’t sure of its quality. Now, after I’ve read over a dozen of novels, I have a new appreciation for it, and I can see its merit, especially for young people. I already have a few favorites and will definitely look out for new titles.” Thinking about this group of teacher candidates, I am certain they will continue making choices in favor of YAL in their classroom whenever it is possible because it is ultimately a choice in favor of their future students. The seed is planted and well nurtured. Let it grow. 
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Next time I write for Dr. Bickmore’s YA Wednesday, I will share some interesting ideas for final creative projects based on my students’ work. 
Leilya A. Pitre is an Assistant Professor and English Education Program Coordinator with experience in secondary school and college teaching. She taught English as a foreign language in the Ukraine and ELA/English in public schools in the US. Currently, she teaches methods courses for preservice English teachers, literary analysis, American Literature, and Young Adult literature in the English Department at Southeastern Louisiana University. Her research interests include teacher preparation, field experiences of preservice English teachers, secondary school teaching, and teaching of Young Adult and multicultural literature. Leilya is a co-editor of Study and Scrutiny: Research on Young Adult Literature (https://journals.shareok.org/studyandscrutiny), a member of National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), English Language Arts Teacher Educator (ELATE) committee at NCTE, Association of Teacher Educators (ATE), and other regional and local education organizations.
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Leilya A. Pitre
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I'm a live link to the registration!
Until next time.
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The 2021 UNLV online Summit and Maria Padian

5/19/2021

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I'm a live link to registration!
The UNLV Young Adult Literature Summit is pleased to feature Maria Padian this year. Padian is especially known for writing about sexual assault through her book Wrecked, which was a 16 Kids’ Indie Next Pick, a winner of the Maine Literary Award, and a Booklist starred review.  Padian’s latest book, How to Build a Heart focuses on the death of a parent as well as homelessness, was a Kirkus Reviews Best Young Adult book of 2020.
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Regarding Padian’s desire to write for young people, she states, “I think young people care very much about serious issues. The trick, as an author, is to create relatable teen characters and to write about these issues in age-appropriate ways without condescending to the reader.”  Through her careful attention to the nuances of sexual assault reporting and the ways teens grieve, Padian’s believable character are sure to impact the young people who read her books.


Register for the UNLV YA Summit today to learn from, and interact with, Maria Padian!
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Lessons Learned From Teaching My First High School Young Adult Literature Course by Tara Anderson Gold

5/12/2021

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Our contributor this week is Tara Anderson Gold. Tara is a  type of contributor that we love to have and, frankly, we don't host as frequently as we should--a practicing school Media Coordinator. I have worked with Tara on a couple of projects. She has written chapters in books  that I have edited or contributed. In fact, she will have a chapter in a book due out this summer. I love what she has to say about YA classes in a high school setting. Keep watching for Tara's work. 

Lessons Learned From Teaching My First High School Young Adult Literature Course

This school year, despite the uncertainty and challenges of the pandemic, I was excited to engage in my own challenge -- teaching a young adult adult literature course through the high school library program. Officially titled “Trends and Movements in Young Adult Literature,” my English elective course was taught one block a day for students across all grade levels in the school. My students have had a blast in this class even though I have yet to meet many of them in person, so I thought I would share some reflections on things I learned from my first foray into teaching YA lit with actual YAs. ​

Our Why

Before I even get into the nitty gritty of our course, I want to explain a little about why I wanted to teach this course. After all, I am a librarian who already has a lot on her plate -- why would I be teaching an English elective? The short answer is that I love young adult literature and I wanted to experiment with new ways to connect students to great books. As other librarians may understand, getting students into the library to read for pleasure can be a challenge at the high school level. In brainstorming ways to do this, I asked our media assistant students what holds them back from reading more. Most reported that homework, jobs, and extracurricular activities leave them with little time to curl up with a book for fun. When my co-librarian and I learned that our school had a YA Lit course in the course catalog with no one to teach it, we jumped at the opportunity to try something new. ​
Our vision for this course was to design it to serve as a gateway to the library. We would read, explore different types of books, complete a research project, and have the students participate in authentic projects around the media center. Ideally, we wanted these students to come back as members of our school book club or as student media assistants in future years. Spoiler alert: many of our students from this year have already expressed interest in both!

I would say that our class was, overall, a huge success despite being taught 100% virtually using a combination of Canvas and Google Meets. While it absolutely was not perfect, I learned a lot and my students did as well!

Lesson One: Setting Goals for Reading

Our course design was heavily influenced by the work of Donalyn Miller, as her book The Book Whisperer inspired my teaching practices many years ago when I was in the English classroom. With the whole library as our classroom, we had three main priorities: student choice, a text-rich environment, and time to read in class. To this end, each student set a series of goals for themself at the start of the semester to guide their individual reading. First, they created 3-5 personal reading goals. These could be anything related to reading. Some examples from this year included:
  • ​“I want to read five books recommended to me by my mom.”
  • “I want to use a bullet journal to track my reading.”
  • “I want to read for 30 minutes every night before bed.”
  • “I want to find a book I love in a genre I hate.”
Each goal was unique to the student and based on their unique priorities for why they wanted to read and why they were taking the class. Students also spent some time researching and listening to book talks to create a TBR (To Be Read) list of 5-10 books they were interested in reading. The goals served as the backbone for our class.

Throughout the semester, students reflected on their progress and participated in 1-on-1 conferences with me to discuss their goals, modify them, delete them, or create new ones based on their progress. Critically, grades in the course are not defined by whether or not the student completes their goal, but rather on their reflection and discussion about the process. I also used this time to ask questions about the books they completed and recommend new books based on their responses.
At the end of the semester, students shared short presentations on any and all aspects of their reading journey with the class that they wanted to share. These presentations were the highlight of the semester for me! Some shared top ten lists of books they’d read, some shared their progress with their individual reading goals, and one student shared an excerpt from the novel she’d written during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month in November). Of my seventeen students, thirteen reported that setting goals for their reading motivated them to read in the ways they wanted to read, even if they did not reach every goal. Many of the students shared goals for the next semester in their presentations as well. 

I learned a lot from these goal setting conversations with students. In particular, it was so helpful for getting to know my students as readers and how to challenge them individually. These conversations were also so important while teaching and learning during the pandemic when students were struggling with their “new normal.” Goal setting and conferences were an exceptionally valuable part of our course and in building a community in our classroom.

Lesson Two: Audiobooks are Awesome

I have always been a huge audiobook fan, but I’ve found mixed reviews from students when I try to encourage them to try one. One of the challenges I gave my students this semester was to try reading a book in each of three formats: print, ebook, and audiobook. We relied heavily on the public library’s offerings for digital resources and all of my students tried at least one audiobook early on in the semester. To my surprise, they loved them! One student in particular, who was struggling with mental health, reported that she couldn’t concentrate enough to read in print but that audiobooks allowed her to listen while she went about her daily routine at home. Others were able to read more because they could listen while they drove or went on runs. Reading is reading no matter the format and I was so thrilled to be able to help these students find new ways of reading that worked for them. ​

Lesson Three: The Outsiders is Still a Hit

We read three books together as a class in my course as examples of the different eras in young adult literature. The Outsiders is the first book we read as an example of the first/early young adult books that define the category. Even though my students read so many of the latest and greatest YA novels, The Outsiders was still a stand-out novel for many of them in their final presentations and evaluations of the course. This shouldn’t come as a surprise because the book is still widely popular over fifty years since its publication, but it was clear that Ponyboy still resonates with Generation Z
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One of the things I really wanted to do with this class was surround students with books and book recommendations so they would never be lacking in books to fill their TBR lists. The pandemic made this challenging! One ritual of our class that worked well was starting every Monday with a collaborative Google Slide deck called “It’s Monday. What are you reading?” Each student would claim a slide and insert images and text about what they were reading that week. Then we would all share our current reads. 

These sharing sessions became the highlight of my week because I could physically see students being inspired to read things based on their peers’ recommendations. For example, one week a student shared that she finished The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo and wanted to continue reading books by her, so she picked up Clap When You Land. Next thing I knew I had three hold requests for Clap When You Land in my computer system and half the class added the book to their official TBR lists.
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Elizabeth Acevedo
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Other books that spread like wildfire included A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz, and Stamped by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. While I love to recommend books to students (and they read many of my recommendations!), the idea of a community of readers coming together to recommend books to each other was a delight to see in action. With the wide variety of reading tastes in the class we were all able to discover new books for our TBR lists!
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Lesson Five: I Need To Read More Manga

This lesson is super personal to my own reading practices, but I am sure other folks in education can relate. I need to read more Manga! I am totally in my wheelhouse when it comes to recommending great YA fiction and nonfiction, but I was at a loss when it came to helping my Manga readers find new and interesting graphic novels to read. 

Luckily lesson four above applied to these readers and they did a great job of recommending books to each other. I also certainly took note of books and series they were reading that piqued my interest. But it was very clear that I have a huge Manga-shaped hole in my own reading practices that cannot be ignored! Just as my students set reading goals for themselves, I, too, created my own list. “Read the first book in three different Manga series” is my first goal for the coming summer break.

Final Thoughts

Starting this class in the middle of virtual learning in a pandemic certainly was not ideal in many ways. Students didn’t get to interact with each other much in small groups or face-to-face. They didn’t get to explore the library shelves or curl up on a comfy library chair to read for the first thirty minutes of class like I envisioned when I pitched the class. But I had a blast getting to teach a class every day that simply focused on the love of young adult literature. More importantly, my students and I built a community of readers where we all read more because of our time together in the class. I have a to-do list spanning multiple pages of edits and tweeks I want to make to the course moving forward but overall it has been the highlight of teaching in challenging times. ​
Bio: Dr. Tara Anderson Gold is a media coordinator at Millbrook High School in Raleigh, North Carolina. Prior to becoming a media coordinator she taught middle school English. Her research focuses on young adult literature and adolescent literacy practices in digital social media spaces such as BookTube. Additionally, she explores how understanding these digital practices can better inform both classroom instruction and library programming. ​
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Until next week.

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The 2021 UNLV online Summit and Sharon G. Flake

5/5/2021

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I'm a live link!

2021 UNLV online Summit Promo 

An Interview with Sharon G. Flake Part 1

An Interview with Sharon G. Flake Part 2

The UNLV Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature is pleased to feature Sharon G. Flake.
 
Sharon G. Flake writes about African-American youth, illuminating experiences of teenagers and youth of color resolving to have their voices heard. She is a three-time Coretta Scott King Award winner! Flake has received praise for her work’s honest portrayals of complex issues and themes in Money Hungry (2001), Pinned (2012), Bang! (2005), and the short story collections Who Am I Without Him? (2004) and You Don’t Even Know Me: Stories and Poems about Boys (2010).  Her best-selling, Coretta Scott King Award-winning novel The Skin I’m (1998) in was influential in shifting the landscape of young adult literature when it was published over 20 years ago.

A big bonus for getting the new edition of the The Skin I'm In reading the wonderful forward written by Jason Reynolds.​
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Her newest novel is the powerful and long-awaited companion to The Skin I’m In (also in Italian!), The Life I’m In (2021),  offering readers an unflinching story of Char, a young woman trapped in the underworld of human trafficking. The intensity of the story asks readers to bear witness to the oppressive systems and people who take advantage of vulnerable youth and the possibility of healing from trauma.
Until next time.
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    Dr. Gretchen Rumohr
    Chief Curator
    Gretchen Rumohr is a professor of English and department chair 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.

    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.

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