​Shakespeare remains one of the most commonly taught authors in secondary English curricula. I was often impressed and sometimes surprised by my high school students’ responses to reading Shakespeare. When I taught Othello, one student was so indignant he said in exasperation, “Othello and Desdamona die? Man, I was waiting for someone to bust a cap in Iago so Othello and Desdamona could live happily ever after.” To be honest, I couldn’t entirely disagree with my student’s assessment. Desdamona especially deserves so much better than being murdered because of Iago’s lies. While I have yet to find a version of Othello where Desdamona lives, many YA authors have adapted Shakespeare’s stories into novels and short stories, making their own changes to the Shakespearean text.
 
Why and how have YA retold Shakespeare in new time periods and settings? Hutchinson (2012) argues that the appeal of adaptations comes from their combination of familiarity thanks to what readers know about the source material and surprise of what’s changed, removed, or added. YA adaptations often seek to critique Shakespeare’s plays by reframing these stories for today’s readers (Barber & Esther, 2011), and the more interesting retellings may be the ones that diverge the most from the source material, resisting traditional takes on canonical stories (Miskec, 2013).
 
Isaac (2000) notes that authors have adapted Shakespeare for younger readers since the early 19th century and encourages educators and students to critically analyze the changes contemporary authors make in their adaptations. Two issues that Issac suggests students consider as they read adaptations of Shakespeare: How is the story changed by eliminating characters and plot lines? How is the story impacted by turning a work of drama into a novel? It’s important for students to examine changes in both plot and form.

I don’t think Shakespeare would object to today’s YA adaptations of his plays. After all, he adapted Greek and Roman myths, stories from Chaucer, and English history, so it makes sense that writers today are adapting Shakespeare’s plays into novels, short stories, and films. Check out three recent YA adaptations of Shakespeare and see how these authors give us new takes on Shakespeare’s characters, plot lines, and themes.

References
Barber, S., & Esther, H. (2011). Supplementing Shakespeare: Why young adult novelizations belong in the classroom. ALAN Review, 38(3), 52-59.

Hutchinson, L. (2012). A theory of adaptation. Routledge.

Issac, M. L. (2000). Heirs to shakespeare: Reinventing the bard in young adult literature. Heinemann.
​
Miskec, J. M. (2013). Young adult literary adaptations of the canon. ALAN Review, 48(3), 75-85.

​As the climate crisis has intensified, we’ve increasingly felt its effects in our daily lives. Hotter temperatures. More severe storms. Increased drought. Most of us in North America found ourselves breathing in the effects of global warming in the summer of 2023, as we were immersed in waves of smoke from Canadian wildfires, which consumed more than 9.8 million acres of forest (Bilefsky, 2023). The NOAA’s annual report (Assessing the Global Climate in 2023, 2024) ranked 2023 as the warmest year since 1850 when global temperatures were first recorded, and the top ten warmest years in the entire record were—you guessed it—the last ten years. We could go on, but the upshot is this: The global climate emergency has led to no small amount of doom scrolling.
 
But this is where, as lovers of literature, we can pause. We know, because we’ve seen it time and again, that the story is not over until the last page. That’s one theme of Elizabeth Kolbert’s (2024) new book, H is for Hope: Climate Change from A to Z, a collection of 26 short essays, one for each letter of the alphabet. In the chapter for D, Kolbert addresses despair, putting it plainly: “Despair is unproductive. It’s also a sin” (p. 31). Given Kolbert is the Pulitzer-prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, and thus knows a thing or two about the darkest prospects of the climate crisis, we can imagine this rejection of despair as coming from a place of wisdom.  

And that is perhaps the most hopeful thing about the rise of YA nonfiction on climate. It is a publishing trend driven by youth activism.
 
As youth activists have challenged oil and gas powerhouses on the world stage, demand for climate-related books on the children’s and young adult market has skyrocketed. “The Greta Effect,” as reported by The Guardian (Ferguson, 2021), is real. Described by Rachel Kellehar, head of nonfiction at Nosy Crow, the Greta Effect means, “She [Swedish youth activist Greta Thumberg] has galvanised the appetite of young people for change, and that has galvanised our appetite, as publishers, for stories that empower our readers to make those changes” (para. 6). While Greta Thumberg tends to be a household name in the discussion about youth activism, even a “messianic-like face for the climate movement” (Muhammad, 2019, para. 2), young people of color have always been on the frontlines in the fight against global warming, powerfully foregrounding the role of colonialism, imperialism, and racism in climate disasters around the world (Janfaza, 2020). YA publishing is paying attention.

​Confession #1: We love this. It’s amazing. We are cheerleaders for this YA publishing trend.
 
Confession #2: YA publishing trends give us pause.
 
Here’s some context. I (Mark) have been interested in YA nonfiction for some time. And that interest is predicated on the idea that nonfiction is not a monolithic category, but an “aesthetic object” (Kiefer & Wilson, 2011, p. 294) full of authorial decisions about how best to tell the story of a topic, event, or person (Colman, 2007). With those ideas in mind, a certain type of YA nonfiction is particularly interesting: youth adaptations. So that includes anything with “young reader’s edition” or “adapted for young adults” or something similar on the cover. Youth adaptations are essentially a version of another book that is revised, repackaged, and rebranded as YA literature. Why are youth adaptations interesting? If we look at youth adaptations, we can better understand how the YA publishing industry—the imprints, editors, authors, ghostwriters, and artists—produce content specifically for young people. I’ve written about youth adaptations in the past, and here are a couple of things I’ve learned: 

​1. Youth adaptations go beyond just making the language more accessible, although that’s part of what they do.
 
2. Youth adaptations are not all the same. They’re made in all sorts of ways. Some are written by the original author(s). Some are ghostwritten. Some have distinctly different emphases and themes. Some rearrange content. Some sanitize content. Some omit topics that might be perceived as controversial. Some take on an authoritarian tone, directly telling youth readers what meaning they should make of a person, action, event, or topic. And on the other side, some youth adaptations invite youth into complex conversations about complex topics, closely approximating their original versions. The variation in youth adaptations is extremely wide, and it’s hard to discern the nature of the adaptation without fully reading it. But generally, through youth adaptations, the YA publishing industry “talks to” young people differently and, oftentimes, in not-so-generous ways. (If you would like more thoughts on this, I’ve provided some references below to articles about youth adaptations of nonfiction texts.)   

​When it comes to youth adaptations of books on climate, we’re mindful that notions about what is deemed appropriate for youth are often based on stereotypes about who youth are as readers and thinkers in the world (Lesko, 2012). Therefore, when thinking about youth adaptations of nonfiction books on climate, we had this question:
 
How do youth adaptations of climate-related nonfiction books differ from the original versions of those books?
 
To explore this question, we did some reading. Here are four sets of books, each book originally published on the general nonfiction market and then revised and republished as a youth adaptation on the YA nonfiction market:

​So, a throwback to Confession #1, we love this trend. These books provide such compelling pathways into understanding our climate. Across these books, we have beautiful writing about climate science, frameworks for thinking about the health of our planet in terms of what we wear and what we eat, and engagement with the most pertinent social, cultural, historical, political, and critical questions related to our collective future.
 
But, a throwback to Confession #2, while we’re still working on a more in-depth analysis, we did notice something: 

​The youth adaptations tend to prioritize content about individual action over policy action. That is, the adaptations tend to feature content about what you individually can do right now, such as recycling, making a garden, eating less meat, and avoiding fast fashion. These actions are super important, absolutely. Everything counts in the fight to save the planet. However, this change in emphasis tends to leave less space, proportionally, for content about what climate-friendly policies look like, the role of government in the fight against global warming, and the levers that citizens might wield if they band together in concerted efforts to control the behavior of elected officials and corporate entities.
 
Let’s walk that observation back for a moment. The youth adaptations of the set of books we examined, while they do emphasize individual action to reduce carbon emissions, often also put those individual actions in the context of larger forces in play. That, in our estimation, is great!
 
We agree with Beach’s (2023) view that climate education should go beyond an emphasis on individual, solo acts of conservation to critical inquiry about the objects, outcomes, roles, tools, rules, norms, beliefs, and discourses that shape our relationship to the environment and our agency in saving it. In short, climate education should involve systems thinking. 

​These books set the stage for that type of thinking. And yes, while we did notice a shift in the youth adaptations to a greater emphasis on individual actions youth readers can take, it’s not like systems thinking went out the window. In particular, the youth adaptation of Hope Jahren’s (2022) The Story of More very closely aligns with the original version, beautifully demonstrating how our individual decisions and values matter in the larger systems in play and vice versa. We Are the Weather Makers (2009), the youth adaptation of Tim Flannery’s book, has similar connections, although many of the added “Call to Action” chapters could be more explicit about those connections. The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2015) and Fashionopolis (2024) are less explicit still, offering specific advice to youth readers in terms of individual decisions in the final pages (e.g., “Eat real food,” “Buy real food,” “Eat real meals,” in The Ominvore’s Dilemma and “Launder your clothes less frequently,” “Skip the plastic bags,” “Repair and re-wear” in Fashionopolis). The risk here would be that individual actions become the main takeaway from these books and systems thinking is left at a distance, something to get to if we happen to have time, or maybe when the youth reader grows up.
 
On the one hand, of course,  it’s essential to implicate ourselves in the fight against global warming and make personal decisions in alignment with our values. On the other hand, we can’t downplay the role of the machinery behind the curtain, which pollutes at many, many, many orders of magnitude greater than any individual and in fact sets the parameters through which individuals make decisions in the first place. Hope Jahren makes this point in both the original and youth adapted versions of The Story of More (2020, 2022), observing individual choices to go green can be somewhat of an illusion when considering the larger system in play. Example: electric vehicles. If the energy grid is largely driven by fossil fuels, then “an electric vehicle emits its smog on the other side of town” (original, p. 123; adaptation, p. 116). Not only does this turn of phrase invite systems thinking into the conversation, it also demonstrates—because examples such as these are in original and youth adapted books on climate, especially The Story of More—that youth adaptations provide opportunities to read, think, and teach in that direction.  

The caveat is that across the original and youth adapted texts we’re reviewing here, a systems thinking approach is taken up in the original versions at length, and while that content tends to be still present in the youth adaptations to varying degrees, the overall vibe of youth adapted books is more about what you, as an individual, can do to curb your personal carbon emissions. This vibe is eerily similar to the “carbon footprint” discourse, a set of ideas pushed by the fossil fuel industry to shape public thinking about global warming (“How Big Oil Helped Push the Idea of a ‘carbon Footprint,’” 2023). The idea was that if people think about global warming in terms of their personal carbon footprint, then they’ll tend to conceptualize global warming as a matter of individual responsibility rather than the result of harmful energy systems running under the auspices of government support and corporate greed.

Suffice it to say, there is a certain irony if youth adaptations prioritize individual actions over systems thinking. The response of the YA publishing industry toward climate-related nonfiction is itself an artifact of youth activism, which is based in systems thinking through and through.
 
What does this mean? The youth adaptations we examined are still wonderful, complex texts. But we do think—from a conceptual standpoint, from a teaching standpoint, and from a standpoint of readers ourselves—we should be asking questions about nonfiction youth adaptations centered on climate change: 

If a youth adaptation seems a little light on systems thinking, that doesn’t imply we should forget about it. From our perspective, it simply means we should supplement the book with additional resources that encourage systems thinking. YA nonfiction books on climate already include systems thinking to some degree and are an invaluable resource for young readers—and everyone else—to learn about the climate and imagine better futures.
 
To that end, we’ll conclude this post with some resources we think set the conditions for systems thinking and could pair well with climate-related YA books. These resources, we believe, can highlight the systems thinking that is already present in these books, allowing us to set our imaginations beyond what we can do individually (still important!) to what we will need to do collectively. These resources involve questions, frameworks, simulations, facts, concepts, and teaching practices that put the content of the book into conversation with, as Beach, Share, and Webb (2017) put it, “the social, historical, ethical, and human realities that are critical to the problem” (p. 7).
 
We offer these resources as a window into our thinking, but at the same time, we know there are lots of great resources out there. We’d love to hear from you in the comments about what resources you find helpful – let’s keep the conversation going!

Batch, B., & Sulzer, M. A. (2023). Additional teaching resources for a unit on Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TcxHbqf4UKA5KBSD5bDu4B1eC7igPhW9/edit
 
This document compiles a list of supplemental resources to be used in a unit based on Fashionopolis by Dana Thomas and includes various classroom activities, suggestions for a unit side quest (in which students would do individual exploration on a person, event, topic, or issue that interests them), additional readings on fast fashion and climate change, and videos on fast fashion and sustainable fashion. 
 
En-ROADS climate scenario. (n.d.). https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/scenario.html?v=24.5.0&p47=1.8
 
This interactive scenario allows users to adjust various factors, such as energy supply and transport, to see how these levels influence greenhouse gas net emissions and temperature increases.
 
Food Systems Dashboard. (n.d.). https://www.foodsystemsdashboard.org/
This dashboard allows users to explore how food systems work by adjusting various factors such as food system drivers and food environments, among others. The site also links to the food system profiles of specific countries as well as food-related policies and actions. 
 
Sea level rise and coastal flooding impacts. (n.d.). Sea Level Rise Viewer. https://coast.noaa.gov/slr/
This sea level rise viewer allows users to manipulate variables and see how these actions affect sea levels.
 
Toronto Outdoor Education Schools TDSB. (2020, April 23). Fast fashion & Sustainability. ArcGIS StoryMaps. https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/66ea7714178741b4aecbf53b44fb8710
 
This interactive site invites users to explore fast fashion and sustainability through thought-provoking questions, videos, maps, a real-time survey, activities, calls to action, and more. 

​References
 
Assessing the global climate in 2023. (2024, March 25). National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-202312
Beach, R. (2023). Literacy research, systems thinking, and climate change. Research in the Teaching of English, 58(1), 105-122.
Beach, R., Share, J., & Webb, A. (2017). Teaching climate change to adolescents: Reading, writing, and making a difference. Routledge and the National Council of Teachers of English.
Bilefsky, D. (2023, June 28). What to Know About Canadian Wildfires and U.S. Air Quality. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/world/canada/canada-wildfires-smoke-us-air-quality.html
Castaldo, N. F. (2022). When the world runs dry: Earth’s water in crisis. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Young Readers.
Colman, P. (2007). A new way to look at literature: A visual model for analyzing fiction and nonfiction texts. Language Arts, 84(3), 257-268.
Ferguson, D. (2021, August 25). ‘Greta effect’ leads to boom in children’s environmental books. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/11/greta-thunberg-leads-to-boom-in-books-aimed-at-empowering-children-to-save-planet
Fleischer, J. (2021). A hot mess: How the climate crisis is changing our world. Minneapolis, MN: Zest Books.
How Big Oil helped push the idea of a “carbon footprint.” (2023, December 19). NPR Illinois. https://www.nprillinois.org/2023-12-18/how-big-oil-helped-push-the-idea-of-a-carbon-footprint
Janfaza, R. (2020, January 3). 9 Climate activists of color you should know. Teen Vogue. https://www.teenvogue.com/story/youth-climate-activists-of-color
Kiefer, B., & Wilson, M. I. (2011). Nonfiction literature for children: Old assumptions and new directions. In S. A. Wolf, K. Coats, P. Enciso, & C. A. Jenkins (Eds.), Handbook of research on children’s and young adult literature (pp. 302-313). New York, NY: Routledge.
Kolbert, E. (2014). The sixth extinction: An unnatural history. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co.
Kolbert, E. (2024). H is for hope: Climate change from A to Z. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed Press.
Lesko, N. (2012). Act your age!: A cultural construction of adolescence. New York, NY: Routledge.
Martinez, X., & Lukashevsky, A. (2020). Imaginary borders. New York, NY: Penguin Workshop.
Muhammad, N. I. (2019, October 11). The young activists of color who are leading the climate charge. Vox. https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/10/11/20904791/young-climate-activists-of-color
Nakate, V. (2021). A bigger picture: My fight to bring a new African voice to the climate crisis. Boston, MA: Mariner Books.
Rao, A. S. (2020). One earth: People of color protecting our planet. Ferndale, WA: Orca Book Publishers.
Ridge, Y., & Thebeault, D. (2023). Evolution under pressure: How we change nature and how nature changes us. Toronto, CA: Annick Press.
Rusch, E. (2023). The twenty-one: The true story of the youth who sued the U.S. government over climate change. New York, NY: Greenwillow Books.

​References about Youth Adaptations of Nonfiction Texts
 
Sulzer, M. A. (2020). Border crossing from literature to young adult literature: A critical comparative content analysis of Enrique’s Journey (original version) and Enrique’s Journey (adapted for youth). The ALAN Review, 47(2), 12-24.
Sulzer, M. A., Colley, L. M., Hellmann, M. C., & Lynch, T. L. (2021). Doctors, drugs, and danger: Disentangling discourses of adolescence/ts in Dreamland (original version) and Dreamland (young adult adaptation) with critical comparative content analysis. Study and Scrutiny: Research on Young Adult Literature 5(1), 1-39.
Sulzer, M. A., Thein, A. H., & Schmidt, R. R. (2018). What is adapted in youth adaptations?: A critical comparative content analysis of military memoirs repackaged as young adult literature. Journal of Language & Literacy Education, 14(1), 1-27.
Thein, A. H., Sulzer, M. A., & Schmidt, R. R. (2013). Evaluating the democratic merit of young adult literature: Lessons from two versions of Wes Moore’s Memoir. English Journal, 103(2), 57–64. 
Thein, A. H., Sulzer, M. A., & Schmidt, R. R. (2019). Critical comparative content analysis: Examining race, politics, and violence in two versions of I am Malala. In Ginsberg, R., & Glenn, W. (Eds.), Engaging critically with multicultural literature in the secondary classroom (pp. 153-161). New York, NY: Routledge.

​Original and Youth Adapted Books on Climate
 
Flannery, T. (2001). The weather makers: How man is changing the climate and what it means for life on Earth. New York, NY: Grove Press.
Flannery, T. (adapted by Sally M. Walker) (2009). We are the weather makers: The history of climate change. Somerville, MA: Candlewick. 
Jahren, H. (2020). The story of more: How we got to climate change and where to go from here. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Jahren, H. (2022). The story of more (adapted for young adults): How we got to climate change and where to go from here. New York, NY: Delecorte Press.
Pollan, M. (2006). The omnivore's dilemma: A natural history of four meals. New York, NY: Penguin.
Pollan, M. (adapted by Richie Chevat). (2015). The omnivore’s dilemma: Young readers edition. New York, NY: Rocky Pond Books.
Thomas, D. (2020). Fashionopolis: Why what we wear matters. New York, NY: Penguin.
Thomas, D. (2024). Fashionopolis (young readers edition): The secrets behind the clothes we wear. New York, NY: Dial Books for Young Readers.

We have a first time contributor this week. Morgan Shiver is a PhD Student at Western Michigan University. While she is a new contributor to the blog, we certainly have many friends who have ties to Western Michigan University including Gretchen Rumohr our Co-Curator. Morgan is in good hands with our colleagues at WMU. It is great to have this wonderful contribution. Keep up the good work Morgan. We are already looking forward to you next post.

​Over the past academic year, I taught two sections of ENGL 3840: Adolescent Literature at Western Michigan University. ENGL 3840 provides an overview of the YA genre and its conventions, and the students in the course are nearly all English majors and minors, with many planning to become teachers at the secondary level. I chose to focus the course on YA/adolescent books and their film adaptations, so we read How to Train Your Dragon, Simon vs. The Homosapiens Agenda, The Hate U Give, and The Hunger Games and watched all of their film adaptations. 

The correlation between student choice and engagement/motivation in the literature classroom is no secret. Linda Gambrell, former president of the International Literacy Association, establishes “Students Are More Motivated to Read When They Have Opportunities to Make Choices About What They Read” as one of her “Seven Rules of Engagement” for students (2011, p.175). Educators Guthrie, Klauda, and Ho identify “providing students with opportunities for choice” as a type of “motivation support” in classrooms (2013, p.10).
​
So, as I developed my ENGL 3840 course, I wanted to incorporate student choice in a meaningful way — this led me to develop a book proposal project, outlined below. The project asks students to select a YA book/film adaptation combo that they’d like to add to our class curriculum and then develop a digital flyer to propose the book/film to the class. As a class, we voted on our top choice, and then we read the winning book and watched its film adaptation at the end of the semester. 

​My students were allowed to pick any book/film adaptation combo for their proposal flyers, as long as they met the following criteria:

I also encouraged them to consider accessibility/availability as they made their selections; a movie that premiered a month ago probably won’t be available for us to rent or buy online, for example.
 
After they’d made their book/film selections, they were tasked with conducting research and creating a proposal (in the form of a 2-3 page digital flyer) that advocated for their book/film to be added to our course curriculum. I recommend Canva as a resource for creating digital flyers.
 
I asked students to include the following in their proposal flyers: 

​Once the proposals were completed, the students uploaded them to a discussion board on eLearning (WMU’s learning management system). As a class, we took the time to review and discuss the proposals, and then it was up to my students to vote for their top choice! 

While this project is fun and acts as a more creative alternative to a traditional research paper or book report, I wanted to ensure that it still functioned as a serious learning opportunity for my students. The two elements of the project that most directly challenge students’ critical thinking are the defense of why they’ve selected the book/film and the selection of two articles that could be used in conversation with their selected texts. By asking students to articulate why their book/film would be a good addition to the class, the project prompts them to think about how their selected texts engage with or add to some of the major concepts of the course. The article component of the proposal refreshes students’ research skills and asks them to consider how their selected articles could enhance our class discussions. I believe these aspects of the project could be adapted to suit various curriculums at different academic levels.
​
The engagement this project evoked from my students was evident from the start. As soon as I introduced the project, I had students approaching me after class to discuss their possible book/film choices. During the voting process, there were passionate campaigns (I remember one student declaring that the baseball scene in Twilight is “peak cinema”). It’s this enjoyment and excitement that — I believe — allows students to grapple with the more academically rigorous tasks in the project process. 

Now, one of the major hurdles of this project is not letting it turn into a book popularity contest or a 25-way tie. I combatted these issues by not allowing my students to vote on their own proposals. Before they voted, we also took time in class to review everyone’s flyers. While reviewing them, I asked students to shout out proposals they thought were especially compelling or interesting; this prompted everyone to actually read the flyers and consider the proposed texts’ value to our classwork. I used Google Forms to facilitate the voting process.

The book proposal project also proved to be a valuable learning opportunity for me as a teacher. Many of my students’ proposals identified gaps in the existing curriculum as they advocated for their book/film choice — texts that featured issues involving gender and mental health or that engaged with different genres like horror or nonfiction were frequent suggestions, as the four books I selected for the course did not explicitly feature those themes or genres. In the fall semester, my students voted to read/watch Nimona, and in the Spring, my class chose to work with Coraline. I don’t think I would have selected either of these texts if I’d just picked the final book/film on my own. 

Below are links to some example flyers from my students. Again, this is a project that could be adapted to work for a wide range of academic levels.
Example 1
Example 2

Albertalli, B. (2015). Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda. HarperCollins.
Collins, S. (2014). The Hunger Games. Scholastic.
Cowell, C. (2010). How to Train Your Dragon. Hodder Children's Books.
Gaiman, N. (2013). Coraline. Bloomsbury.
Gambrell, L. B. (2011). Seven Rules of Engagement: What's Most Important to Know About Motivation to Read. The Reading Teacher, 65(3), 172–178. doi.org/10.1002/TRTR.01024
Guthrie, J. T., Klauda, S. L., & Ho, A. N. (2013). Modeling the Relationships Among Reading Instruction, Motivation, Engagement, and Achievement for Adolescents Reading Research Quarterly, 48(1), 9–26. doi.org/10.1002/rrq.035
Stevenson, N. D. (2015). Nimona. HarperCollins.
Thomas, A. (2017). The Hate U Give. HarperCollins.

I am excited about this new book by Alan, Luke, and Mark. They have worked together on various projects over the years and they don't disappoint. Indeed, they are some of the people I love running into at NCTE. Their new book builds on their understanding and exploration of sports and Young Adult Literature. 

I love offering the space to share what they are doing. Their introduction below is fantastic. I saw that they cover some of my favorite YA sports novels and introduce me to a few that are now on my "To Be Read List."  I hope take a minute to read the post.

​In his article, O’Brien (2024) describes the rise of the “hot take” culture in sports as well as the decline of objective and impartial sports journalism at local, regional, and national publications across the country. He notes, “This is not just a problem for sports fans; it’s a problem for all of us. You may not care about sports, but sports cares about you. Its fingerprints are everywhere in American life: on entertainment, culture, politics, business.” As teacher-scholars who have been studying the impact of sports culture on young people for years, we (Alan, Luke, and Mark) would add education to that list because schools and communities are often influenced by sports. If our jobs as English teachers and teacher educators are, at least in part, to teach students to ask probing questions about relevant social topics, then sports-related content is worthy of inclusion in the English language arts curriculum.

Students can also learn to ask questions about the impact of sports culture on their day-to-day lives, not to mention how their experiences do, and do not, reflect the lived experiences of others. YAL can be an important tool given the genre’s wide range of stories about young athletes relevant to three particular NCTE/IRA standards for the English language arts: (1) reading a wide range of fiction and nonfiction, print and nonprint texts across various cultures; (2) engaging a wide range of literature that examines the human experience; (3) and conducting research that questions and synthesizes different data sources.

The book opens with a foreword from journalist and Sports Emmy Award-winner Kavitha A. Davidson, and each chapter features a “Voices from the Field'' section, with educators from across the nation sharing thoughts about teaching with sports and YAL to facilitate the study of pressing sociopolitical issues. Each core chapter focuses on an individual work of YAL that can support the exploration of a particular sociopolitical issue. These books include the following:

​Whether or not you have ever considered teaching literature through sports, or frankly whether or not you even like sports, we believe there is something in this book for every English language arts teacher. Back in September 2014, Brown and Crowe wrote the following in the introduction to their guest edited issue of English Journal (“A Whole New Ballgame: Sports and Culture in the English Classroom”).

​A decade later, this sentiment still rings true, perhaps more than ever, and is worthy of deliberation by journalists, editors, teachers, and students alike.

References
 
Brown, A., & Crowe, C. (Eds.). (2014). From the guest editors. English Journal, 104(1), 11-12.
Brown, A., & Rodesiler, L. (Eds.). (2016). Developing contemporary literacies through sports: A guide for the English classroom. National Council of Teachers of English.
Lipsyte, R. (2016). Foreword: Sports culture. In A. Brown & L. Rodesiler (Eds.), Developing contemporary literacies through sports: A guide for the English classroom (pp. xv-xvii). National Council of Teachers of English.
National Council of Teachers of English / International Reading Association. (2012). Standards for the English Language Arts. https://ncte.org/resources/standards/ncte-ira-standards-for-the-english-language-arts/
O’Brien, K. (2024, February 6). You’ll miss sports journalism when it’s gone. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/sports-illustrated-journalism-pete-rose/677351/
Rodesiler, L., Lewis, M. A., & Brown, A. (2024). Reading the world through sports and young adult literature: Resources for the English classroom. National Council of Teachers of English.

​Young Adult Literature
 
Aceves, F. (2020). The new David Espinoza. HarperTeen.
Farizan, S. (2018). Here to stay. Algonquin.
Johnston, E. K. (2016). Exit, pursued by a bear. Dutton.
Kleist, R. (2014). The boxer: The true story of holocaust survivor Harry Haft. SelfMadeHero.
Lynch, C. (2015). Hit count. Algonquin.
McGinnis, M. (2019). Heroine. Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins.
Reynolds, J., & Kiely, B. (2015). All American boys. Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum.
Van Draanen, W. (2011). The running dream. Alfred A. Knopf.
Walden, T. (2017). Spinning. First Second.
White, E. E. (2017). A season of daring greatly. Greenwillow.

This week we have a mother daughter duo writing about a difficult issue. We appreciate their frankness and their willingness to share. Please welcome these new contributors -Kirby Larson and Quinn Wyatt.

​KIRBY LARSON is the acclaimed author of many books for young people, including the 2007 Newbery Honor Book Hattie Big Sky; Dash, winner of the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction; Duke; Liberty; Code Word Courage; Audacity Jones to the Rescue, and Audacity Jones Steals the Show, and the new Shermy and Shake chapter book series, to name a few.
 
QUINN WYATT has lived with Crohn’s for most of her life and is encouraged by all the progress that has been made over the years in the treatment of inflammatory bowel diseases. This is her first book. A mother-daughter writing team, both Quinn and Kirby live in Kenmore, Washington.

​Why would anyone write a book about a kid living with Crohn’s, an incurable chronic disease with super embarrassing symptoms?
 
Quinn: Because slightly over 1 million people in the US live with Crohn’s disease. And, out of those million people, about 80,000 are kids. Kids like Tess Medina, the main character in GUT REACTION. Kids like me.
 
I grew up with a writer for a mom, so it seemed like a no-brainer to ask her to write a book about a kid living with Crohn’s because I thought it would be helpful. I was pretty surprised when she turned me down. Many, many times.
 
Kirby: In my defense, I knew that writing such a book would mean revisiting that tough time in our lives when Quinn was so, so sick and we could not figure out why. It was anguishing to be her mom and not be able to figure out what would make her feel better.
 
Quinn: But I kept asking because I really wanted to have a book out there that would help kids feel less alone coming to grips with the unpleasant and painful symptoms of illness and all of the changes a diagnosis often requires. And when I shared that with my mom, she said she’d do it. . .if we teamed up.
 
Kirby: We took ourselves on a retreat to create characters and build a plot. As a writer with over 20 books published, I certainly brought writing experience to the table. But Quinn had the most important role in this storytelling process: to bring her lived experiences to the page.

​Quinn: Even though my symptoms began long ago, it wasn’t hard to recall those times. Like Tess in GUT REACTION, I became an ace bathroom detective because I could be fine one minute and suffer a diarrhea attack the next. Like Tess, I had a hard time talking about my illness, even to my closest friends. That led to confusion when friends couldn’t understand why I left early from a sleepover, or why I always had to sit on the aisle at the movie or why I was sometimes just too tired to participate.
 
It gets very old being the different one. The one in the crowd who can’t drink the fancy coffees all her friends do. The one who has to weigh whether a night out at a party will be worth the exhaustion the next day. The one who has to ask in great detail about menu items at a restaurant or risk suffering a debilitating flare-up. It’s hard for others to understand what it means to take medications on a daily basis, dealing with the side effects that can come with them, or getting your blood drawn so frequently that you have to keep switching arms to avoid scarring. 
 
I was a shy kid and it took many years of managing a disease to teach me the importance of advocating for myself. Back in school, that meant explaining to a teacher why I couldn’t “take care of personal needs'' during the minutes-long passing period. Sometimes that meant calling my parents to come get me from a party (including my high school graduation party). Sometimes that meant standing up to doctors when they just couldn’t seem to hear what I was saying. When you have a chronic illness, learning how to say what you need is not just a nicety but a requirement for survival. 
 
Kirby: We have been blown away by emails and messages from people who are so grateful that this book is out there. One young woman, who’d been diagnosed at age 11, said she felt like everything had been taken away from her, especially her beloved gymnastics. She wrote, “After I left the hospital, it finally hit me. I had a disease. A disease that has no cure. I felt like I was the only one going through this. . so this book means everything to me.” We feel so honored to be able to offer a space where this young woman and others like her feel represented; feel less alone.
 
Quinn: My mom and I are so pleased that children's books are starting to normalize conversations about physical and mental health realities and issues. By writing a hopeful, honest, and sometimes humorous story of living with Crohn’s disease, it is our desire to add to that conversation. We want to support the Tesses of the world dealing with various hard-to-talk-about conditions by saying it’s okay to talk, even about the embarrassing stuff. Especially about the embarrassing stuff! And for those unaffected by physical or mental health challenges, we hope this story offers insights that may foster greater understanding, empathy, and kindness. 

Visit the Website: https://gutreactionbook.com/
Visit Kirby's Author's Website: https://kirbylarson.com/