For the second time, Crag Hill will be our guest contributor.  Crag is a great friend and we continue to work together on several projects when we get the chance. Currently, Crag and I, along with Leilya Pitre are the editors of the emerging young adult journal--Study and Scrutiny. If you haven't visited that website, please do. The first issue of the second volume is waiting for your approval.  

​Crag has done significant work as an editor of two books. The first book was The Critical Merits of Young Adult Literature. I was one of the reviewers of the book for the publisher and was thrilled to write the forward. The second book is released today! It represents Crag deep interest in teaching and studying Comics. The title is Teaching Comics Through Multiple Lenses. This week, Crag discusses an assignment he uses with his pre-service students in a YA course. If you would like to read Crag's first posting just click here. 

I would love to know of a research study that explores the attitudes pre-service teachers have about young adult (YA) literature before and after taking a YA literature course. Even more so, I would be interested in how these attitudes have shifted, if at all, in the last 15 years. Had I a research mindset when I was first enlisted to teach YA literature in 2000 at Washington State University, my research questions would have been: What attitudes do pre-service teachers have concerning YA literature? What experiences with YA literature have pre-service teachers had in class and out of class? Had I a research mindset then (if that was possible adjuncting this YA literature class on top of full-time high school teaching, starting a doctoral program, as well as being a father of two young children), I would have started collecting data for this kind of research study.

Below is the assignment, a reading autobiography, I have given at the start of my YA literature classes for over a dozen years (I do not have copies of syllabi for all the YA courses I have taught, so I cannot say when I first assigned this). I have not been fortunate to teach this course every semester, but over a two-year span I generally have taught it three times. Average class size has been approximately 25, so every year on average I taught 37.5 students. Over that dozen years, then, I have taught approximately 450 students. To have 450 reading autobiographies now would be a robust data set to analyze.

Alas. But I can summarize what I have been reporting back to my students after reading their autobiographies, the patterns that are so deep they are inescapable ruts. English majors tend to start school as avid readers, reading with family and independently through elementary school. Perhaps half continue in this vein into middle school, growing into and with a community of peer readers, while the other half scale back on their reading because of the pressures of extracurricular activities (e.g. sports). 

Most, however, hit a wall in high school. Extracurricular activities increase, but the number of assigned books also increases. The work—and an overwhelmingly number of students report it as work—makes reading onerous (Kelly Gallagher’s Readicide). Independent reading precipitously declines. That pattern continues—and intensifies—as these students, against all odds, decide to become English majors and read many more assigned books in college English classes. Too many have reported that they cannot remember the last time they read a book of their own choosing. And they have forgotten that reading can be a pleasurably activity​.

When I first started teaching the YA literature course the resistance was palpable. My students were English majors who went from reading chapter books and/or series to reading the classics, The Babysitter’s Club to Jane Eyre. YA literature was never an option. I remember in the first week of class a student asking pointedly, “Why are we reading kid books in a college English class?” But then the students who read the Harry Potter series growing up arrived. The resistance became non-existent. Now my students come with extensive experience reading YA literature in and out of class (Laurie Halse Anderson, John Green, The Hunger Games, Divergent, and many, many titles and authors I have not heard of). So rather than skipping over YA literature, they have read it alongside the classics they love.

As a way to help you get to know your students as readers (or non-readers), I offer the assignment below for both high school and pre-service classes. I offer it, too, to those who would like to research the changing of reader’s attitudes over time. I contend that if we can document when/where/how readers turn toward or against reading, we can more strategically implement the ways to turn more readers toward rather than against reading that Terri Lesene, Donna Miller, Penny Kittle, and so many others have been proposing. For me, I want to start with pre-service teachers who have been changed as readers (or who have been renewed at the very least) changing the readers (or non-readers) they encounter as teachers.

 Reading is breathing for some; for others it’s a chore. For the majority of us, reading falls somewhere between those two poles. By way of introducing yourself to the class, to provide me with a background of your reading, write an autobiography of yourself as a reader (see below for an example). Write about your reading experiences; highlight significant books, ones that influenced you or taught you or nudged you in a new direction, that opened up not only the world of reading but the whole shebang; focus on one stage in your reading life, e.g. elementary school; write a survey of your reading from the time you started reading through last semester; or answer one or two or all of the following questions: What do you know about young adult literature? What young adult authors do you know? In what ways has the field of young adult literature shaped you as a reader? Who are you as a reader?

 All papers will be read in small groups. Together, they will give us a portrait of the class as readers as we begin our exploration of young adult literature.

I’ve been a reader as long as I can remember, a memory that recalls watching JFK’s flag-draped caisson crawling toward Arlington Cemetery on the boxy black and white television crowding the living room. Actually, I can’t remember how I learned to read, or when (or if one ever stops learning to read). It seems as if I always have been reading, an act as organic as walking, as vital as breathing.

My earliest memories of reading consist of those times I volunteered to read aloud in class. Maybe this was in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grade, I can’t pinpoint it. I took this classroom exhibition as a moment to seize the English language – I have always robustly loved the sounds of words - to project it through my voice toward my peers. To embody language. Or maybe I was just a show off.
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I read the funnies, comic books, the sports page, the backs of baseball, basketball, and football cards, and I read biographies of athletes I wanted to emulate – Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Bart Starr, Jerry Kramer, Gale Sayers, or short novels about the sports I played such as The Catcher with the Glass Arm by Matt Christopher. These show what kind of reader I was – looking through print to measure and extend my world, to entertain me but also to point me toward something beyond myself, seeking ways to better myself. Reading to know.

As a young adult, reading – and then writing – saved my life. Pushed off center by things I am finally beginning to understand, reading – and writing – anchored me. I read widely, wildly perhaps, voraciously – over fifty books in the year after I barely graduated from high school – poetry by Ginsberg, Sexton, Richard Hugo, Frost, Robert Bly, Wallace Stevens, novels and short stories by Kerouac, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, plays by Eugene O’ Neill, and criticism on poets such as Lord Alfred Tennyson and Ezra Pound (way above my head!). I read on my job at Mirror Aluminum (manufacturer of cooking pans) when I could steal five or ten minutes; I read off the job, often skipping parties or other social events to read. The words on the page made more sense than my life. Then the practice of making meaning from these stories helped me make sense of my own story. 
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It hurts to say reading drove a wedge between me my peers, from my friends, but what I was learning about the world and myself always felt right. Eventually, reading led me to a way to make a life, to make a living, to living a life, vocation and avocation hand in hand. After ten years of working jobs I came to despise, the obvious overwhelmed me: I had to find some way to do everyday – to get paid for – what I did everyday, what I had to do everyday – read, think, read, imagine, think, read, and imagine. Teaching rose to the top of a short list of possible jobs (editor, literary agent, journalist) because I also realized I didn’t just want to work with texts; I wanted to work intimately with readers and writers of texts; I want to be a positive trigger for how readers responded to texts.

My first blush with young adult literature was in 1988 (when the Gipper was President). I’d now been a reading snob for years – reading must be profound or it was a profound waste of time. The young adult lit course I took at San Francisco State, however, blew the doors and shutters off my snobbery. I will always remember standing up in Muni wishing the streetcar would slow down so that I could read more from Dragonwings or Captives of Time or Tuck Everlasting (still some of my favorite novels). I had no idea that literature could be so simple – written for adolescent readers – yet so resonant, so profound. And I had no idea that heroin addiction or other controversial topics – could be a topic for a young adult novel. A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich is as profound as it gets.
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Not only was the course an eye-opener for me as a reader – or an eye-blurrer, reading a book a week on top of my other classes – but that course did more to prepare me to work with young readers than any other class I took as a pre-service teacher: it gave me rich resources to draw from at the beginning of my teaching career, a list of books that my students found both challenging and rewarding (even as they struggled with the other reading – Shakespeare, Oedipus Rex, Toni Morrison’s Sula – that I was required to assign). 

Teaching high school English for 18 years (most recently for twelve years at Moscow High School in Idaho) reinforced those findings. Many high school readers crave the intellect and the emotive – Ayn Rand’s Anthem, George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.  Yet for every self-motivated reader of utopian novels, there are ten readers who would rather do any thing with their time but sit down and crack a book. Knowing Meg Wolitzer’s Belzhar, escaping genocide with three children in Like Water on Stone by Dana Walrath, inhabiting the segregated south of the past of Stella By Starlight by Sharon Draper, I have some other stories I can suggest. If one book sparks these readers’ interests, then there’s hope for a fire.

When I was asked to design and teach the young adult lit course at Washington State University in 2000 (shoot, that was already more than a 15 years ago?), I was ecstatic. I had been away from young adult literature for a few years, my reading focused on poetry and adult fiction and non-fiction, and I quickly found out I had missed much, including the Harry Potter rage (I caught the fever the summer the fourth book came out). But I also found out that what I was missing could be easily made up by a summer of reading into the wee hours of the morning. Blurry eyed again!
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Young adult literature is thriving. I can’t wait to meet new friends – many works that you will introduce me to – and to re-acquaint myself with the old. As a teacher, and now it comes down to that, I aim to facilitate. I want to provide students with the opportunities to learn as I have learned, through reading, what they do not think they want to learn.

Beginning on August 12th Mother Nature began to come down hard on Southern Louisiana. I watched the news reports carefully. I spent seven years working at Louisiana State University.  We have a daughter who still lives in the New Orleans area and we worried about her and her husband’s family. I also worried about the host of students I taught who are still teaching in Louisiana. I was rocked by all the pictures and video clips posted on Facebook.
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I began to wonder, “How bad can this get?” In reality, pretty bad.  A larger than expected rainstorm dumped about “7.1 trillion gallons of water or enough to fill Lake Pontchartrain about four times. Hurrican Katrina, by comparison, dumped about 2.3 trillion gallons of rainwater in the state (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Louisiana_floods). 

I know I can’t do everything, but I can do something.

In this blog, I will try to recount how I began to think about one small part of this disaster—What is it like for a teacher to lose books?

One of the students, Sarah Batty, from my first year as an English Educator at Louisiana State University posted a picture that pushed it to the personal. She lost a annotated copy of To Kill a Mockingbird that had been passed down through three generations of teachers.

As I gazed at the picture, I immediately thought of books that I would miss if they were gone. I haven't taught high school for 8 years, but I still have books that I found in college. There is an argument that I don't need them anymore, but as Lear shouted "Oh, reason not the need". Lear laments the loss of his servants when he realizes that their lack of presence by his side, to do his bidding, indicates a tremendous loss of identity and purpose. For many English teachers books have been our servants, our missionaries, our inspiration, our solace and our friends. I try to understand the loss that Sara felt as she held a sodden book with annotations smeared through the pages of her lost book. ​

Sarah’s loss, which has now become symbolic (for me at least) of the loss of books by hundreds, if not thousands of teachers, throughout southern Louisiana, those I know and those I don’t, caused me to turn and stare at the books on my shelves. I have consciously kept quite a few books that serve as important markers in my graduation from college through my journey of thirty five years teaching English at almost every level from grade 9 through PhD students.
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A few books that standout are: Pudd’nhead Wilson, Cane, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Cry, the Beloved Country, Moby Dick, The Sound and the Fury, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Little Dorrit, Bleak House, Theodore Roethke’s Straw for the Fire, The Power and the Glory, I am the Cheese, Crime and Punishment, and Wide Sargasso Sea. Each book holds special memory of my own learning or teaching experience. Both my thinking and my teaching expanded as I thought deeply about these texts and worked through them with my students.

 Pudd’head Wilson
As senior college student, I took a graduate seminar on Mark Twain from Dr. Richard Cracroft at BYU. His class was one of the most  experiences as an English major. I began to think that maybe, just maybe, I could have original ideas about a piece of literature. While reading Pudd'nhead Wilson, I had an idea for paper. In reality, I struggled to write--still do--critically about literature. (This isn't just me being modest, there are still many of my extended family members and colleagues who can verify this account.) I didn't spell well and my hand writing was horrible. We had to type papers back then on a typewriter. Do some of you need a picture of one of these beasts? Sitting in the library, I had an idea while reading the book. I was unprepared for big ideas, no paper, no notebook, just a pen. I began writing what became, after several hand written version, a 20 page paper. I turned it in to Dr. Cracroft, who was a notable Twain scholar and received a good grade. It wasn't perfect, but it let me know that I could do the work; that I could read through a text and put together ideas. i taught the book a couple of times instead of Huck Finn and it was always on my shelf. When I need a boost of confidence, it was always there and still is. If it were gone, I would surely miss it.

Cry, the Beloved Country and Their Eyes Were Watching God
Both of these books weren't on my radar until a teacher discussed them with me. I never actually took a class from Steven Walker while I was at BYU, but he was always extremely generous with students. Some how I found out he had done work on Cry the Beloved Country and I became interested. The book was amazing and became one of the staples in my Sophomore Curriculum during the 1980's. My students generally knew next to nothing about South Africa or Apartheid. We did cross-curriculum work before I knew what to call it. My students read articles about Nelson Mandela, the African National Congress, The Boar War, Diamond Mining, and Ghandi, all before de Klerk began discussing negotiations in 1990. Some of my best teaching experiences occurred in those classes where we learned together about the racist practices in South African and how they might inform events and practices in the U.S. during the 1980s. During that period there were protests on college campuses about how their university endowments were invested in South America. In 1985, we listened to Sun City recorded by Artist United Against Apartheid. 

I first saw the title of Their Eyes Were Watching God on the list of options for the open question on the Advanced Placement Literature exam.  The following summer, I was at a NEH Summer Seminar at Auburn University and several of us began talking about which books we were using. One of the  attendees highly recommended Zora Neale Hurston's wonderful book. I continued to teach this book every year in my AP course until I left to do graduate work. My eyes were opened and I tried hard to make this book part of every students' consciousness. 

If either one of these books disappeared from my shelves I would be distraught. They represent moments when I began to think differently and my teaching changed. 

Bleak House.
For many years, I taught a Dickens' novel in a serial format. Every other Tuesday was Dickens' day. As a kid, I struggled with long 19th century novels. They were too long, too slow, too something. I struggled the first time I had to teach A Tale of Two Cities; furthermore, I am sure that my students struggled. I wasn't as committed as I should have been. I had a hard time sharing Dickens' greatness, because I didn't quite get it myself. While reading through an English Journal I saw an application for NEH Summer Seminar about reading and teaching serialized Victorian novels directed by Dr. Michael Lund at Longwood College. 

The experience change my teaching life. I taught a new Victorian novel every year for about 15 years, generally one I had never read before. Yes, and students do read long books if we read with them. One week I would quiz them and two weeks later they would quiz me. This practice lead to a sabbatical funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Readers Digest. Every year nearly a third of my students wrote on the current Dickens' novel on the AP Literature exam. (How do you not know a book well that you have lived with for nine months?) I point to Bleak House because, not only is it fantastic, but I taught the novel the year my oldest daughter was a student in my AP class. The book sits on my shelf as a reminder of this wonder pedagogical practice that changed my relationship with my students, Reading and discovering a novel with them throughout a school year was both challenging and rejuvenating. Many of them were better readers and writers than I was, I only kept them at bay due to my experience and the craftiness of old age. Having my daughter in the class added to the experience in immeasurable ways and Bleak House remains on the shelf as a marker. I don't think I could make it any clearer that losing this book would be like misplacing 15 years of teaching memories.

How can I help?
I am quite sure that teachers like Sarah are making memories with books. So, what can I do? I get more than my share of books. I belong to ALAN and I attend the annual Workshop, I preview books in my role as an academic and scholar of young adult literature. I try to promote and discuss the scholarship, teaching, and advocacy of this literature in this blog, during conferences, school visits, and in my courses. I read as many as I can and when I am done I pass them on to teachers, students, and other academics. I immediately realized I could help Sarah. When she is ready and has settled into her classroom, I can send her several boxes of books. She can shelf the books that are appropriate for her students and pass the rest on to her colleagues.
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I know that the local school districts will take donations, but I always worry about how that will trickle down to books on teachers’ shelves. Will they be given money for books that students might choose to read?  Unfortunately, I see institutions replacing books with anthologies, scripted curricula, and other mind numbing texts instead of novels and books for classrooms and libraries. By giving some books to Sarah, I know there is a good chance that a kid will wander over to her bookcase and take a book home that might interest them and lead them to new horizons.  At our house, we feel compelled to help. We will give generically to our church and directly to LSU colleagues who have lost their homes, but a box of books to a teacher when they are ready for them would mean a great deal to me if I were in her place. Below is a closer look at what Sarah found when she visited her classroom.

How can you help?
I hope that others want to help. Last week in the blog, I mentioned that I would be helping in a small way. I also offered to keep a list of people who would like to help and then, when the time is right, match them with one of my former students, their colleagues, or their schools.
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Of course, you can help anyway you would like. I am going to suggest a couple. 1.) Start collecting books that you have on your shelves and storing books that you can ship. I might even suggest you find a partner who might not have books, but you might be able to help you with shipping costs. 2. Maybe students in your YA literature classes might want to do a joint venture. Remember, this doesn’t have to be done this week or within the next month. The inhabitants of the area will be cleaning homes and schools for quite a few weeks. 3.) If you are in a school that does a charity drive during the holidays, you might consider encouraging them to sponsor a school in one of devastated districts. You could raise the money and sent up an amazon account with each English teacher in the school. They could then buy gently used books that are appropriate for their students. I am not sure how this would work; but, again, we have time. 4.) A group of teachers could collectively visit thrift stores and buy up gentle used YA books and other titles. Then, when they are ready you can send them the books. 5.) If you are an author and have a classroom set of books you can share them with some of these teachers. Those teachers can share the books and create groups of books that students can use in literature circle assignments.

Final Thoughts for the Week
There are probably several others ways we can help individual teachers restock their classroom libraries. I will continue to build the list of people who would like to donate books and prepare to match them we teachers in need.
Please take some time to listen to the news or read some evaluations about the level of loss. The people of Baton Rouge and the rest of southern Louisiana are great folks. It won’t take you long to see how engaged they are in helping each other clear out debris, cut out sheet rock, dry out the support lumber, and prepare to rebuild. Nothing I can do here will do justice to the pain or the loss. I can, however, help one teacher. I can help other individuals connect with a teacher. Hopefully, I can be helpful in connecting larger efforts.   Thanks for listening.

Please take a moment to like this post on Facebook. It is also helpful if you share the post on Facebook or mention it on twitter. (I know that many of you have much larger networks than I do, so thank you in advance.)

Next week, we will be back to talking about developing a syllabus and preparing to share and teach this wonderful literature.

There a large  number of approaches to develop and conduct a young adult literature course.  Some professors focus on historical coverage, others on theoretical lenses, some focus on contemporary choices, others focus on pedagogy, and the list can go on. While we share an interest in Young Adult literature, we think about it in different ways. Guest contributors have offered various insights. To see what has happened in the past click on the Contributors Page.

In  fact, our guest this week has posted before. This time, Jon Ostenson briefly explains his course and then describes a series of assignments that usher students in to discussion of Disciplinary Discourse using their experience as English and English Teaching majors. I will hand it over to Jon.

​I, Jon, teach a semester-length course on adolescent (or YA) literature that is designed for English majors (as an elective course) and for English teaching majors (as a required course). Students read from a list of titles during the semester, half of which I choose from amongst more recent YA titles and a couple of classics (like The Outsiders and The Chocolate War) and the other half of which students select on their own. This reading accomplishes one of the major objectives I have for the course, which is that students have a broad exposure to current and significant titles in the field.
 
A second objective for the course is that students become familiar with issues and discussions in the field of adolescent literature and that they feel comfortable themselves engaging in the broader discourse in our field. This is perhaps a lot of ask of undergraduates, many of whom have been consuming a steady diet of canonical literature typical to the English major. But my students are up to the task, I think, and I have found an important way to scaffold their exposure to these disciplinary discussions and to give them a chance at entering the discussion themselves.

We do this in my course through a keyword study project. I was first inspired to create a project like this at an NCTE conference where I attended a session on keyword studies in culture and other literary fields. This session described the history of keyword studies, which traces its origins to work by Raymond Williams, who published an early study of key terms in his 1976 book, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. The study of keywords has since been embraced in numerous fields of cultural and literary studies. In keyword studies, the primary goal is to identify the recurring terms that are used in the discourse of a discipline and set out to describe those in a way that helps shed light on the meaning of the word in a specific context, but most importantly on the underlying reasoning behind the use of these words in the discipline. These definitions are not necessarily (no pun intended) definitive, as the meanings of the words are at times the subject of intense debate and struggle. A link to the newest edition can be found here.

​In my course, after sharing some brief background on keyword studies, I explain to my students that we will be using this approach to better understand the scholarly field of adolescent literature. Before we identify the terms they’ll define, we read some examples from Raymond Williams’ work; I like to use his essay on the term “literature” as it discusses a concept familiar to my students but one whose meaning they come to see upon reading the definition as being far from certain or simple. I have also used examples from the fine collection Keywords for Children’s Literature (edited by Philip Nel and Lissa Paul); one I like to use is the essay on “literacy,” which is a concept of particular interest to me and to the teaching majors who are enrolled in the course.
 
As we read, we look to understand not just the content of these essays but to also identify the genre expectations for these texts. We examine how authors seek to define the word while at the same time describing subtle differences that may emerge in how the word is used in certain contexts or by certain groups within a discipline. It is important that students understand how these essays help lay bare the debates and struggles within the discipline around the term. We also identify how the writers of these essays use specific examples (of literary texts or of scholarly writings) to help shed further light on the term’s use.

With a clear sense of the expectations of the assignment, we move next to choosing terms to define. I have collected a set of terms that I feel are commonly used in the field, and we look at that list and brainstorm other possible terms that might be worth defining. Students then choose a term that they want to investigate and write an essay for; they can do this either in groups or alone (most choose to do this in groups, which I encourage for the sake of allowing them to research more broadly and to have peers with whom they can exchange ideas about the term).
 
In the process of defining their term and then writing an essay about it, I encourage students to first look to traditional dictionary definitions for the word and then to consider the etymology and history of the word. This may prove helpful to students when the term (“romance” for example) has been in use for a long time and perhaps is only just recently being used in the context of adolescent literature studies. However, I caution students that these words are often used in specific and sometimes unique ways when we’re talking about adolescent literature and that their essays should reflect this.
 
To further explore their word, they look through scholarly journals (e.g., The ALAN Review, The Lion and the Unicorn, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, SIGNAL Journal) for articles that are related to their term in order to get a sense for how the term is used in context in the scholarly field. And they select three young adult novels to read (as part of their elective reading) that have a meaningful connection to their term and can be used in their essay to support their thinking and discussion of the term.

In the three semesters that I have been using this project in my class, I have been pleased with the results. The essays provide an important synthesis of students’ thinking and research about the keyword and its importance in the study of adolescent literature. The keyword project helps my students come to understand at least one aspect of the field in more depth, and I am gratified to see them making references to and connections with their keywords study during class discussions. In fact, if I know that a book we’re studying together (like Neal Shusterman’s Unwind) has a connection to a keyword studied by my students (like “dystopia”), I’ll often encourage the authors of that essay to share what light their research sheds on our discussion of the book. It’s become clear to me that this project helps students understand the scholarly discussion around adolescent literature and it has enriched our class discussions of the literature in noticeable ways.

I invite you to see the results of this work by browsing the students’ essays at a web site I’ve created to house them (yalitkw.jonostenson.com). (Please recognize, though, that I’ve recently moved earlier content to this new site and not all of the essays have been updated in terms of formatting and citations yet.) If you’d like more details about the project, you can see the assignment description on our course web site (jonostenson.com/yalit/assignments/keyword-study/).

Thanks Jon

Over the next couple of weeks we will be talking about developing and teaching YA courses, censorship and book approval, and we will be hearing from a couple of authors. If you liked this post, please share it with your colleagues and friends as well as teachers and librarians in your area.

Occasionally, when I am avoiding work or the final touches on an article, I check Facebook or my email just one more time. Last April I checked the UNLV Today email and was introduced to a UNLV College of Education alumnus that has a children’s book series. I found out that a graduate from our college, Marquin Parks, has been teaching in Michigan. Like many other teachers he wanted to find books that might speak more directly to his students. He also made the happy mistake of establishing a pact with this students; if they read quietly for an hour he would write. As a result, he created the Wrinkles Wallace series. First, he wrote Wrinkles Wallace: Knights of Night School and, then, Wrinkles Wallace: Fighters of Foreclosure. I can’t image how hard it would be to write and teach at the same time. Some remarkable writer/teachers have managed to do both. Marquin joins the ranks of Alan Sitomer, Gene Luen Yang, Andrew Smith, Sharon Draper, and I know there are others. Marquin and I exchanged some emails and hopefully we can get him back to UNLV for a speaking engagement. He joins the ranks of two other emerging teacher/writers that I know personally--Paul Greci and Sarah Guillory. Now I have a trio of personal acquaintances that I can send positive thoughts. I hope that in a few years everybody knows more about Marquin’s experience with his students and as a writer. You doesn’t like a writer who list some of his favorite books as Maniac Magee, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, My Side of the Mountain, The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963. I would love to hear him discuss each of these books. 

​For the time being, I will turn it over to Marquin to briefly introduce himself and to talk about how he uses bonus chapters to engage his readers.

 My name is Marquin Parks.  I’m a dad (woot!), a fifth grade teacher (yay!), and the author of the Wrinkles Wallace series (Wrinkles Wallace: Knights of Night School and Wrinkles Wallace: Fighters of Foreclosure) of children’s novels. (My parents are so proud!)
 
Oh, and, well, I have a confession to make… 
 
I write bonus chapters for my books.
 
BONUS CHAPTERS! Bonus chapters?
 
Allow me to tell you more.  For me, a bonus chapter comes to life when a writer (me) continues to write material for a previously released book because a reader continues to want to read and know more about my finished book.  And, in order for me to supply something to meet the demands, I write free bonus chapters and release them on my blog at WrinklesWallace.blogspot.com
 
While there are numerous reasons for me to create these bonus chapters, I will share three with you:

1. Bonus chapters Keep my Readers Involved in the Series Until the Next Book is Released.

In my classroom, I often work with students who stand in limbo while waiting for an author’s next masterpiece to be released. They have looked me in the eyes and asked, “Have you ever had to wait for the next book in a series?” 
 
I would nod and try to give them suggestions for other books they might find interesting. 
 
Then they would ask, “Have you ever wanted the writer to HURRY UP or give you just a little bit more to hold you over until they release another book?”
 
Certainly! Soon after Wrinkles Wallace: Knights of Night School was published, I had readers asking me plenty of questions during author talks.  Sure, a F.A.Q. page on a website, or the usage of social media would serve as a wonderful connector for us to develop our writer/reader relationship, yet many readers wanted to know more about Wrinkles and the crew.  That’s when I realized that I could write a bonus chapter to explain what typical answers, using hashtags, and 140 characters could not.  Why not feed that anticipation for a new book with some bonus chapter snacks and appetizers?
 
By the time the second book in the series, Wrinkles Wallace: Fighters of Foreclosure was released, my readers had six bonus chapters to hold them over and help them get to know more about my characters. Indeed, writing and releasing a timely bonus chapter allowed me to stay connected and relevant to my audience.  Clearly, bonus chapters kept my readers involved in the series until the next book was released.

​2. Bonus Chapters allow me to Dig Deeper into the Book and Reveal More About the Characters and Situations.
 
Ever had any questions you wanted to know about a character or situation in a book and realized that unless you talked to the author, you would never get the answers to those questions? 
 
Not every character in a book has the same significance as the main characters.  There are supporting characters and cameo characters.  In addition, there may be events that a reader will want to know the background story about.  Well, for me, writing a bonus chapter to explain why Fib the Lion chased students out of the hallways and had them scurrying up ropes when the tardy bell rang at school was the answer to questions asked by my readers. While I thought having a lion in charge of motivating students to get to class on time was a simple humorous twist, my readers wanted to know more about him. Who was the lion?  Why was he there?  Why would he want to feast on the femur bone of a fifth grader?  Answering their questions required me to think deeper as a writer and gave me another opportunity to show my creativity.  Not to mention, answering those questions led me to writing even more bonus chapters.

​3. Bonus Chapters are a Free Gift to my Readers for all Their Support.
 
As a writer of a series, I’m trying to step away from the trees to look at the forest. I’m constantly planning three or four books ahead of what I’ve already released to the public. My readers help me to see the beauty of specific trees that were planted inside the pages of books. Releasing the free gift of a bonus chapter shows my readers that I’m listening and that I value their feedback.  By the time a reader has invested their time and money into reading my books, I feel like we have developed a unique relationship. They have supported my movement to promote literacy, and that certainly motivates me to continue giving them as much as I can.
 
Steady,
Marquin Parks

4. BONUS REASON!
 
I would be fibbing if I said I was not afraid of the fact that Fib the Lion might find a way to put his claws on my clavicle and his teeth on my trachea if I stopped writing bonus chapters about him…
BONUS CHAPTER
The Leisure Limousine
 
I was made with the heart of a race car, the mind of a skateboard, and the spirit of an office chair.  I’m tuned for quickness and agility; I’m designed with supreme craftsmanship for comfort.  Please don’t confuse me with a trendy tricycle, interesting inline skates, or a unique unicycle[a1] .
Why?
Well, because I roll as crisp and clean as Lenny’s leisure limousine.  Yeah, I’m Lenny’s wheelchair, and I’m built for this lifestyle.
When I first met Lenny, he walked into a store, paid a fast-talking guy some faster-talking cash for me, and then he did something odd.  Usually when a person doesn’t walk with a cane or one of those walkers, they are buying a wheelchair for someone they care about.  And, they usually walk me out without a passenger sitting in my lap.  Then, I’m placed into the trunk of a car or the back of a SUV, and I am introduced as the lap of luxury for someone who appreciates me for what I do.
 
Not Lenny.  No, Lenny put his wallet back in his pocket, stood in front of me with a huge wooden-tooth smile, turned his back to me, and extended his rear end to sit down. After he sat down, he wiggled his rump to get more comfortable, put his feet on my foot rests, and started turning my wheels to get used to the way I handle business.  Prior to Lenny’s actions, unless it was a kid who was playing around, I’d never seen a person walk in without any issues and decide to sit in a wheelchair.   Yet, Lenny did it, and I was changed forever.
                Before Lenny came into my life, I was a pretty useful wheelchair.  Honestly, I’d get the silver medal and come in second to Santa in an Olympic sitting contest.  In the past, I helped transport a few great people who went through surgeries at the hospital and folks who needed to get to their flight quickly at the airport.  I even provided something to do for a few grandkids who visited their grandparents.  While I wasn’t motorized, I was still helpful, and that worked for me.
                Once Lenny and I partnered up, things changed. I wasn’t just some wheelchair stored in the trunk of a car or in the closet near the front door. No, being cheap on gas and having low mileage worked to my advantage with Lenny.  I’m proud to say that I’m Lenny’s leisure limousine, and it has been amazing!  Well, it was up until the day I thought I was going to die in an accident.
It’s hard for me to even let the events of that day roll[a1]  through my mind. For me, it still hurts, but I think talking about it helps me to heal and push on.  As I share some of the details, try not to cry because seeing you cry, might make me cry.
 
                It was a typical evening. Lenny had me rolling around and we were both having a good time. While Lenny seemed a little more nervous than usual, I actually felt perfectly fine.  That was until I lost a limb when Mr. Quiet threw thunder and lightning in the form of a dodgeball at one of my wheels and damaged it to death. The side-airbags Lenny installed actually went off to protect him, and I just knew the end was near for me.  As I barely rolled off the court, I saw my life flash before my seat cushion.  Even after Wrinkles changed my tire, and Lenny did his first back-flip while sitting in me, when I saw the ambulance in the parking lot, I thought they were there for me.
                To be honest, immediately after surviving the accident, I never thought I’d be able to work again, but Lenny brought me back from the brink of death. Death!  He made sure I had nothing but the best and helped me to have a speedy recovery.
A few days later, instead of throwing me away, Lenny took me to a shop and they repaired me with newer and better parts. I went from a pretty basic wheelchair, to a wheelchair with an alarm that could be programmed to behave like a mechanical bull. I even had cruise control, rear view mirrors, pegs for a passenger to ride, larger rims  and tires that helped us with traction in the snow and on ice, speed that could be used on a racetrack, cornering for those twisty curves, and some top secret stuff under my seat that Lenny and I don’t talk about.
 
                Though I can’t tell you too much because we don’t like to have our business all out in the streets, I can share some current events I’ve been going through. About a week ago, I spent the weekend at Mr. Quiet’s house. You would think Mr. Quiet and I would be fast friends because his name is Sittin’ B. Quiet, and that’s what I allow people to do when I’m around. Instead, I was nervous around him for obvious reasons, but he was so distracted with what was going on with his house that he looked at me with dead presidential pupils or dollar signs in his eyes.  Instantly, Lenny tightened his grip on my arm rests to silently show Mr. Quiet that I was not for sale.
At first, everything was fine. Lenny used me as a spot to park his back pockets and relax. Later, we went for a trip to the gas station and some rude guys were talking smack.  One of them put his hands on me after I was armed with my alarm and I gave him the great gift of an electric shock that put him on the concrete in a hurry.  Then, after Lenny and Wrinkles went into the store, I saw one of my two wheel brothers get stolen by a group of guys. I felt so upset to see it happen because that bike was to Wrinkles what I am to Lenny.
Over the course of that weekend I had a few more things that popped up quicker than one of Lenny’s wheelies, but we were able to handle them without too many issues. Meanwhile, I continue to roll as crisp and clean as Lenny’s leisure limousine.

Thanks Marquin! 

I hope many of you will explore Marquin's books. In addition, if you know some emerging authors, I would love to here about them. Over the next several weeks the guest contributors will talk about developing and teaching a college young adult literature course. I know that many of you are developing courses as you are reading this. I hope you can see YA Wednesday as a useful addition to your YA literature discussions. If you are, I hope you take a bit of time to comment on how you are using this academic blog.

This week Stacy Graber reminds us of the positive literacy experiences that are provided at the YSU English Festival. This is a perfect post as we get ready to plan activities for returning students at every level. Thanks Stacy.

​The English Festival at Youngstown State University is an event arranged primarily around pleasure.  That is, middle and high school students from areas surrounding the university in Ohio and Pennsylvania come together to celebrate the enjoyment of reading and writing through 3 days of participation in games, activities, competitions, and conversations based on notable works of young adult literature (YSU English Festival, 2016).

The rationale for Festival book selection reflects the priority placed on pleasure as evident in the following: “The Committee’s aim in selecting its booklist and in planning all Festival activities is neither to have the students accumulate a particular body of knowledge…nor to have them study the standard classics of English or American literature” (YSU English Festival, 2016).  Rather,

"The aims are to encourage students to read more, thereby improving all of their communication skills; to enhance their interest in reading, thereby building pleasurable and positive associations with reading as an activity; to indicate to students that 'literature' is not merely an academic course but can and should be an integral part of their lives; [and] to introduce students to authors and works of sufficient caliber to lead students to a recognition of and respect for writing of high quality" (YSU English Festival, 2016).   
​
This rationale is important and reminds me of the expression of connoisseurship identified by Bourdieu (1984), or the deep sense of understanding and capacity for appreciation that comes from everyday exposure to beautiful things (--like good books).

I think the Festival offers a powerful lesson here that translates profitably to education.  More specifically, in their emphasis on pleasure, it seems that the Festival creators intuited the all-important joy-factor that makes academic work possible.  As a teacher, I hold out hope that school culture is able to transmit some of the rich and seemingly effortless competencies that Bourdieu claims are acquired almost exclusively outside of the classroom, and that immersion in young adult literature contributes to this process. 

So, in planning an Insight Session for this year’s Festival (i.e., a one-hour, informal activity, generated for an audience of 30-35 students, related to one or more of the Festival books) with the relationship between academic skill and enjoyment in mind, I produced an activity that situated students as curriculum designers.  The idea behind the session was to give kids the opportunity to (re)imagine ways of teaching reading and writing through the creation of “dream units” arranged around favorite works of young adult literature. 
​
The tools offered to the kids were intentionally spare because I wanted them to freely invent strategies for developing learning activities and projects based on the Festival books.  So, I compiled a brief list of organizational structures drawn from a fine methods text (Hinchman & Sheridan-Thomas, 2014), and defined a few basic models that could help students shape their ideas (e.g., interdisciplinary units, multimedia units, thematically arranged units, project-based units, research-based units, and activism-based units).  

Likewise, the instructions provided to session participants were lean in the hope that kids would feel free to create content in a way meaningful and logical to them.  For example, they were told that unit plans might contain elements such as a rationale for text selection, discussion questions, learning activities, a description of a writing prompt or project, and a list of related resources (e.g., films, websites, artwork, etc.).  Students were then invited to use or disregard these suggestions, and they embarked on 40 minutes of planning with the understanding that they would share the product of their conversations in the final 15 minutes of the session. 

The Festival booklist for senior high school students in 2016 included the following titles: De la Peña’s I Will Save You (2011) and We Were Here (2010), Quick’s Boy 21 (2013), Sedgwick’s Revolver (2011), Sheinkin’s Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon (2012), Wein’s Rose Under Fire (2014), and Westerfeld’s Leviathan (2010).
Not surprisingly, the majority of the groups selected one of the books written by the immensely popular keynote speaker for 2016, Matt De la Peña.  Students noted that De la Peña’s stories were driven by exciting plotlines that did not sacrifice deeper meaning, and they especially appreciated the complexity of the author’s protagonists and the intensity of the situations presented. 
​
The unit plans proposed by students were predominately interdisciplinary designs arranged around a relationship between ELA and Social Science, with a focus on psychological aspects of individuals, social issues concerning mental health, and sociological dimensions of friendship networks and surrogate families.  For example, one cluster of students responded with particular sophistication, reflective of contemporary theory, in designing a unit around the impact of trauma on young people.  Another group focused on the “mental prisons” afflicting De la Peña’s characters metaphoric of thoughts and beliefs that constrain individuals in everyday life.  Yet another cluster of students explored confessional forms of writing as a vehicle for therapeutic release.  

All students were invested in attempting to establish connections between themes in the literature and pragmatic applications through research and civic involvement.  In other words, students seemed to think of story as a framing mechanism for understanding social issues and addressing public needs.  In their concluding statements on the value of their plans, students appeared to avoid what might be considered more “literary” ways of talking about texts and instead argued the benefits of reading that could be generalized to problem-solution formats of research, writing, and direct action.       

Overall, the session produced an unexpected glimpse of pleasure in reading, not exclusively understood as an expression of enjoyment but as an experience of satisfaction in utilizing young adult literature as a vehicle for effecting real change in people’s lives.  At the same time, the students seemed to appreciate the reversal of roles in the session such that they were asked to design curriculum as opposed to being situated as receivers of information. 

References

Bourdieu, P. (1984).  Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste  (R. Nice, Trans.).  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
​
Hinchman, K.A., & Sheridan-Thomas, H.K. (Eds.).  (2014).  Best practices in adolescent literacy instruction (2nd ed.).  New York, NY: Guilford Press.
 
The YSU English Festival.  (2016).  Retrieved from http://www.ysuenglishfestival.org
 
Stacy Graber is an Assistant Professor of English at Youngstown State University.  Her areas of interest include critical theory, pedagogy, popular culture, and young adult literature.
Please address questions/comments to sgraber@ysu.edu 

Dr. Bickmore adds his two bits.

Attending the YSU English Festival was one of the great experiences of my professional life. The faculty was great, the teachers were fantastic, and the students were wonderful. If you live in the area you should plan on attending next April. The exact dates will be April, 26, 27, 28, 2017. While the final list of books will be announced soon we do know the Guest Lecturers. The Thomas and Carol Gay Guest Lecturer is E. Lockhart and the James A. Houck Guest Lecturer is Gene Luen Yang. 

One more call for Book Chapters

Paula Greathouse asked me to post this blurb about a new edited book on YA Literature. This is a great opportunity.

 Attention all teachers, media specialists, reading specialists, and teacher educators! Do you use young adult literature in your classroom/course or know someone who does? We have already secured a publisher and are now seeking chapters for our upcoming book on the infusion of young adult literature in the content area classroom! Please read the call for abstracts! Contact Paula Greathouse at pgreathouse@tntech.edu with any questions. Thanks!!

Please see a pdf about the call for chapters below.

chapter_call_-_adolescent_lit_as_a_complement_to_the_content_areas.pdf
Download File

If you need a few books to read before the end of the summer, you can't go wrong by consulting this list of finalist!