Bridging Curricular Silos Through Collaboration

This blog post takes the time to celebrate collaboration while pointing to the ways that Young Adult Literature can be used as a tool to bridge the subject silos of both Social Studies and English Language Arts classrooms. 

Steve's Turn

The Academy can be lonely, isolating work. We have to create independent reputations and that requires at least some individual work and writing. At the same time, most of us understand that we need help from other to frame our ideas, to receive feedback, to do collaborative work on committees, to plan program curricula, and a variety of other projects. For example, as a relatively new assistant professor I was a coeditor of The ALAN Review. While we often had independent tasks, the work with Jackie Bach and Melanie Hundley was rewarding, grounding, and helped me frame how I thought critically about Young Adult Literature through my work with them and reading the work of other scholars in the field.

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When I was a high school teacher, I saw the tight connection between the Social Studies (SS) and English Language Arts (ELA). However, I didn’t do much about it. I occasionally had a brief conversation with a social studies teacher, but we never brought it to a coordinated action. For example, for several years I taught A Tale of Two Cities to tenth graders while, at some point during the year, my colleague taught the French Revolution in a world history class to the same students.  A perfectly natural pairing, right? Laziness? Or was it just that we never had such cross-curricular opportunities explained to us during our preparation? Maybe a bit of both. In teacher education most of us understand that most teachers are victims of the apprenticeship of observation. In short, regardless of our preparation, most of us revert to teaching the ways we were taught. Schooling remains the same. ​

Skip forward in my academic career.
 
After several years at Louisiana State University, we hired a new Assistant Professor of Social Studies education.
 
Enter Dr. Paul Binford.
 
Paul and I began working together on several department projects. Primarily we each had a responsibility to communicate with our corresponding subject departments, teaching subject specific methods classes to undergraduates, and working with a yearly cohort of graduates students in a fifth year teacher certification program. We began discussing where our pedagogical concerns overlapped and whether or not there were avenues of collaboration. Paul introduced me to historical simulations and a teaching technique called visual discovery. Both concepts belong in an ELA classroom. I know some ELA teachers are doing some form of simulation in terms of court room simulation with To Kill a Mockingbird or something similar. Even though I thought I often incorporated visuals into my teaching and writing prompts, nothing I had planned or discovered on my own lead me to the richness of Visual Discovery. I have been thinking about it ever since and trying in my own limited way to usher novice English teachers into using this strategy.

Three years ago we both left LSU, but we have continued to collaborate. (Would anyone be interested in a book that discussed how to teach state history through YA historical fiction or Non fiction?) Furthermore, Paul has been a contributor to the YA Wednesday blog. He discussed Chris Crowe's Mississippi Trial, 1955. Find it here. Later, he discussed Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse. You can find that post here. So there you go, I know at least one Social Studies educator who thinks about Young Adult literature. As an added bonus, Dr. Binford will be presenting at the 2018 YA Summit in Las Vegas (Come be #Vegasstrong and #YACritical).

Dr. Binford and I have presented at Kennesaw State University at the KSU Conference on Literature for Children and Young Adults about how to bridge these curricula silos. We have published together and with Dr. Getchen Rumohr-Voskuil. We have been fortunate to present with Laurie Halse Anderson and then with Rich and Sandra Neil Wallace. You can find out about latest collaboration with Gretchen here. The title of the article in the Middle Grades Review is Crossing Selma's Bridge: Integrating Visual Discovery Strategy and Young Adult Literature to Promote Dialogue and Understanding. We hope you share it with both pre-service and inservice Social Studies and English Language Arts teachers.
 
This coming fall we will be present at 2018 NCTE Annual Convention in Houston, TX.
 
Our session title is: Crossing Selma’s Bridge with Visual Discovery Strategy and Young Adult Literature: Allowing Voices from the Past to Echo in the Present
 
The Panelist will include: Laurie Halse Anderson, Steven Bickmore, Paul Binford, Brendan Kiely, Luke Rumohr, Gretchen Rumohr-Voskuil, Rich Wallace, and Sandra Neil Wallace.  
 
We will be focusing on Anderson’s Seeds of America series, Wallace and Wallace’s Blood Brother, and Kiely and Reynolds’ All American Boys.
 
We hope you join us.

Now Paul's Turn

​I first met Dr. Steve Bickmore during the “campus visit” phase of the interview process at Louisiana State University.  As you can imagine mind my head was spinning, but one of my distinct recollections from that experience was that I would enjoy working with this guy.  After arriving on campus in the fall of 2015, Steve served as my informal mentor, and he kindly inducted me into the professional world of higher education.  I would also be remiss if not also acknowledging a mentor that both Steve and I shared—Dr. Jacqueline (or “Jackie”) Bach.  Jackie regularly touched base as I transitioned to LSU, and she had a keen knack for alerting me to various deadlines, issues, and opportunities associated with the College of Education.  Jackie also included me on several writing projects not only because I could make a meaningful contribution, but because she was looking ahead to my tenure needs.  
 
Both Steve and I made the transition to higher education in mid-career, so--needless to say--it was a high stakes decision.  The great thing about Steve was that he was approachable, self-effacing, and an open-book about the tenure and research process.  My first year he spent countless hours (yes, countless!) answering my questions and responding to my requests for advice.  Through this mentoring relationship and a common hobby--golf (the frustrations, vagaries, and all too few skilled shots on the links), we forged a friendship and began recognizing opportunities for cross-curricular collaboration.

In regards to YAL, Steve first opened the pages of possibility for me by suggesting that I read Roll of Thunder:  Hear My Cry.  Although a bit ambivalent at first, reading this Newbery Medal winning work of historical fiction convinced me that YAL had much to offer to both ELA and the Social Studies.  As a result, I have read many more compelling YAL books—often at Steve’s suggestion, which shed light on the human experience:  Chains, Death Coming Up the Hill, March, Muckers, Mississippi Trial, 1955, Out of the Dust, and, most recently, Bound by Ice.  As a long-time ELA teacher, Steve instinctively considers pre-reading, during reading, and post-reading activities to enrich student understanding of a YAL book.  These were not pedagogical moves that I was aware of until after dialoging with Steve; nor I suspect are they intuitive to most social studies teachers.

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Bound by Ice:  A True North Pole Survival Story, by Sandra Neil Wallace and Rich Wallace, is a rich historical treatment of the U.S.S. Jeannette expedition (1879-1881).  Bound by Ice describes the Arctic odyssey of Captain George W. De Long and his crew, which endured many months stuck in the ice, a portaging of life boats, materials, and supplies, the gales and swells of the open sea, and a traversing of the Siberian tundra.  While reading Bound by Ice, I gradually became aware of a period of Arctic exploration (the 19th century in particular) seldom mentioned in the standard secondary textbooks.  From 1818 to 1908, there were 92 expeditions (from nine different countries) to the Arctic in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, the northernmost point in Greenland, and, of course, the North Pole.
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Why not provide historical background information about Arctic exploration, through a pre-reading activity, so students could contextualize the U.S. Jeanette expedition in Bound by Ice?  

“Arctic Exploration 1818 to 1909:  Fact or Myth,” is a pre-reading activity, in a game format! Using a slide presentation, the teacher projects a series of statements, augmented with images, about this period of exploration.  Then, each student must decide whether he/she believes each statement on the “question slide” is a fact or myth?  Each student records their “fact or myth?” decision on a record sheet.  This is shortly followed by the “answer slide” with the correct answer—“Fact!” or “Myth!” along with some additional historical information related to that slide’s topic.  If the student correctly deduced the answer, they place a check-mark on their record sheet.  Regardless, all students use this record sheet to note the historical information provided.  For example, here is a two-slide combination on one of the “fact or myth?” topics from this activity:

Question Slide:

Mode of Travel

While a large majority of the Arctic expeditions were ship based, there were four expeditions during this period conducted by balloon.
Fact or Myth?
 
Answer Slide:
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Fact!
There were 4 balloon-based, 25 land-based, and 63 ship-based Arctic explorations.
In essence, this pre-reading activity is a presentation, using guided notes (the record sheet), with a game overlay.  It takes about 30 minutes to complete and your students will love it!  More importantly, they will be reading Bound by Ice in historical context. 

For this “Fact or Myth?” activity and a during reading activity—a side-by-side comparison and Venn Diagram of a passage from Bound by Ice with a journal entry about the same event go to this link:  https://ringoftruth.org/social-studies-links/young-adult-literature-and-social-studies.

Thanks for following the blog. Until next week.

This blog will also be co-posted on Dr. Binford's blog for Social Studies educations--Ring of Truth.