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

1/25/2023

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Dr. Becki Maldonado is a ninth-grade English teacher at Parkside High School in Salisbury, MD. She is a committee member of the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children. Her scholarship and research focus on arts integration, nonfiction text, text selection, and developing and exercising teachers’ critical consciousness, along with the use of critical dialogue to develop social awareness in education and the community. She is also the editor of Arts Integration and Young Adult Literature: Enhancing Academic Skills and Student Voice.
Unleashing the Possibility Through Inquiry and the Color Blue by Dr. Becki Maldonado
As a Marvel enthusiast, I tend to make a lot of connections to Marvel comics and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. When I received this book, my first thought was, “Wait! The heart-shaped herb is real?” In Black Panther only the royalty, who were destined to be the Black Panther, could drink the indigo liquid from the heart-shaped herb. Publishers were sending us what were supposed to be nonfiction books to read and deliberate about for the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children; yet, there on the cover of the book sat a girl grinding a blue-purple substance in a bowl with dark indigo iris in the background. Honestly, I was really hoping the publisher accidentally sent me a Shuri picture book, but that wasn’t the case. It ended up being a book more valuable and important than anyone would imagine. But before I get into that, let me give you a brief historical run down about the Orbis Pictus Award.
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A Brief Histography of the Orbis Pictus Award from 1658 - Present Day
In 1658, John Amos Comenius, a Czech educator and social reformist, wrote the first children’s textbook with pictures – Orbis Sensualism Pictus, “The Visible World in Picture.” Having lived under the oppression of the German feudal lords, Comenius believed “all the knowledge and all the scientific achievements belong to all people and all nations, and that everybody should be enabled to get to know them, and in this way, by possessing knowledge, have the power” (Lukaš & Munjiza, 2014, p. 34). From this belief he advocated for children, holding fast to the understanding that students “were born with a natural craving for knowledge and goodness, and that schools beat it out of them” (Moravian University, n.d.). While his pedagogical influence grew in Europe, his influence did not span over the Atlantic Ocean until the early 20th century when Orbis Pictus and the Great Didactes hit the shore of the United States. 
In 1989, NCTE created the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children, named after Comenius’s Orbis Sensualism Pictus, credited as the first picture book written specifically for children. This award “promotes and recognizes excellence in the writing of nonfiction for children” (NCTE, 2023). Each year one nonfiction children’s book, written for the K-8th grade audience, is granted this prestigious award. The Great Little Madison by Jean Fritz was the first Orbis Pictus Award winner. Over the decades a diversity of nonfiction books have been given this distinguished award: Through My Eyes by Ruby Bridges (2000), Quest for the Kangaroo Tree: An Expedition to the Cloud Forest in New Guinea by Sy Montgomery (2007), The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia by Candace Fleming (2015), and Between the Lines: How Ernie Barnes Went from the Football Field to the Art Gallery by Sandra Neil Wallace (2019). 

The 2023 Orbis Pictus Award winner embodies Comenius’s belief that all people should be able to have knowledge and scientific achievements through exploring the history of the color blue. Blue: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond takes the reader on a journey through time, traveling throughout the world to rediscover the rich history of the color blue. From the discovery and use of the rock, lapis lazuli, in Afghanistan, to the squeezing of snails and the growing of Indigofera, the reader gets to relive the innovations used to harvest the coveted blue dye, including an inventor being awarded the Nobel Prize for creating a blue chemical dye. From reading this book it is easy to see the impact, for better or for worse, the color blue has had on every society throughout the world. ​
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Brew-Hammond (2022) concludes:
Maybe because blue has such a complicated
history
of pain,
wealth,
invention, 
and 
recovery,

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

Unleashing the Possibility Through Inquiry and the Color Blue

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

After reading Blue as a class or individually, have the students respond to the following instructions on one paper in both written words and drawings:
  1. Describe what you think of when you see the color blue.
  2. What are two ways the color blue is used in your everyday life? What does the blue represent? If you do not know what the blue means, you can use your resources to research and discover what the blue means.
  3. What are two ways in your home is blue used? What does the blue represent? If you do not know what the blue means, you can use your resources to research and discover what the blue means.
Once the student has answered the question for themselves, have the students use these three questions to interview a classmate and a family member, using a separate paper for each interview. Students should then compare and contrast the possibilities found in the color blue from the three interviews. 

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


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


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Exploring Place and Social Class in YAL

1/18/2023

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​Dr. Chea Parton is a farm girl and former rural student and high school English teacher. She’s currently an assistant professor of instruction at The University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation “Country-fied city or city-fied country?”: The impact of place on rural out-migrated literacy teachers’ identities and practices (2020) won honorable mention for the American Educational Research Association’s rural education special interest group’s dissertation award. Her research focuses on the lived experiences and identities of rural and out-migrant students and teachers as well as how they’re (in)visible in classrooms and YA literature. 
Exploring Place and Social Class in YAL 
I spent a lot of December buying Christmas presents. And I realized that I didn’t have to think very much about how much money I was spending. I didn’t make a budget because I’m fortunate and privileged (now) not to have to do that. And everytime I made a purchase, I thought about my Uncle Leroy talking about how it killed my Grandma Nellie not to have money for the kids’ Christmas presents. How grateful she was when folks would donate an orange for each of their stockings.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If they traded places, neither one of them would know how to navigate and be in the other’s place—even though they occupy similar class positions. And despite their shared class positions, the differences in their places lead them to be stereotyped in different ways. There are important differences between the assumptions that people make about “trailer trash” and folks from “the projects.” The intersectional identities assumed to belong to each and the way they are connected to power and privilege offer important opportunities for critical examinations of systems of power and the ways they interact to position people within society.
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So, we should let students have that chance. And one way we could do that is through book clubs. If I were to do it, it’d look something like this:
  • Introduce the concept of social class through the crayon activity. (You can learn more about that here as well as listen to Antonia talk about it in our pre-recorded NCTE video.)
  • Discuss how place shapes those classed experiences. Using Jason Reynolds’s Time 100 talk would be an excellent resource here. 
  • Run book clubs where some students read class-salient rural books and others read class-salient urban books. 
  • Ask students to keep readers notebooks where they take note of any mention, description, or illustration of class and/or place, jotting their thoughts and reflections in their notebooks. 
  • Have students talk across their books, essentially performing a comparative analysis similar to the one I describe (albeit briefly) here. 
  • Ask students to complete a project that allows them to use what they’ve learned to continue to explore social class in their lives and be activists in their community and the world. Possibilities include: 
    • Writing their own autobiographical/fictional, multivocal, poetic examinations of their class position(s), movement(s), and/or injury(ies). 
    • Examining community supports for folks experiencing lower SES social class positions and proposing ways to do it better.

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

If you’d like more detail on any of the ideas found here, please check out our pre-recorded NCTE session, read the social class issue of English Journal, and don’t hesitate to reach out to me with questions at readingrural@gmail.com.    
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January 11, 2023

1/11/2023

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

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

When I just moved to Louisiana, I taught at a public middle school. After the winter break, as usual, I assigned the first daily journal prompt to my eighth graders asking them about their holidays. I walked around the classroom anticipating joyful stories about the holiday gifts my students received, adventurous family trips, visits with friends, and other exciting activities they experienced in two weeks I hadn't seen them. Surprisingly, just a couple of students volunteered to share their journal entry. That evening reading those journals at home, I cried and felt so helpless. Jaylen wrote about his cousin who was caught in a drug related operation and got detained. Dee explained that most of the time she had spent reading to her Dad. She had known that they had just a few days left together because of his terminal illness, and it was her "sweet Daddy" who had taught her to read when she was a little girl. Nick's uncle was shot, and Mary's brother got into a car accident. There were other stories full of pain and despair. Being new to the community, I was caught off guard and felt heartbroken.
​I believe other teachers may have encountered situations similar to the one I described. How do they come to class the next day and look in the eyes of these students who are so deeply hurt and lost? How do I find a way to connect to them? How do I help them rediscover love and hope? How do I make them believe the future, the better future is possible? These questions were tearing me apart.  I also know that I have to find hope myself and only then I will be able to project it onto my students showing them that sad, dark moments may define the concrete situations and experiences, but they do not determine the future.
​I thought about their journal entries and how to respond to them because I had no right to simply write “I understand,” or “I feel your pain.” It would be superficial. For my next class, I brought Jane Yollen's "Birthday Box," a short story of a 10-year-old girl who lost her mother to cancer, felt angry, empty, and hopeless until she found strength to return to writing and fill her life, and the box, with new, more hopeful stories. I could relate to this story because I had lost my first husband and parents by that time. For me, as a new teacher in the US, it was also a moment, when I exposed my vulnerabilities to students. We cried together reading the story, shared our losses, and ways we managed to cope with them and heal.   
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Later, when I was introduced to the YA literature and began reading it abundantly, I became even more convinced that we could help students find strength and resolve in the darkest places by looking up to other people who were able to deal and overcome struggles. Since then, I look for hope in every adolescent novel I read. That is why I share young adult stories and novels with my students regardless whether I have time to teach an entire book for a couple of weeks or just have a book talk at the end of class to point students' attention to characters, their challenges, and how they face them. Books contain these uniquely storied life experiences that not only mirror adolescents’ struggles, but point to the ways out of the murkiest places. 
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It is also vital for our students to know that YA writers are live human beings, who themselves experience pain, loss, betrayal, despair; it is being close to such tragic encounters allows them to become effective storytellers and help us rediscover hope. If you haven't heard about  Hope Nation (2018), edited by Rose Brock, give it a chance. The collection presents readers with stories from Atia Abawi, Renee Ahdieh, Libba Bray, Howard Bryant, Ally Carter, Ally Condie, Christina Diaz Gonzales, Gayle Forman, Romina Garber, I. W. Gregario, Kate Hart, Brendan Kiely, David Levithan, Alex London, Marie Lu, Julie Murphy, Jason Reynolds, Aisha Saeed, Nic Stone, Angie Thomas, Jenny Torres Sanchez, Jeff Zentner, and Nicola Yoon.  The authors, included in this volume, represent diverse racial, religious, and economic backgrounds; their family makeup and stability, experience, age, country of birth, and sexual orientation are various, and they all defeated obstacles to their dreams through hope.
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Rose Brock, an editor of Hope Nation
In the introduction to the collection, Brock emphasizes that these are “stories of resilience, resistance, hardship, loss, love, tenacity, and acceptance — stories that prove that sometimes, hope can be found only on the other side of adversity.”  The authors generously share flashes of light in the darkness and assure readers that hope is a decision people make to be able to cope and prosper after pain, loss, or struggles. Hope also requires work, and taking an action is the first step and an integral part of healing. 
​Among hundreds of the YA novels about hope, I would like to suggest a few of my favorite novels with diverse characters:
A Time to Dance (2014) by Padma Venkatraman
All American Boys (2015) by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely
Long Way Down (2017) by Jason Reynolds
I have Lost My Way (2018) by Gayle Forman
The Poet X (2018) by Elizabeth Acevedo
Internment (2019) by Samira Ahmed
Furia (2020) by Yamile Saied Méndez
I Must Betray You (2022) by Ruta Sepetys
 
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There are ample opportunities for discussions while reading the novels, which can be completed in small groups or with an entire class. After reading, enrichment activities would add to understanding and analysis of the theme, and what it is about hope students learn from any of the chosen novels. In the second volume of Teaching Universal Themes Through Young Adult Novels: Exploring Relationships and Connections to Others (2021), Mike Cook and I offer a teaching unit focused around the theme of dreams and hopes. It consists a possible unit scope and sequence with detailed descriptions of activities and tasks that would enhance students’ critical thinking, analytical, and writing skills. 
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Here is one final activity from this textbook.
A Tree of Hope
On the last day of the unit, students together with the teacher celebrate their achievements. By this time, they have completed a variety of activities and two culminating tasks to explore the theme of dreams and hopes. Their final task is to create a Tree of Hope. This tree will host leaves of dreams and hopes that are refined as a result of all the work completed by this point. To make the collective project more engaging and challenging, the revised dreams and hopes will be in the form of a haiku, a three-line Japanese poetry form.
If needed, the teacher may conduct a mini-lesson on haiku writing and model an example. Students and the teacher will create a haiku, and then partner with another student in class to exchange and review each other’s haiku and provide suggestions. After revising their poems, students will write a clean final copy on a leaf. The teacher and students will share their haiku poems and place them on a poster with a tree template.
As seen in the example, it is an unusual tree with different leaf forms and colors as a symbolic representation of different voices, backgrounds, and perspectives in the classroom. One of the poems on this tree written by my student  reads:
    Re-gifted mercy,
    A home for all who claim it.
    Let love teach you how.
 I would like to conclude this post with this beautiful and uplifting message. 
Thank you for visiting the blog post! 
Till next time,
Leilya
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January 04th, 2023

1/4/2023

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

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Winter is the Time for Storytelling by Dr. Fawn Canady
“In winter, when the green earth lies resting beneath a blanket of snow, this is the time for storytelling…”
--Robin Wall Kimmerer

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

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

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

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

I quote this nearly in full because the following books include examples of characters telling or listening to stories or the authors adopt the cadence or styles of storytelling. Additionally, the following YA novels remind readers of the “verbal art” that students are invited to “perform…in their own, personal language.” In English language arts classrooms, we want to encourage students to create as well as read. Furthermore, each of these novels “legitimizes and honors [students’] individual ways of speaking in a way school spaces usually don’t.” In a time when teachers look to engage students' lived literacies and further linguistic justice (Baker-Bell), YA novels that emphasize storytelling invite students’ community cultural wealth (Yosso) into the classroom. It also creates a space for them to lean into the stories central to cultures different from their own. Lastly, in this spirit of Xito Institute, it invites all of our ancestors into our learning spaces.
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The Last Cuentista: Storytelling for the Future of Humanity
The Last Cuentista, by Donna Barba Higuera, is an award-winning YA sci-fi novel in which storytelling, specifically Mexican folklore, plays a key role in shaping the future of humanity. The story begins in the near future, with 12-year-old Petra Peña and her Abuela, Lita, sitting near a piñon fire in the desert in the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico. Lita is telling Petra the story of the Fire Snake nagual (also known as Haley’s comet), which is on a collision course with earth. The only hope for humankind is to leave the planet earth. This is one of many, many stories that Lita has told her children and grandchildren. This one, however, she “makes her own '' and encourages Petra not only to remember the stories, but to make them her own when she arrives on her new planet. Her new home. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Little Badger, D. (2021). A Snake Falls to Earth. Levine Querido.
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Yosso*, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race ethnicity and education, 8(1), 69-91.


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Book Clubs as Inclusive Spaces with YA Literature by Dr. Jody Polleck

12/14/2022

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Dr. Jody Polleck is an associate professor and the program coordinator for literacy education at Hunter College. She began her work with urban adolescents in 1994 as an outreach counselor in Washington, D.C. for homeless youth. In 1999, she received her Master’s in English education and worked as a high school reading and English teacher for emerging readers and writers. In 2002, Jody received National Board Certification for adolescent English language arts; and in 2003, she accepted a full-fellowship to New York University where she completed her doctoral degree in English education. Jody is a 2019 Fulbright scholar. Her current research focuses on differentiated, culturally responsive-sustaining literacy instruction. She has published in over 25 books and journals including ALAN Review, Contemporary Issues in Technology and and Teacher Education, English Journal, High School Journal, Journal of Teaching Writing, Literacy Research and Instruction, Preventing School Failure, Reading and Writing Quarterly, Reading Horizons, and Teacher Education Quarterly.
Book Clubs as Inclusive Spaces with YA Literature by Dr. Jody Polleck
My work with book clubs began in the late 1990s.  I taught a (terribly named) high school course in Florida called “Intensive Reading” to an amazing group of young people who unfortunately had not passed our state mandated reading exam.  When I was given the class, my principal at the time said, “Just get them to pass in March and then do whatever you want”.  And so I eagerly marked down the days until I had some freedom from test prep—to allow students moments of joy with reading and each other.  It was this freedom that brought me to book clubs—or literature circles—as we used to call them and I began to see the power of such spaces.  I witnessed students’ heads lifted with a new enthusiasm to come to class to just read and have conversations.  

I worked with young people like Franz, who called himself “the Haitian Sensation”, who ran a Christopher Pike book club.  Franz facilitated with authenticity, asking questions about how his peers connected to the books.  He would shake his head, making deep eye contact as he responded often with “that’s deep man, that’s deep.”  For six years, I integrated these experiences into my classroom, providing students with rich literature and time to discuss their lives and the books.  

Since then, for over 20 years, I have researched and facilitated youth-led book clubs, both in and out of the classroom, where I use young adult literature to engage students, to elevate their literacies, to create lifelong relationships, and to enhance their emotional and social development in culturally affirming ways.  Research tells us book clubs increase students’ reading comprehension—and their appreciation and motivation for reading.  These spaces also enhance students’ perspectives and prepare them to live in diverse societies. They allow young people space to grapple with tough issues of oppression and discrimination, and they provide them with forums to develop their sense of agency and advocacy.  

The success of this work, however, is due to offering youth culturally, neurologically, and linguistically diverse texts that speak to their intersectionalities.  From The New Kid by Jerry Craft which centers the experience of a tween Black artist who disrupts racial microagressions in his new school to I am J by Cris Beam which explores the world of a Latine transgender teen to Dread Nation by Justina Ireland, which centers the life of Jane who not only fights zombies but battles racial and gender discrimination.
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In my recent book, Facilitating Youth-led Book Clubs as Transformative and Inclusive Spaces, I argue that we can use young adult literature and book clubs as places for academic and social-emotional development.  We can also use them as spaces for social justice, where we support students not only in their relationship building but help them to enhance their sense of agency, creating opportunities for us to activate and enhance their inner activist. 

In my own experience, I’ve seen this development time and time again within book club spaces.  While working with young Black and Brown Muslim men in Brooklyn, I witnessed them collectively advocate for themselves after the George Floyd murder, and while reading Written in the Stars by Aisha Saeed, they also advocated for the women in their lives.  I’ve seen this while reading Scythe by Neal Shusterman with an international group of students who collaborated online via zoom around ways to help vulnerable populations during the pandemic while also sharing strategies for getting more young adults to vote.  I have worked with culturally and linguistically diverse young women in the Lower East Side of Manhattan who talked about taking more activist roles not just in their families and school communities but within their friend circles as well.  We shared conversations from how to resist bullying to dismantling systemic racism and white supremacy.  
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In Facilitating Youth-led Book Clubs as Transformative and Inclusive Spaces, teachers will learn how to integrate book clubs into secondary schools with the purpose of nurturing students’ literacies, critical consciousness, and social-emotional development.  I provide educators with resources for creating and sustaining book clubs that serve as critical forums where adolescents can develop as readers while simultaneously working to build relationships with their peers.  Grounded in culturally sustaining pedagogies and healing-centered engagements, I offer suggestions for facilitation approaches that embody humanizing practices.  I also include practical strategies from sample lesson plans and reflective questioning techniques to suggestions for diverse young adult literature that connects to our students’ intersectional identities.  In addition to practical strategies, I center the voices of students who have participated in book clubs, sharing their experiences as they engaged with texts and each other.  Most importantly, I discuss how we can use young adult literature and books to center joy, where students have opportunities to connect with one another, to inspire, and to laugh.  

Book clubs, whether small or large, will most certainly be challenging but the risks are worth the benefits as we collectively work for equity within our school communities. In 1857, Frederick Douglass told us that “if there is no struggle, there is no progress,” and 150 years later, our current abolitionist warrior Bettina Love tells us “to want freedom is to welcome struggle” (p. 9). Pedagogies and support systems grounded in equity are not easy, but they are a must.  We must remember to ground our work in love—and consider ourselves as what Ginwright coins as “soul rebels,” where we work on challenging “conventional educational and political strategies” and embark on journeys that allow us “to discover practices that heal and transform classrooms, organizations, and communities”.  Our healing as humans, as members of a collective, must be entrenched in social justice. That change can be housed in book clubs where we begin and end with the heart and with radical love.  And so I close out this blog today with visions of joy. Joy for book clubs; joy for texts and conversations; joy through laughter and friendships; joy in imagining and creating innovative and equitable spaces; and joy in the hope for our future. 

(Note that this book comes with a supplementary website where teachers can access resources and materials:  https://educateforaction.com/resources-from-the-book.  To obtain a copy and get a 15% off discount, please enter the code FRINGES, using this website:  https://www.tcpress.com/facilitating-youth-led-book-clubs-as-transformative-and-inclusive-spaces-9780807767504.  Offer expires on 1/31/2023.)  
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Surfacing:  The Toe Tag Monologues and YA Literature by Dr. Gretchen Rumohr

12/7/2022

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Gretchen Rumohr is Chief Curator of YA Wednesday.  She serves as a professor of English and Writing Program Administrator at Aquinas College, where she teaches writing and language arts methods.   She is also a Co-Director of the UNLV Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature. She lives with her four girls and a five-pound Yorkshire Terrier in west Michigan.
Surfacing:  The Toe Tag Monologues and YA Literature by Dr. Gretchen Rumohr
Whew!  It has been a busy couple of weeks which has paused some blogwork.  Now, in the midst of exam week I can take a quick breath and reflect on my NCTE/ALAN experience in Anaheim.
I've been fortunate to work with colleagues Steven Bickmore, Shelly Shaffer, and Steffany Maher on a book project that focuses on the Toe Tag Monologues, a greater Las Vegas dramatic troupe founded by R. Byron Stringer. Focusing on diverse youth, the Toe Tag Monologues address youth trauma that often results in deaths of marginalized students. Currently, we are drafting a book about how Stringer's monologues can be used in tandem with Young Adult Literature in secondary classrooms.  The writing has been interesting and seems to evolve the more we know about young people and the challenges they face.
Too many students in our classrooms are marginalized through bullying, neglect, abuse, racism, or other issues that they can't find ways to understand or express. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated many of these problems. In an equitable society, we should attend to the social and emotional needs of young people and empower them to dream instead of simply cope with their trauma. We worry that our students are shouting into the dark–that their needs aren't being heard, understood, amplified, and attended to.  How do we recognize our students’ stories--ALL of their stories--and also make space to meet their needs? These issues are real, and teachers must be empowered to broach these difficult topics.  Too often the topics are censored, even for students who are, in reality, living and experiencing these situations. 

We were fortunate to have R. Byron Stringer serve as our keynote.  He was able to provide more information on the Monologues and moved us toward meaningful discussion.

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We had a chance to explain how the Toe Tag Monologues can equip teachers to approach youth trauma.  We also aimed to connect Byron's work with well-known Young Adult authors.  At our roundtables with Matt de la Peña, Padma Venkatraman, Bill Konigsberg, and Ellen Hopkins, we asked authors to describe some of the most impactful responses from readers that they have received; to share words of encouragement for teachers considering using “taboo topics” in their classrooms; and to reflect on how their own books connect to taboo topics.  Those attending the session had the chance to talk about their favorite YA books related to various traumas, their questions about addressing various traumas in the classroom, and questions for the author about using their work or addressing certain traumas.
One observation I continue to make is that most Young Adult authors are eager to meet not only their readers, but the teachers who support their work through book talks, classroom libraries, literature circles, and meaningful whole-class reads.  I walked away from this session feeling empowered to continue these conversations–and am ready to finish writing this book!  
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ALAN Workshop 2022 Excitement:  Tips for Newcomers by Dr. Gretchen Rumohr

11/16/2022

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Well, everyone! Today is the day!  NCTE2022 is finally happening–and that also means that YA lovers will gather for the ALAN Postconvention Workshop. 

When I first started going to NCTE, people would tell me to attend ALAN.  I would roll my eyes.  “Me?  With my busy schedule?  I can’t take two more days for travel.”  As time went on, though, I heard more and more about this incredible workshop–that I’d be able to meet authors, listen to thought-provoking keynotes and panels, and receive the HUGE MAGIC BOX OF BOOKS.

I have to say, the virtual ALAN workshops were productive and interesting–especially since I was able to bake pies while watching panels.  But this year, I am eager to reconnect face-to-face with colleagues, open that book box in that ballroom, and learn even more about rising YA authors and their stories.
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For some of you new to the workshop, the ALAN community has advice!  Here are some pointers from the Facebook ALAN group.  And if you aren’t registered for the workshop this year, plan on attending in Columbus, Ohio for 2023!

Get there early, as Neil Klein advises.  There will be many other attendees eager to receive their programs, open their boxes, and stake out a spot in the ballroom.
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Be prepared to pack your books, or to ship your books home.  Now, there’s a bit of debate about this–some prefer to ship books media mail (like me), some prefer to ship books priority, and others pack an extra suitcase for a carry-on.  In case you are wondering, there will be shipping options close to the workshop.

Get ready to receive some books from authors you know well and some authors you may not be familiar with. This will be true for everyone–and everyone’s boxes will be different.  Daria Lynn breaks it down for us:  “You won't get everything you hope for and it may not all be for the grade level you work with. Please be gracious. Each publishing company DONATES those books but not every company can give 500 of every book. Plus, part of the fun is trading with other people.”  #ALAN22Trades is one way that you can trade with others.
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Be sure to attend the Sunday evening reception (5-7:30 at the Hilton) and be social. You’ll be able to meet other ALAN attendees, play YA trivia, and meet your favorite authors. Jordan Sonnenblick reminds us: “Please don’t be shy.  The authors WANT to meet you.” Speaking as a true introvert, these events can seem overwhelming at times–however, I have found that the excitement of meeting ALAN authors makes for a rather friendly reception atmosphere.  Make a point to be there and introduce yourself to a few other people.  You’ll see them next year, and the year after that, and the year after that.  This workshop is where some lasting friendships are made.  Do your best to be social!  You won’t regret it.
Dress for comfort.  ALAN is about relaxing, connecting with others, and going wild about all of these new YA books.  It’s unnecessary to dress formally in this atmosphere.  Bring those jeans and yoga pants!  The conference room may be cold, so bring a sweater.

As I write this post, I am frantically checking my flight updates, crossing my fingers that this Midwest snowstorm holds off just two more hours so I can get on that plane.  See you all in Anaheim for NCTE22 and ALAN22!

Photo credit to Noah Schaffer–who will be dearly missed at this year’s workshop!
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The Role of Literacy Within YA Texts by Dr. Brady L. Nash

11/9/2022

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Continuing the conversation begun by Michelle Falter a few weeks ago, we welcome  Brady L. Nash to the blog today to consider how characters' own literacies should be considered when we study YA texts.

Dr. Nash is an Assistant Professor of English Language Arts at Miami University (Ohio) and a former secondary English teacher. In his teaching and research, he focuses on the preparation of future teachers through critical approaches to ELA curriculum and instruction.
The Role of Literacy Within YA Texts by Dr. Brady L. Nash
Young adult literature is one of the few genres of literature in which the genre is explicitly defined by the age of the characters and the anticipated readers (For more, see Michelle Falter’s recent post on this website exploring the definition of YA). This genre construction creates a rhetorical situation in which adult writers compose worlds for youth with a mind to how young people - specifically - make meaning with the text and with characters. Each young adult text represents and contributes to an imagined version of how the world does or could work. 

Within the worlds, lives, and activities of characters depicted in YA, there is a wealth of literacy practices on display. Characters read novels in their English classes, blog in their freetime, write in diaries and writer’s notebooks, compose songs, lyrics, videos, watch TV, read poetry. They do all of the literate things that people in the world do. This raises the question for teachers as to how YA texts represent literacy for students, and how YA texts teach students something about the way literacy operates in the world. 

Below, I consider several texts in which the literacy practices of the characters play an important role in their lives and in the stories told within the texts. Considering the role of literacy within YA texts could be something for teachers to consider as they choose which books to recommend to students or as they help students pick books that may connect to their own literacy practices. This topic could also be one that teachers invite students to explore, analyze, or consider as part of larger class discussions, projects, or activities.
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​Gabi, a Girl in Pieces by Isabel Quintero is a novel told through the protaganist’s (Gabi) diary entries. In this sense, every word on the page functions as a showcase and extension of her literacy practices. Gabi takes creative writing courses, reads and writes poetry, mediates her life experiences through her personal writing, and dreams of attending The University of California Berkeley as an English major. Gabi also navigates her experience as a Mexican American within a culture of literature that has not traditionally celebrated writing from people who look like her and challenges related to others’ perceptions about her weight. Each of these experiences are told to us through writing (writing that exists both in the world of the novel and the world we live in). Writing is not only the medium for the novel, but also much of its content, as we consider how Gabi uses her writing both in and outside of school to make sense of herself and of the world.
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​On the Come Up, the highly anticipated follow-up to Angie Thomas’s heralded young adult novel, The Hate U Give, follows Bri, a teenage rapper living in the aftermath of her father’s murder and her mother’s recovery from addiction. Like Starr in The Hate U Give, Bri attends an elite, predominantly white high school; after being targeted and assaulted by security guards at school, Bri writes a song about the incident that goes viral, bringing her more attention as a lyricist, rapper, and activist than she had bargained for, with students at the school, neighborhood gangs, and the media all taking notice and reacting. Although much could be said about the ins and outs of the story, the role occupied by Bri’s writing and music production highlights the powerful impact of words and art to spark action - and re-action.

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​Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell follow’s Cath’s life as a first year student at The University of Nebraska, with a particular focus on her experiences as a writer of fan fiction stories, many of them erotic, constructed in the world of the Simon Snow book series, loosely based on Harry Potter. The plot is filled with family and social dillemas, and twists and turns related to both. Central conflicts related to Cath’s writing life include the perceived validity of fan fiction in comparison to traditional or normative writing (presuming we don’t count the likes of classic remixes such as Paradise Lost or Hamlet as fan fiction) and the social experiences of Cath as she navigates a literacy practice that, though it brings joy to millions of readers and is deeply important to her, goes largely unrecognized in her life.

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​Rani Patel in Full Effect by Sonia Patel focuses on the life of Rani Patel, an up and coming battle rapper who faces both family and political struggles as her Moloka'i community in Hawaii battles for water rights in the face of corporate developments. Rani’s Gujrati heritage and family culture leave her feeling a bit stuck in-between worlds, not quite at home with the values and experiences of either her family or her peers. To complicate matters further, she is grappling with surfacing memories of abuse from childhood. In the swirling midst of these problems, Rani’s engagement with poetry and rap music - as a listener/reader/writer, and eventually, her own performances, serve as powerful forces for her as she deals with this array of personal and political challenges, helping her to develop a sense of self in a world that has been anything but inviting of her. 

In each of these novels, writing, reading, and varied forms of multimodal literacy play important roles in the lives of the characters and the progression of the plots. They each showcase a possibility for literate engagement outside of the narrow confines of school walls, standardized tests, or the next grade. They showcase the intimacy of literacy to our lives and just might serve as possible models of ways of being literate in the world.
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Transgender Awareness Week: Mourning, Empathy…and Maybe Even Some Joy by Dr. Sam Morris

11/2/2022

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​We welcome Sam Morris to YA Wednesday today!  Thank you, Sam, for helping us to understand how to incorporate transphobia awareness into our teaching of YA Literature.

Dr. Morris is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Beaufort. She is also the program coordinator for the B.A in English, with Secondary ELA Licensure. Her current research focus is the role that YA can play in encouraging adolescent empowerment and agency.

Transgender Awareness Week: Mourning, Empathy…and Maybe Even Some Joy by Dr. Sam Morris 

This year, the week of November 13th-19th is Transgender Awareness Week. November 20th is also the annual Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day to honor and to mourn those who have lost their lives due to anti-transgender violence. As a trans woman, I must admit that—in this current social and political climate—I’d like to be a little less visible.

I discovered that I was trans later in life. Ironically, I may never have discovered this truth about myself had it not been for a certain YA author’s remarks during the summer of 2020. As I move forward in a world that grows stranger and more hostile every day in a body that grows finally more familiar and comfortable every day, I realize that I am the only trans person that many of my colleagues and students know.

Although that reality is rapidly changing! According to the UCLA Williams Institute, there are 1.6 million folks over the age of thirteen who identify as transgender in the United States; one in five are adolescents between the ages of thirteen and seventeen. When I think about Transgender Awareness Week, I think about the joy that results in finding out who you are, and I think about how important empathy is in all of our lives. In The Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick provides several axioms that she argues are central to understanding queerness; the first of those axioms is, “People are different from each other” (22). If you are happy with the sex that you were assigned at birth, there is no requirement for the person next to you to be similarly happy. But that’s only one piece of what it means to be trans.
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What does it mean, then, to be trans? As C.N. Lester puts it in Trans Like Me, “It seems to have far less to do with gender than it does with broader issues of empathy and humility, and a willingness to understand that we are each the experts on our own lives” (37). When we truly understand Sedgwick’s first axiom, we begin to see the pain and suffering from which many youths suffer because of the rigidity of a social system that is more arbitrary than perhaps many would care to admit. Instead of asking ourselves how many trans children, adolescents, and adults are out there, I think we should be asking how many more trans folks are out there? How many people continue to hide who they are or are simply never able to make that discovery? Fighting transphobia is something that we must do, and we fight transphobia the same way that we fight racism, xenophobia, religous persecution, and homophobia: knowledge and action. Censorship has become one of the key themes of 2022. While others seek to take books out of the hands of adolescents, here are some books that I suggest putting into their hands.
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Becoming Nicole (2015) - Amy Ellis Nutt
Nicole Maines played Dreamer, the first transgender superhero, on CW’s Supergirl (2015). A few years before appearing in Supergirl as well as cowriting Dreamer’s comic-book debut in Superman: Son of Kal-El (2021) and starring in the vampire film Bit (2019), Maines and her family were the topic of Amy Ellis Nutt’s book Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family. The book is an account of Maines’s realization that she was a trans girl and her family’s fight for Maines to receive appropriate medical treatment and social acceptance. 

 “If there is an inner distress,” Nutt writes about transgender children and adolescents, “it arises from knowing exactly who they are, but at the same time being locked into the wrong body and therefore being treated by others as belonging to one gender when they really feel they are the opposite. The dysfunction arises not from their own confusion, but from being made to feel like freaks or gender misfits'' (29). Nutt’s work helps to frame both how damaging and confusing ill-informed narratives about being trans can be and how helpful YA novels that feature trans characters will become.

Cemetery Boys (2020) - Aiden Thomas
Yadriel is a member of a Latinx community of brujx, who value traditions, many of which involve gendered roles and spaces. When Yadriel begins to live as a boy (i.e., transmasc), he is denied the ritual induction for a brujo. Yadriel is convinced, however, that he deserves to be blessed by Lady Death as a brujo. Should it take multiple demonstrations of magic and saving an entire community from destruction to be gendered correctly? Perhaps not, but that is the quest that Yadriel must undertake. Thomas’s message of community echoes a common theme in YA that features trans protagonists: the concept of being enough to occupy certain spaces. Parents, family, friends, teachers, classmates, pastors, lawmakers, career professionals, and virtually every other person on this planet can be a source of contestation for transgender adolescents. The site of confusion and denial most common amongst trans youths? Themselves. 

Trans youths need allies because figuring out how to be trans at the same time as figuring out how to be you is difficult enough without anyone else making it more difficult. When adults cease trying to restrict and legislate trans youths out of existence, the real work of an empathetic and access-oriented society can truly begin.
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Can’t Take that Away (2021) - Steven Salvatore
An irony of being a trans child, adolescent, or adult is the assumption that all trans people understand what it means to be trans. On the one hand, transphobes are so sure of their position; on the other, the journey to understanding what it means to be trans for each individual can take a lifetime. While many trans people may find their truest self at the other end of a traditional binary, many find who they are at a point somewhere else on the gender continuum. Others still find their identity to be an ever-shifting conception of gender—a further “queering” of gender. This process of discovery comes under even greater scrutiny in childhood and adolescence, when adults are eager to reduce young people’s decisions about identity to “phases” that aren’t worth serious consideration.

The opening scene of Salvatore’s Can’t Take that Away demonstrates the instability at play here. After Carey, a genderqueer adolescent, makes an interpretation of Holden Caulfield that involves a comment on “the plight of the straight cisgender bro,” his antagonist responds, “You don’t know shit. Are you gonna let he/she/it talk to me like that, Mr. Kelly?” (4). In this opening chapter, Salvatore collapses multiple complex debates about identity into the experience of a single adolescent. What readers must remember is that every trans child or adolescent has to negotiate these debates every day. The transphobic classmate, meanwhile, has no complexity to negotiate; even the teacher, who must negotiate between supporting LGBTQ+ students and keeping his job, only has the one complexity to negotiate.

Carey is not sure who he is, just that he is not part of the traditional gender binary. This uncertainty should be perfectly fine if adolescence is truly a time to wrestle with questions of identity. The central conflict of Can’t Take that Away is what happens when Carey is cast as Elphaba in the high school’s production of Wicked. Salvatore explores the issues that being genderqueer can present, but not at the expense of queer joy. 

Victories Greater than Death (2021)/ Dreams Bigger than Heartbreak (2022) - Charlie Jane Anders
Charlie Jane Anders’s Unstoppable series is a showcase of what empathy looks like when it is valued or devalued. Tina is no ordinary human; she is the reincarnation of Captain Argentian of the Royal Fleet, a legendary intergalactic war hero. Whisked away from Earth and forced to choose Tina’s human body or Argentian’s alien body (and memories!), Tina begins to wonder whether she is truly trapped in the wrong body or not. Meanwhile, while the Royal Fleet may see the definition of “the right body” differently from the transphobes on Earth, they still lack empathy for those who do not look like them–i.e., alien species who do not possess humanoid-shaped bodies. Anders’s work of science-fiction and fantasy is an educative experience in intersectionality.

“To be trans,” Lester writes, “you have to be surer than you’ve ever been, because being trans is what you are when you’ve exhausted every other option” (42). When Tina brings some of Earth’s “best and brightest” onto the ship, she meets Elza, a transfemme girl. Elza, having been exiled by her parents and then by a hacker collective, finds community, friends, and love in the midst of a galactic war. In the sequel, Dreams Bigger than Heartbreak, Elza becomes one of the narrators. Now that the reader can experience Elza’s point of view, they can see that, even in space, the trauma of Earth and its many transphobes does not suddenly go away. Learning to live in one’s body is difficult enough; it is a victory to be celebrated, not demonized.

Nicole Maines provided Nutt with these thoughts at the end of Becoming Nicole: “I do not go through life thinking, ‘I’m trans, I’m trans, I’m trans,’ on repeat. I love bingeing on Netflix, I’m obsessed with food and video games, and I can’t stand weather below freezing. I don’t want to say my life is just like any other eighteen-year-old girl’s, though” (qtd. in Nutt 263). During this Transgender Awareness Week, I’ll be thinking about why a trans girl’s life—or the life of a trans boy, a nonbinary adolescent, a genderqueer adolescent, or an intersex adolescent—has to be different than any other adolescent’s life. One thing I know for sure: those trans adolescents? Whether you know it or not, they are students in your classrooms right now.

References
Anders, C. (2022). Dreams bigger than heartbreak. Tor Teen.
Anders, C. (2021). Victories greater than death. Tor Teen.
GLAAD. (n.d.) Transgender day of remembrance. GLAAD. https://www.glaad.org/tdor
GLAAD. (2022). Transgender awareness week. GLAAD. https://www.glaad.org/transweek
Lester, C.N. (2018) Trans like me: Conversations for all of us. Seal Press.
Nutt, A. (2015). Becoming Nicole: The transformation of an American family. Random House.
Salvatore, S. (2021). Can’t take that away. Bloomsbury YA.
Sedgwick, E. (1990). Epistemology of the closet. University of California Press.
Thomas, A. (2020). Cemetery boys. Swoon Reads.
Williams Institute. (2022) How many adults and youth identify as transgender in the United 
States?. UCLA School of Law Williams Institute. https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/ 
publications/trans-adults-united-states/

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Remembering Gary Paulsen for Nightjohn by Stephanie Robillard

10/20/2022

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Stephanie Robillard (she/her) is finishing on her dissertation at the Graduate School of Education at Stanford, studying Race Inequality and Language in Education (RILE) with a focus on English Teacher Education. Her doctoral research addresses the ways Black girls and their  teachers navigate classroom conversations about enslavement in the United States. Prior to studying at Stanford, Stephanie served as a middle school teacher, librarian and as a lecturer in the School of Education at UC Berkeley, where she earned her Master’s Degree in Education.  Stephanie currently serves as Board  Co-chair of the ELATE Graduate Strand.
Remembering Gary Paulsen for Nightjohn by Stephanie Robillard
October 13, 2022 marked the one year anniversary of Gary Paulsen’s passing. He was a young adult literature lumanari, probably best known for his wilderness survival novel, Hatchet. However he will always be a hero to me because of his lesser known book, Nightjohn. 
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Published in 1993, Nightjohn is the lyrical story of Sarny, an enslaved girl, who learns to read and the consequences that follow. In fewer than 100 pages, and less than an hour on audio, Paulsen documents the violence inherent to enslavement in the United States while balancing it with the joy of learning and literacy. 
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At the time of the book’s publication, there were very few young adult novels that addressed enslavement in the United States. Paulsen originally wanted to write a book about Sally Hemings, the woman who was “owned, raised, and subsequently used by Thomas Jefferson without the benefit of ever drawing a single free breath” (p.7). However, while reading narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, Paulsen became interested in the ways enslaved people engaged in fugitive literacy practices, that is, how they learned to read despite the risk of dismemberment should they be caught. 
Most books with themes of racial inequality include a sympathetic white character who supports or fights on behalf of those oppressed. The uniqueness of Paulsen’s Nightjohn is that there are no white characters who serve as allies to the enslaved. This is a remarkable feature. In fact, the only white character in the novel is Waller, the violent enslaver whom Sarny calls, “dog droppings and pig slop and worse things yet” (p.10). Unlike texts that include heroic white characters with whom white readers can align, Nightjohn forces all readers to align with the enslaved or the enslaver. 
In Nightjohn, we witness the cruelty and depravity inherent to enslavement in the United States. Most young adult books about enslavement sidestep the explicit violence by which enslavers held their position. Paulsen does not shy away from this, particularly when describing the consequences of violating the rules of the plantation. In an interview with Minneapolis Public Radio, Paulsen discussed his decision stating, “this book is, is the truth… It is rough and it has some hard things. But it happened to 12 year old girls, and it happened to kids, and so kids should be able to know about it. It’s very important to me.” 

What stands out to me the most about Nightjohn is the way that Paulsen incorporates themes of resistance. The laws that governed an enslaved person’s life, the Slave Codes, restricted freedoms in multiple ways. Delie, a mother-figure, prays for freedom, whispering into a kettle so as not to be heard. She tells Sarny never to tell anyone because it was illegal to pray. Pawley, a young man, visits a girl at another plantation overnight - leaving each night without permission, exercising control over his own body. Sarny understands that it is illegal for her to learn to read and write, yet she continues to desire and seek out this knowledge. John knows it is illegal for him to teach, and yet he continues to do so because, as he says, “We all have to read and write so we can write about this—what they doing to us. It has to be written” (p. 58). Through these multiple examples, enslaved characters are shown resisting oppressive laws and acting as agents of their own liberation.

My students greatly enjoyed reading Nightjohn. They appreciated Paulsen’s attention to language, as he incorporates elements of Black English into the dialogue. I recall one student saying, “I’ve never read a book where they talk like us.” Students also rejoiced at the conclusion, even as Sarny remains enslaved. At the end of the unit, I would always ask students if they liked the book. Given the challenging content, some students would say no they did not like the book. However they always said they were glad to have read it. 
​
Almost thirty years later, Nightjohn remains an important teaching text for me. While my middle school students have been replaced by credential candidates, I continue to teach the novel as it raises additional questions that are essential for them to consider. Whose stories are allowed to be told? Who should author them? At what grade is reading about racialized violence appropriate? Who is protected from hard histories and to what end? These are questions teachers must contend with, especially with the increase in book banning and anti-CRT legislature.
In the years since Nightjohn’s release, other books have been published that are equally powerful in their representation of enslavement. Sharon Draper’s Copper Sun, and Armstrong Dunbar’s Never Caught and Kwame Alexander’s The Door of No Return or Yuval Taylor’s anthology, Growing Up in Slavery: Stories of Young Slaves as Told by Themselves are a few. Given the brevity of Nightjohn, it would pair nicely with these or with Octavia Butler’s Kindred or even The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. I believe it continues to have a place in the classroom. 
​
Gary Paulsen will always be remembered for Hatchet. However, in my heart, his greatest work is that of Nightjohn.
 
Books Mentioned: 
Alexander, K. (2022), The Door of No Return. Little. 
Butler, O. E. (2004). Kindred. Beacon Press. 
Draper, S. M. (2008). Copper sun. Simon and Schuster. 
Douglass, F. (2014). Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Other Works. Simon and Schuster. Dunbar, E. A. (2017). Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge. Simon and Schuster. 
Paulsen, G. (2009). Hatchet. Simon and Schuster. 
Paulsen, G. (2011). Nightjohn. Laurel Leaf. 
Taylor, Y. (2007). Growing up in slavery: Stories of young slaves as told by themselves. Chicago Review Press.
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    Dr. Gretchen Rumohr
    Chief Curator
    Gretchen Rumohr is a professor of English and department chair at Aquinas College, where she teaches writing and language arts methods.   She is also a Co-Director of the UNLV Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature. She lives with her four girls and a five-pound Yorkshire Terrier in west Michigan.

    Dr. Steve Bickmore
    ​Creator and Curator

    Dr. Bickmore is a Professor of English Education at UNLV. He is a scholar of Young Adult Literature and past editor of The ALAN Review and a past president of ALAN. He is a available for speaking engagements at schools, conferences, book festivals, and parent organizations. More information can be found on the Contact page and the About page.

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