Follow us:
DR. BICKMORE'S YA WEDNESDAY
  • Weekly Posts
  • WEEKEND PICKS 2023
  • Monday Motivators 2023
  • Weekend Picks 2021
  • Contributors
  • Bickmore's Posts
  • Lesley Roessing's Posts
  • Weekend Picks 2020
  • Weekend Picks 2019
  • Weekend Picks old
  • 2021 UNLV online Summit
  • UNLV online Summit 2020
  • 2019 Summit on Teaching YA
  • 2018 Summit
  • Contact
  • About
  • WEEKEND PICKS 2023

Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday has a new Feature-- A YouTube Channel

Don't worry, it is easy to find.  Just go to YouTube and search for Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday.

Check Out the YouTube Channel

Exploring Place and Social Class in YAL

1/18/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture
​

​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. 

Picture
Picture
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.
Picture
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.    
Picture
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    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.

    Co-Edited Books

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    June 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014

    Categories

    All
    Chris-lynch

    Blogs to Follow

    Ethical ELA
    nerdybookclub
    NCTE Blog
    yalsa.ala.org/blog/

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly