January 11, 2023

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.   

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. 

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.

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
 

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