Navigating Our Way: The Role of Human Geography and Globalization In the Middle School English Language Arts Classroom by Bird Cramer

 
​We happily welcome Bird Cramer for  YA Wednesday today.  An upper level teacher and coordinator of curriculum and instruction, Bird teaches a little bit of everything and designs curriculum at a small independent school in the Finger Lakes Region of Upstate New York. Hold on to your hats!  Bird will be sharing methods--and texts--that help our students consider histories of human geography, and ways that they can advocate for a better world.

Navigating Our Way: The Role of Human Geography and Globalization In the Middle School English Language Arts Classroom 
​Bird Cramer

With every year, I become slightly more adept at looking at the needs of my middle school students, my school, the community, the country, and our global community. These lenses create a curriculum that reflects diverse and sometimes diverging interests. My constantly curious middle schoolers want to understand how their actions impact the world around them but can get lost navigating the way. In the past few years, I spent a great deal of time weaving pathways between the past, present, and future of our planet and with the novels we read. 

As teachers, we know the importance of having the vocabulary to define the wide perspectives of our world. Globalization and human geography may not be terms we think of as being in our classrooms but they are in everything we do. Human Geography is, as defined by Wikipedia, the study of humans and their relationships with communities, cultures, economies, and interactions with the environment through studying their relations with and across locations. Globalization is completely intertwined with human geography, one guiding the other until it is becoming harder to pull them apart. For our students, the pull is almost negligible. 

The ELA classroom is one of the best places to discuss these interactions as literature is always the gateway. How else do we explore a novel but through its people and their interactions with one another? We cannot separate the characters from their settings, cultures, and communities. By combining a choice chapter or two of a trade book with a class novel and new vocabulary, we can provide our students with another way to look at themselves, their surroundings, and their fellow humankind. This post combines new titles with ones that have proven themselves over the years.

I start this exploration with the same way that NCTE started this year, with The 1619 Project: Born On The Water by Nikole Hannah-Jones and Renée Watson and illustrated by Nikkolas Smith. This book is a profound reminder of the effects unchecked globalization has on populations around the world and the impact of centuries of forced human migration. The classroom question of tracing your ancestral land carries a heavy weight for so many students when your ancestors were bought and sold. However, this is the narrative that way too many of our schools teach students. This book corrects that narrative and teaches the bitterness and the cost of unchecked greed on our humanity. 

Next year, I will follow 1619 with a chapter from Globalization: Why We Care About Faraway Events by Carla Mooney and illustrated by Sam Carbaugh. It is geared towards middle school students and paves the way for substantial connections.  Divided into seven chapters, the colorful pages are full of sidebars, comics, QR codes, and primary sources. Chapters exist independently and can be used to match specific fiction titles in the classroom. The book itself breaks globalization into easily digestible topics such as money, trade, laws, cultures, and the future of globalization. Each chapter ends with a series of discussion questions that pair easily with novels. ​

Chapter Six, “Crossing The Cultural Divide”,  weaves together the causes of cultural globalization and their effects on local cultures from dress and food to languages and war, and ends with cultural extinctions. This chapter can fit with almost any novel in today’s classroom, the second being Ann Clare LeZotte’s Show Me A Sign. Set in 1805, Show Me A Sign is an incredible book for a multitude of reasons, one of which being that, by page 39, LeZotte tackles the evolution of a language, the English colonization of Wampanoag (Massassachusettes) as well as the biases against freed slaves and the Wampanoag themselves as they try to take back the land that was promise by the Massassachuesttes government. All at the same time, LeZotte’s heroine, Mary Lambert questions her privilege of living on land that, while being in her family for over one hundred years, may not be her land at all. Before she can continue further on this journey, she is kidnapped for “scientific endeavors' ' as Mary is one of many on Martha’s Vinyard who descended from deaf forebearers. This book traces the results of so many far away events and how they all coalesced to form the creation of The United States of America.

The Wall: Growing Up Behind The Iron Curtain by Peter Sis is the brilliantly illustrated memoir of his childhood and adolescence in Cold War Prague, a time which highlights a large shift in globalization. Cleverly disguised as a picture book, the sophisticated subject matter meant my middle schoolers poured over the pages as it greatly helped them understand the global impact of the Iron Curtain and The Cold War. This book is an excellent example of an antithesis of cultural globalization while also aiding to clarify a social and political moment in history that can be difficult for students to understand. 

Naomi Shihab Nye’s Voices In The Air: Poems For Listeners contains free verse poems that touch down on all continents except Antarctica. She travels the world through the eyes of activists, authors, artists, and disruptors that span centuries and includes biographical notes at the end of the book. She merges both past and present, effortlessly bringing historical figures forward to meet wars, refugees, and her own people in Jerusalem. She walks many roads from activist to friend and her prose engulfs us like the oceans she travels across. Her collection is human geography in lyrical form and crosses so many cultural divides. 
​
American Border Culture Dreamer: The Young Immigrant Experience From A To Z by Wendy Ewald is the result of a public installation in Philadelphia where she collaborated with eighteen high school students who were first or second generation immigrants to the United States. Each page contains original artwork and text designed and written by the subject(s) of the photo. The work covers issues close to the artists’ hearts while also introducing how these universal themes intermingle with cultural, political, and social experiences of transitioning to living in.a new country. The issues range from being a DREAMer to the corruption in Tajikistan in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union (see The Wall) and the wearing of cultural apparel in a new home country. 

Another chapter in Globalization, “In The Name Of The Law'', discusses The UN Human Rights and The International Court of Justice, which pairs well with American Border Culture Dreamer and Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamad’s When Stars Are Scattered, a graphic novel memoir that gives students a window into the lives of Omar and his brother Hassan, who spent 15 years living in the Dadaad UN Refugee Camp complex in Kenya.  It can also be used to discuss The Bridge Home by Padma Venkatraman and the other ten phenomenal books in Marshall George’s Around The World YA Wednesday blog post.  

Clean water is such a precious commodity both nationally and internationally as illustrated in When Stars Are Scattered and The Bridge Home. Nancy Castaldo, who has authored many STEM books, will release When The World Runs Dry in January of 2022. This book examines the effects of globalization on the water cycle and how it creates human migration in the name of drinkable water.  She also centers on water issues in the United States and there are some incredible fiction books that pair well with these moments, my favorite being We Are Water Protectors by Carole Lindstrom and illustrated by Michaela Goade. My sixth graders were inspired to find environmental activists their own ages from their own country. Goade’s illustrations pulled them and the combination of the illustrations and text created space for students to draw comparisons with water issues in their own communities, communities in the United States, and communities around the world and the traits that bind these communities together. 

Dry by Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman tells the story of a California drought that does not cease to end until the water runs dry. While set in an undisclosed time in the future, the sad truth is that the drought that ravages through Southern California was devastating Cape Town, South Africa, right before the time of publication. The main character, Alyssa, along with her younger brother, are left to find their way through a city engulfed in chaos and violence. This book blurs the lines between science and realistic fiction, an interesting place to hold discussions about or pave the way towards solutions to the water crisis in our country and on our planet.

 After attending NCTE this year, I feel that I must include some multimodal texts. For water and the United States:  flooding, droughts, or pollution problems can now be traced through maps. Human migration has been animated by the brilliant mind of Hans Rosling, a co-founder of Doctors Without Borders. Dr. Rosling created Gapminder, an independent educational non-profit fighting global misconceptions. 

One can find information on innumerable global issues from refugee numbers, water in homes, economic growth, population data,  monthly incomes throughout the world, and global CO2 emissions, all themes tackled in the above mentioned novels. ​

This process continues to ebb and flow with my students’ curiosity about different topics but the commonality of the pull of our place in the world and how globalization plays a role in it continually resurfaces, especially as we dig deeper into social justice issues and the incredible selection of novels written in the past few years. We live in such incredible times. ​

References

Ahmed, S. (2018). Being the change: Lessons and strategies to teach social comprehension. Heinemann. 

Castaldo, N.(2021, November 21). Teaching Climate Change Impacts on Our Food and Water Supply. [Panel Presentation]. Teaching For Climate Justice. 2021 NCTE Annual Convention. 

Common Core State Standards Initiative. (2021, June 28). English language arts standards: history/social studies: 6-8 grade. http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RH/6-8/

Gapminder (2017) Bubble chart of CO2 emissions of united states and cambodia. [Interactive infographic]. Gapminder.org. 

Gapminder (n.d.) Aye family, myanmar: Dollar street. [Interactive Video Set]. Gapminder.org        https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street?active=5fd03e3df2d9500e43590658

George, M. (2021, October 20). Around the world in a dozen ya novels: windows, mirrors, and doors
that show the trials, tribulations, and hope of teens in challenging circumstances. Dr. Bickmore’s YA Wednesday. Retrieved November 18, 2021, from  http://www.yawednesday.com/weekly-posts/around-the-world-in-a-dozen-ya-novelswindows-mirrors-and-doors-that-show-the-trials-tribulations-and-hope-of-teens-in-challenging-circumstances-by-marshal-george.

Human geography. (2021, October 12). In Wikipedia.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_geography

Short, K. (2021, November 21). Exploring The Human Impact of Climate Change. [Panel Presentation]. Teaching For Climate Justice. 2021 NCTE Annual Convention.