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The March Madness Method Part One: Teaching A Group Read of Sports Novels by Dr. Christian Gregory

3/1/2023

Christian Gregory is an Assistant Professor at Saint Anselm College, teaching courses for preservice teachers in methods, pedagogy, the graphic novel, and Young Adult Literature. He has written chapters on the history of both YAL and the graphic novel and published in English Journal, English Education, the Journal of LGBTQ Youth, and the International Journal of Dialogic Pedagogy. His research interests are diversifying the canon, dialogical theory, and queer studies.

The March Madness Method Part One: Teaching A Group Read of Sports Novels by Dr. Christian Gregory

I am an assistant professor at a small liberal arts college in New Hampshire with a large proportion of student-athletes. Of the 1,900 or so students on campus, the college has estimated that 42% of the population are either on a team or play on some intramural sport. And, of course, the college, just one hour out of Boston, resides in the halo of the New England Patriots, the Boston Bruins, and the Red Sox. In a recent class I taught, I gave students the option of designing a short graphic novel chapter. Knowing my class population of student-athletes, I offered the option to render a sports game into graphica. Many returned to their favorite football game by the Patriots, reviewing the footage for stills they could use to shape the narrative for their final project. Needless to say, March isn’t the only month for sports madness at a small college in New England.

Responsive to this population of fans and athletes, I have adjusted my curriculum accordingly. In my course Adolescent Literature, I have been inspired by the work of literacy scholars who trumpet the need for student book selection, which they deem essential for engagement, literacy, and student success (Buehler, 2016). For the instructor, this “savy and strategic matchmaking” (p. 87) is key; yet for some classrooms, teachers may not wish to sacrifice the benefits of collective discussion for small group reads. How then can we allow for student choice while inviting topical conversation?

My response is March Madness pedagogy. I invite students team up for reads in teams of two, three, or four, and select book of interest to them within an All Sports Read (See list of possible titles for your classroom next week, in Appendix I). I do suggest a curated list by the instructor. Last year, I provided titles I thought offered diversity of race, gender, sexuality and culture. Each student was allowed to select from the curated list, and no student was allowed to read alone. This program of study was to ensure another reader of each title in class: to both encourage completion and bolster discussion in small groups. Small group reads in middle and high school are nothing new in curriculum, but whole class discussions on topic may be less so. Were a classroom teacher to take this on as a practice, an all-sports read, I would like to offer a pedagogy that respects the differentiation of titles while embracing common themes.

Consider the Essence or Ontology of the Athlete

One way to invite students into small group discussion is to focus on the athlete and their relation to the sport or their identity as an athlete. I offered my students an introduction to the two opposing ontologies of noted boxers, Muhammad Ali and Jake LoMatta. Joyce Carol Oates (1985) offers that even sports have their own narratives: “Each boxing match is a story, a highly condensed, highly dramatic story--even when nothing much happens: then failure is the story.”

In her book On Boxing, an elaboration of the NYTimes article, Oates highlights the modes and ontologies of several boxers. Two of her descriptions have forever remained in my memory: Muhammad Ali and Jake LaMotta. Each entered matches with a distinct philosophy of the fight, positions suggestive and emblematic of world views. The first, Jake LaMotta entered the ring with the understanding that he would outlast any opponent. As he fought, he became less and less interested in dodging any punch that came his way; instead, he was simply able to endure the throws and jabs of his opponent. He trained for and felt that he could simply outlast his adversary and endure any more pain.

By contrast, Ali was a fighter who predicated his boxing on finesse, on the bob and weave and his capacity to never be hit in the face. Famously he claimed, “My face is so pretty, you don’t see a scar, which proves that I’m the king of the ring by far.” LaMotta accepted the hit took the punishment; in stark contrast, Ali agilely dodged it.

My point here is to present two manners of being of the athlete in sports: one based on the endurance of great pain and the other, based on the extraordinary skill and bravura of it all. I present the students with these images of the face of LaMotta and Ali, each a registration of one’s relation to pain in sport: how one might endure it and how one might avoid it altogether. In my mind, I compare Michael Jordan, Simone Biles, Tom Brady, the Olympic women’s soccer team, and imperturbable mountain climber Alex Honnold to the skills of Ali – a sort of transcendent technical skill that leaves spectators in awe.

By contrast, I offer other extraordinary talents who, while succeeding, nonetheless, endure either physical or psychic pain to succeed. I think of Hall of Famer Mike Webster of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who was known to endure great hits on the field; or Colin Kapernack, who suffered more psychic offences, and Serena and Venus Williams, who like Kapernack, faced racial battle fatigue in the face of systemic oppression, but unlike him, had to contend with the intersectional oppression of sexism. By offering such examples, teachers invite students to judge the protagonist-athletes in their works as demonstrative of one or both of these modes of existence.

Of course, since novels are predicated on conflict and grief, students may situate their main character with LaMotta ontology. Certainly, the YA classic novel, The Chocolate War features a main character who endures the physical beat down on and off the football field. Yet instructors may easily point to other figures, such as Kareen Abdul Jabar, who seem to skillfully manage the conflict on the court with ease, while suffering the blows of systemic racism off.

Next week, I will focus on ways that teachers can guide discussions which focus both on the sport and the overlay of intersectionality, be it gender, race, or sexuality. Come back for Part Two!

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What's the Matter With YOU? by Roy Edward Jackson

2/22/2023

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We welcome Roy Edward Jackson back to the YA Wednesday blog! In the past, Roy has written with Dr. Erinn Bentley. Today is Roy's first solo YA Wednesday post.

Roy Edward Jackson holds degrees in Education, English, and Library Science. He has worked in public education in a variety of roles for over two decades. Currently, he is working on his doctoral research on the rise in LGBTQIA+ book challenges in school libraries. He resides in Pennsylvania with his husband and menagerie of pets.

What's the Matter With YOU? by Roy Edward Jackson

If you decide to go outside and see what is happening turn to page 122...

For many, the first foray into second person point of view most likely occurred in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. One could be in the shoes of a track star or a zombie hunter upon turning to page 122. The book series has captivated young readers for generations. Many reluctant readers are hooked through the books that require the physical act of turning pages forward and backwards to progress the story, and the story changes each time one reads it by making different choices. But for some, the unconscious sliding into the shoes of others through second person point of view may have even more serious impact for the older YA reader. Second person POV is often described by adults as cold and distant. However, for the YA reader, second person can be quite the opposite.

We know through Contact and Intergroup Contact Theory that the more interactions we have with people different than ourselves helps decrease the bullying and marginalization that occurs in society. For many students, the only contact with others vastly different from themselves may occur through literature. The second person POV brings the young reader into a closer connection with others than perhaps any other narrative. Being in the shoes of a character, or having the narrator speak to them through the word /you/, has a powerful emotional impact on the reader. There are various second person POVs that include reader as character, narrator speaking to reader, narrator speaking to other characters in the novel, and second person masking as first to cover trauma. Second person POV is a powerful tool regarding social emotional learning and building empathetic capacity. Novels like Two Boys Kissing, Damage, Booked, and 13 Reasons Why show the power that the word /you/ has in YA literature.

Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan is the story of Harry and Craig who set out to break the world record for longest kiss. Narrated by gay men of the past, the novel isn’t just a story of Queer kids today, but of the struggles from the past for gay, male Americans. The novel vacillates between various POVs but it is the second person POV that is the most powerful, especially for the reader who may not identify as LGBTQIA+. Levithan often uses the /you/ to give readers breathing space to ponder and consider as they are spoken to directly by the narrator. From the first page, the narrator is addressing all young readers. “You can’t know what it is like for us now-you will always be one step ahead,” (1). All kids can read this line and know that they are in a way one step ahead in all forms of progress than a narrator who was a teen in the 1980s. This writerly move to impact young readers continues to the last page. “There will come a time when the stars of your favorite teen TV show will be sixty. There will come a time when you will have the same unalienable rights as your straightest friends,” (195). While the first line clearly encompasses all young readers, it is the second that will engage the social emotional lens of the reader who is not Queer. They can pause, emphasize that while progress has occurred, Queer youth are still without equity. That their rights are still up for debate. This type of writing, addressing the reader through second person, impacts young readers in a most powerful way.

A.M. Jenkins’s young adult novel, Damage, is the story of Austin Reid who is sliding into a deep state of depression. A star football player in his small Texas town who dates one of the most popular and pretty girls in his school, Austin cannot seem to connect with anything or anyone around him. He suffers from depression and is coping through the trauma of his father’s death to cancer. His girlfriend’s father committed suicide and Austin has suicide ideation. Jenkins uses second person in the form of masking as first person. The narrator, Austin, is telling his story to himself. Telling himself the things he cannot face fully. He has stepped outside of himself to fully extrapolate his trauma. Because Austin is a football star, his girlfriend a cheerleader, they are the juxtaposition of the perfect outward life, and internal struggles of mental health and trauma. This allows the reader to slide into the shoes of the characters easier through the second person POV, and thus have a stronger understanding of the mental health struggles of others--particularly those who appear to have a perfect life outwardly, while struggling deeply inwardly.

Kwame Alexander’s young adult novel, Booked, centers around eighth grader Nick Hall. Nick, an African-American young man who would rather spend his time playing soccer than studying. He is particularly averse to reading, much to the dismay of his linguistic professor father. Alexander has crafted a voice so direct, and distant from his circumstances, that as a reader we literally are both the /you/ as addressee and protagonist. There is a clear reason that Alexander chose the second person, and that is because Nick is going through compounded trauma. At the surface level he is in competition with his white best friend and starting to find his first romance more complicated by racial bullying. Deeper below the surface he is watching his family crumble through divorce and feeling abandoned by his mother. He cannot face these compounded trauma’s face on, in first person, so he has chosen to tell his story in the second person as if it’s not fully happening to him. The second person POV, along with a novel written in verse, allow readers of all races to relate to Nick. Young readers will relate to the trauma of divorce regardless of their own experiences with it. In addition, for young readers in predominantly white schools, Booked gives them a window to the experiences of racial bullying through the use of second person in a more connected way.

13 Reasons Why by Jay Asher has been one of the most talked about YA novels in the last decade and a half. As new generations discover the book, it will continue to capture young readers. The novel’s, and author’s personal controversies aside, it merits mention in an examination of the power of second person POV in YA books. Asher’s protagonist, Hannah, speaks from the grave to the other characters in the book, as well as to the readers. Hannah’s suicide, and the implications to the characters she sends her tapes to, have serious impact on the young reader. That great impact comes from the use of the /you/ in the novel. While Hannah tells each recipient how they marginalized and hurt her, the young reader of the novel steps into interesting shoes. They do not step into Hannah’s, rather the reader steps into the victimizers’ shoes and receive how their harmful behavior hurt Hannah. Readers are not empathizing with those that hurt others, rather they come to terms with how they, through the characters in the book, can harm and cause pain to others. It is a powerful place to receive how our behavior hurt others, and that is the precise power of the use of second person in 13 Reasons Why.
Many adult readers find second person point of view difficult to read. They often struggle with how to read, or receive, the use of the word /you/. But with each new generation comes new ways of reading. As more and more kids are taught social emotional learning and social justice, the way they read changes. That makes the power of second person POV in YA books all the more useful. Teaching kids to read with the ability to empathize with the marginalized, those that are hurting, or are othered, is a powerful tool in social emotional learning, and young readers find connections to others they may not have typical contact with in their daily lives through books. These books show how the use of second person can make that connection even deeper as it can force readers to become the /you/ they are reading in literature.

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Reveling in Reading, Space for Safety by Dr. Gretchen Rumohr

2/8/2023

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Dr. 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 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.

Reveling in Reading, Space for Safety by Dr. Gretchen Rumohr

As a teacher of literature, I know that being a reader is the best way for me to improve the literacy of my students. So I read whenever I’m offered the opportunity. My reading has ranged from the very easy (such as Jason Reynolds’s Ghost) to the practical (such as Jeffrey Wilhelm’s Planning Powerful Instruction to the challenging (such as Peter Elbow’s Vernacular Eloquence, a thick, dense book that explores what the spoken word can bring to writing).

And generally I read well, making meaning as I read. I usually “live through” the text, as Louise Rosenblatt would desire. Employing Jeffrey Wilhelm’s evocative, connective and reflective dimensions, I see the story world and its characters, fill in plot gaps to make sense of textual events, and feel myself “living” in the text. Wilhelm calls it “BEing the book.” In the thick of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, I caught myself at the grocery store, looking at all the printed labels, and thinking about what they would look like in that particular story world--all pictures, no words. When reading Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy in the middle of a bitter winter, I basked in the sun that Gary Schmidt created for me, rereading passages that reminded me of the twinkling sea, hot sand beneath my toes, and a salty ocean breeze. Craig Thompson’s graphic novel, Blankets, prompted memories of awakening and experimentation in my youth. I was, in effect, “shaping” each text, just as Rosenblatt would suggest, “draw[ing]on our reservoir of past experience with people and world...participat[ing] in the story…identify[ing] with the characters... [and] shar[ing]their conflicts and feelings (Morawski and Gilbert 11).

As we read, live through, and enjoy books, how do we make sure we’re allowing adequate time for students to process the ways they identify with plot events and related characters? In what ways, for example, can we help students revel in what they are reading yet create space for students who may be living through more difficult events? In what ways can we create safe spaces when, as Wolpow and Askov state, “reading a book or writing a paper may trigger traumatic memories in a student who has suffered from violence and trauma” (607)? How can we make sure students can speak up if they need help?

Here are a few ways that I’ve encouraged processing time and opportunities to reach out for help:

1. Reading on their own terms. How do students read in our classrooms? Do we send them home with nightly reading homework (which I will never, ever, EVER recommend because students don’t really read when this happens)? Do we read together in class? Do we give time for silent reading (or reading with headphones and an audiobook) in class? Regardless, if we are processing a book together as a whole-class read, we need to be aware of the reading method and plan accordingly. If we’re reading as a whole class and come up on a triggering event, it might be time to give a quick warning, or allow a short break afterward, or give students an opportunity to write a bit or turn-and-talk. In other words, be aware of what’s being read, how it’s being read, and how you’re allowing time to think about what’s being read.

2. Responding on their own terms. How do students respond to literature in our classrooms? If students are considering literature that triggers them, they may feel out of control, unable to harness their emotions and reactions. In many ways, bringing a sense of control to the students in how they respond to literature can help. Consider a response assignment that prioritizes the student’s voice and choice. One example: when reading The Outsiders in class and focusing on the essential theme of “what makes a family,” students can curate a soundtrack for the book on that theme.

3. Choosing what’s next. If you are reading a more “triggering” text as a class, consider allowing students to choose their next book from your classroom library. Maybe they will choose a book on the same topic; maybe they will take a “brain break” and choose something completely different. The goal in this instance is to help students take ownership of their reading as well as their responses.

4.Critical witnessing. If a topic is personal to you–is triggering to you, too as the teacher–it’s ok for you to say so. I have never regretted sharing information about my own trauma when discussing relevant texts and topics. In doing so, we turn the classroom power dynamic upside-down, serving as counter-witnesses to each other’s experiences. For those of you interested in learning more about this idea, check out “Writing Wounded” by Elizabeth Dutro.

I have so much more to say about this topic–and don’t worry! I have more prepared for another day. But isn’t it wonderful when our students invest in what they read, bringing those story words to life in ways that become intensely personal to them? It is up to us to encourage that investment by also creating safe spaces for this literary exploration.

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Speculative Fiction for Racial Justice by Dr. Sarah M. Fleming

2/1/2023

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Sarah M. Fleming is a 20-year high school English teacher, president of the Central New York Reading Council and co-founder of the CNY Social Justice League. Her research focuses on critical inquiry instructional methods for implementing anti racist / anti bias pedagogy, specifically as it relates to disrupting the ELA curriculum with young adult literature.

Speculative Fiction for Racial Justice by Dr. Sarah M. Fleming

I grew up on the genres of speculative fiction and the modes of “thought-experimenting” (Oziewicz, 2017): stories within the realms of science fiction, fantasy, horror, dystopia, and the like. I lived amidst pages where I encountered other worlds and characters with supernatural, futuristic or magical powers, spaces where I could feel emboldened and empowered despite my young adult reality of living in an often unwelcoming and unjust world. Reading such stories provided a much-needed escape from reality. Unfortunately, that escape was not equitably available for all readers. As a white, middle-class, cisgendered, heterosexual girl I did not have to look hard to find myself in the stories of my beloved speculative genre. As an ELA teacher for twenty-one years in a predominately white, suburban classroom, I found most of my students did not have to look hard to see themselves either. But for my students of color and those from historically resilient communities, it was much more challenging.

Scholar Ebony Thomas explains that “when people of color seek passageways into the fantastic, [they] have often discovered that the doors are barred” (2019), speaking to the lack of representation in speculative fiction. We have to do more than simply diversify our book collections and curriculum to do the real kind of anti-oppression and anti-racist work needed in our ELA classrooms. Ebarvia (2021) reminds us of self-work teachers and students must engage with in order to do this work, noting that “we must hold space for students to understand and analyze how those systems of oppression work in their own lives” (p. 582). Sinclair (2018) addresses the call to confront systems of oppression and the symptoms of colonization in the ELA classroom. She claims that “literature can help us and our students identify and understand the systems at work in our society… and once we can see them - and see their impact on others - we can confront and dismantle them” (p. 91-92). In his model for Critical Race English Education, Lamar Johnson (2021) advocates for a pedagogy that “explicitly addresses issues of violence, race, whiteness, white supremacy, and anti-black racism within school and out-of-school spaces” (p. 57). And S. R. Toliver (2020) shows us how speculative fiction can be used to serve as testimony and counter storytelling:
Black authors often assume the role of conjuror, using literary and linguistic magic to challenge oppressors and mitigate the everyday violence enacted on Black communities by those who continuously work to fortify our oppression. To invoke an image of justice, some authors transform the real into the fantastic, grounding their stories in the imaginary because justice has not historically been, nor is it currently, defined as our social reality. In this way, some Black authors embed their truths in the make-believe, combining testimony, and counterstory in hopes that readers will bear witness and join the fight for justice.
We must invite our students to join that fight for justice, and we can do so by embedding texts into our curriculum and classroom libraries that center Black voices, experiences, and perspectives as they exist in speculative fiction. What follows is a brief overview of three recent speculative fiction publications: The Getaway (2022) by Lamar Giles, The Weight of Blood (2022) by Tiffany D. Jackson, and Bloodmarked (2022), sequel to Legendborn (2020) by Tracy Deonn. In each case, I suggest that the centering of these texts can prompt the beginning of the work prompted by these scholars in developing a racial literacy and working toward racial justice. But be forewarned of spoilers! While I leave the resolutions unaddressed, there are specific details discussed below that give away plot lines you may wish to avoid knowing about before reading…

The Getaway by Lamar Giles
Jay works as an Immediacy Helper (janitor) at Karloff Country, a Disney World-esque entertainment resort in a near-future America suffering the effects of climate change and subsequent famine. Jay’s family and friends live in Jubilee, the predominantly Black employee’s neighborhood, and they all work across the resort for the mostly white, affluent guests to keep them happy - with service and joy, as is “the Karloff way.” But something has happened in the world outside the Karloff walls; first Jay’s friend Connie and her family all disappear overnight without explanation, then private jets start arriving, and suddenly everyone gets confined to their living quarters while the world erupts in a chaotic, apocalyptic event. When the smoke clears, Jay and his friends are directed to return to work because there are apparently still a small handful of elite guests at the resort who expect things to run as normal. At a celebration event that first night after, it becomes clear to Jay and all the other Helpers that they are now at the mercy of these guests, the Trustees, as the Karloff director explains that “for the duration of the world’s metamorphosis, you will live, as promised, with the award-winning, five star service and joy you’ve come to expect within our walls” (p. 163) - and that such service will be provided to them by Jay and the Karloff employees. An all-too familiar hierarchy of race and class is quickly established, and when that precarious balance is challenged by the Helpers, a horrific and violent consequence is the result.

What ensues is a hellish new reality in which these Trustees have direct control over the Karloff employees by way of threatening harm to them through technological control, because “they invested in service. The same service they'd have gotten if the world wasn’t burning. Anticipating some resistance, they created safeguards…” (p. 170). Jay first witnesses and then suffers the result of such safeguards, and readers watch a new social environment unfold that smacks of the emboldened white supremacy and history of enslavement we fear can still be part of our reality.

The Weight of Blood by Tiffany Jackson
This book is a must-read for fans of Stephen King, and of Carrie in particular. In this case, the prom nightmare takes place in 2014 in a small, southern town, where segregated proms are still a thing and white supremacy remains unchecked. The main character Maddy is bullied for multiple reasons, but most notably for the recent revelation that she has been passing as white since coming to school in the 7th grade. The story line mirrors its predecessor in that the seemingly well-meaning Wendy is looking to absolve herself of guilt and therefore works to set Maddy up as her boyfriend Kenny’s date to the prom. Kenny, the senior, Black football star, carefully navigates what it means to be the tokenized Black friend amongst his peers, while his white girlfriend Wendy and her circle of friends engage in regular microaggressions. After an incident in terrorizing Maddy went viral on social media, prom chair Wendy decides to work toward a unified prom to combat the spotlight put on their school - but the student body’s response is mixed and some students refuse to participate in the “all-together” prom. As students vote to either keep the proms separate or unify them, teacher Mrs. Morgan explains that “combining proms is a start toward restorative justice, community healing, and unity against an archaic practice,” (p. 91). Kenny’s friend Jason bemoans her statement, claiming that prom’s “not supposed to be about all that. Prom’s about tradition!” and what ensues is an important conversion about tradition being rooted in segregation and systemic racism.

Meanwhile, socially powerless Maddy discovers that she is now manifesting new supernatural powers that let her move objects with her mind. Maddy works to hone her powers, just as she and Kenny become friends in the days leading up to the prom. Interspersed throughout the narrative are excerpts from various media outlets: news stories and a podcast that relate the larger tale to the readers. And while readers watch Maddy grow in her powers, they also get a hint at what is to come on prom night (which I won’t spoil for you), where another terror will befall Maddy - and this time, the entire town will pay for their mistreatment of her as Maddy uses her powers in response. In discussing the final events of that fateful night, one podcast interviewee alludes to the role societal racism played in the disaster, noting that Maddy was “an innocent bystander in a long overdue comeuppance for a town holding on to outdated ideologies” (p. 402). The Weight of Blood becomes more than just a horror story, but one that suggests that if such supernatural responses to systemic racism were possible, “if revenge of this magnitude was even a remote possibility, there would be far less incidents of racial injustice in the world” (p. 404).

Bloodmarked by Tracy Deonn
Bloodmarked is the sequel to Tracy Deonn’s novel Legendborn, the story of Bree Matthews. While attending the Early College program at UNC-Chapel Hill, 16-year old Bree first witnesses and then becomes party to magical happenings on campus. Bree discovers she is somehow connected to two magical family lines: that of the fabled King Arthur, and her Wildcrafter ancestors with Root magic. She is drawn into the battle of the Legendborn, who fight as the descendants of the Round Table to protect the world and humankind from monsters of the Shadowborn. In this fight she is Called to be the Scion of King Arthur, destined to lead the Legendborn in the ultimate battle of Camlann. But as she rises to her Arthurian fate, she must also reconcile the manifestations of her Root magic, born out of a history of oppression and enslavement. In Bloodmarked, readers are introduced to a greater understanding of this part of Bree's family history, and how she must work to reconcile her identity as a young Black woman while called to be the heir to King Arthur’s bloodline. When others balk at her legacy as being legitimate, she calls them on it and reminds them that the one who pulls the sword becomes king (which she did) - “unless she looks like me” and saying “when white people say something's not about race, it’s usually because it is and they don’t want to talk about it” (p. 168). Later when Bree and her friends stop at a store in rural Georgia, she immediately understands why the restroom is suddenly “out of order” when she goes to use it: “just a reminder that it doesn't matter what my title is, whose magic I have…” (p. 299). And while she leaves the statement unfinished, the implication is clear to the reader - that no matter how much magical power Bree might have, she must still contend with the racist implications of being Black in spaces characterized by white supremacy.

Later Bree meets Valec at the Crossroads Lounge who warns her to be wary of the promises made to her by the Legendborn Order, reminding her that she is “a daughter of the enslaved” (p. 339). As Bree and her friends elude those in the Order who would wish to stifle her power, they make the acquaintance of other rootcrafters who shelter them at Volition, a former southern plantation and home to the Ancestors. Lu explains that “Volition is both a gravesite and a refuge. A site of mourning and a site of hope” (p. 437). Bree finds refuge at Volition and seeks clarity from those generations of women who came before her, as she prepares to do battle with the one who hunts her.

Speculative Fiction for Racial Justice in the Classroom
In all three texts, readers are asked to contend with characters, settings and storylines that replicate the harsh realities of a social system imbued with facets of white supremacy and elements of anti-Black racism. Black readers and readers of color will recognize themselves and their experiences in the texts, and white readers will be made to better understand and empathize with situations they can only imagine. As stories of speculative fiction, each asks what if? and wonders what could be, if only people were socially and politically empowered they way they might be fantastically, magically so. In prompting readers to question the status quo, the inclusion of such stories in our classrooms aids students in answering the call to fight for justice, and I for one am grateful to these authors for their work.

References
Deonn, T. (20202). Legendborn. Simon & Schuster.

Deonn, T. (2022). Bloodmarked. Simon & Schuster.

Ebarvia, T. (2021). Starting with self: Identity work and anti-racist literacy practices. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 64(5), pp. 581-584.

Giles, L. (2022). The getaway. Scholastic.

Jackson, T. D. (2022). The weight of blood. HarperCollins.

Johnson, L. L. (2021). Critical race English education: New visions, new possibilities. Routledge.

Oziewicz, M. (2017). “Speculative Fiction.” Oxford Research Encyclopedias. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.78

Sinclair, M. N. (2018). “Decolonizing ELA: Confronting privilege and oppression in textual spaces.” English Journal, 107(6), pp. 89-94.

Thomas, E. E. (2019). The dark fantastic: Race and the imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. New York University Press.

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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.

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.

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:

Describe what you think of when you see the color blue.
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.
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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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Stay tuned for information regarding the Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature!

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Surfacing: The Toe Tag Monologues and YA Literature by Dr. Gretchen Rumohr

Dr. Steve Bickmore
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Stay tuned for information regarding the Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature!

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

Dr. Steve Bickmore​Creator and Curator

Co-Edited Books

Archives

Categories

Blogs to Follow

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

Dr. Steve Bickmore
Creator and Curator