Sports Talk, Free Snacks, Good Books: The Paisley Sports Literacy Program By Alan Brown

This week's guest contributors is Alan Brown. Alan is a leader in Sports Literacy. What is sport's literacy? Well, there might be some who trouble the term. That's ok, let's get people thinking. A good place to start is with Alan's book, coedited with Luke Rodesiler entitled Developing Contemporary Literacies through Sports. The book was reviewed in the blog by Dr Dawan Coombs and can be found here.  Alan has also written about this topic in the early days of Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday blog and his contribution can be found here. All of us know adolescents who would rather do than read. Maybe some of us were those kids at one time in our life. Alan helps us consider how we might reach some of these kids through literature. Thanks Alan.

Sports Talk, Free Snacks, Good Books: The Paisley Sports Literacy Program By Alan Brown

​Let me start by sharing a recent text message I sent to Wendell Dunn, a graduate student in the Master of Educational Studies program at Wake Forest University and my co-organizer for the Paisley Sports Literacy Program.
 
“Johnny said you are a scrub and can’t play any basketball. He hopes your [football] tryout went well, though.”
 
Johnny, an eighth grader, was in the middle of snack, just prior to cracking open a young adult novel. On this day, Wendell, a former co-captain of the Wake Forest football team, would not join us because he was returning from training in Miami in preparation for his pro day the following week. Wendell quickly called via Facetime to let Johnny know he stood no chance in a game of one-on-one before wishing him a good day.
 
The most fun Wendell and I have each week is on Thursday afternoon with a group of eighth grade boys whose greatest thrill is talking smack to anyone who will listen, especially when it comes to basketball, football, and video games.

The Paisley Sports Literacy Program

The Paisley Sports Literacy Program is a weekly after-school club for eighth grade boys with an interest in sports. The program meets for an hour and a half each week at Paisley IB Magnet School in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and is intended to support youth through academic, social, and community engagement. The group is sponsored by Bailey Allman, an eighth grade English teacher at Paisley and a graduate of Wake Forest.
 
The primary goals of the Paisley Sports Literacy Program are
 

• to support youth through academic, social, and community engagement,
• to empower students who are interested in sports to read and write for enjoyment,
• to explore social issues that affect the lives of adolescents and young adults through culturally-relevant literature,
• to improve literacy skills and practices that support learning across content areas and promote college and career readiness.

 
Our program is grounded in sociocultural theory in that students develop literacy skills while engaging in activities related to their personal, everyday interests. This consideration is important since the eleventh and twelfth NCTE/IRA standards tell us that students should become active members of a variety of literacy communities while using language to accomplish their own purposes.
 
Our motto is simple: sports talk, free snacks, good books.
 
Our daily agenda consists of accountable talk, a think-write-pair-share activity, and a young adult novel, all for making text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world connections. As you might imagine, what gets students in the door is the sports talk and the free snacks. The fact that they are willing to stick around for the good books is an added benefit. Some days we play basketball after our meeting, which helps with recruitment and motivation.

We also provide unique opportunities for our students, from social events, including attending Wake Forest football and basketball games, to academic and cultural events, including a recent event on the historical legacies of Dick Gregory and Muhammad Ali, to opportunities to share meals with students’ role models, including our etiquette dinner hosted by members of the Wake Forest football team. By the end of the spring semester, we hope to take our students to visit at least one local elementary school, so they can begin to transition from the role of mentees to the role of mentors.
 
Since starting the sports literacy program, we have seen an increase in students’ willingness to participate in class activities as well as improvements in school attendance, benchmark scores, and academic grades, not to mention a decrease in office referrals for many of our students.
 
Yet, one of our biggest challenges remains students’ perceived identities as readers. In 2016, I wrote an article for SIGNAL Journal called “Young Adult [Sports] Literature: Looking Back and Moving Forward.” In that article, I included a quote from a 2016 CNN article about fantasy baseball by sport administration researcher Brendan Dwyer, who suggested: “Sports in general has been a space for men to communicate…and now fantasy sports is an enhanced version of that….I like to equate it to the male version of a book club.”
 
Obviously, this quote is problematic because it implies book clubs are primarily for women, not to mention that sports are primarily for men. Alternatively, we believe in helping our young men see themselves as readers with something important to contribute to literary conversations. We have attempted to counter the notion of reading as a feminine activity by demonstrating to our students the powerful, and relatable, messages found in young adult literature.
 

Robert Lipsyte and The Contender

​Last year, we held a 50th anniversary celebration for Robert Lipsyte’s (1967) classic young adult novel The Contender. Mr. Lipsyte came to Winston-Salem to join the festivities, and his publishers were so impressed that they will soon be releasing a 50th anniversary edition of the book, including a new foreword that includes his thanks to our Paisley students “for keeping alive the spirit of the kid coming up, the contender.”

Last semester, our students spent time reading Tears of a Tiger by Sharon Draper, and we are currently reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie at a time when the author has become a focal point in the news media for sexual harassment against women. The book teaches many lessons, but we are now using Alexie’s personal story as a teaching tool to show our eighth-grade boys the importance of treating all people, and particularly their female counterparts, with dignity and respect. We also want to demonstrate how people’s words and actions can have severe consequences not only for the accused but also, and most importantly, for the victims, whose voices are too often marginalized in such conversations.
 
Ultimately, we have chosen to enter Alexie’s text as part of our after-school sports literacy program because the protagonist, Junior, is a high school basketball player around the same age as our students. Nevertheless, sports are merely the hook to get students interested in the reading. During our conversations, students will also be asked to dig deeper into various social issues, including poverty, racism, homophobia, and disability. 

Through young adult literature, we can engage students in important conversations about the intersections of sport and society through the lens of critical literacy. In our edited book, Developing Contemporary Literacies through Sports: A Guide for the English Classroom, Luke Rodesiler and I have tried to showcase the many ways English teachers can use sports to interrogate the social culture of sports in America.
 
Sports, like schools, are often said to serve as a mirror to the issues we see in the world around us. Young adult literature, then, can be an entry point into these conversations. Some of my favorite books containing the backdrop of sports include Boy21 by Matthew Quick, Slam! by Walter Dean Myers, The Running Dream by Wendelin Van Draanen, and Mexican WhiteBoy by Matt De La Peña. Chris Crutcher, who has also written many outstanding sports-themed novels, will be the keynote speaker for our annual NCTE session entitled “The Intersection of Literacy, Sport, Culture, and Society” in November at the NCTE Annual Convention.

Even books not commonly considered to focus on sports, including The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy by Gary D. Schmidt, All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely, and The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, are rife with connections to sports that allow teachers to explore the text through different contexts and/or critical approaches, similar to Jennifer Rossuck’s exploration of “The Games People Play: The Great Gatsby and the Golden Age of Sports” from our edited book.
 
Just as we have done in our sports literacy program, I hope more English teachers will consider engaging their students in critical conversations about the pros and cons of our societal emphasis on sports. Even if you do not know much about sports yourself, rest assured that young adult literature, not to mention your students’ own experiences, has the potential to serve as a useful guide.

Afterward, maybe you will consider joining your students for a pick-up basketball game. On this day, I jumped in a game of three-on-three. Once again, it was Johnny who stole the show, as he drained a three-pointer from the top of the key for the win. I am quite sure Wendell will hear about it next Thursday afternoon, or, what is more likely, for the rest of time.

References

Brown, A. (2016). Young adult [sports] literature: Looking back and moving forward. SIGNAL Journal, 34(2), 42-50.
 
Brown, A., & Rodesiler, L (Eds.). (2016). Developing Contemporary Literacies through Sports: A Guide for the English Classroom. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.
 
Kounang, N. (2016). The time-sucking, dopamine-boosting science of fantasy baseball. CNN. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/18/health/fantasy-sports-psychology/index.html
 
McIntyre, S., & Brown, A. (2016). Dare to be different: Celebrating difference and redefining disability in Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The ALAN Review, 44(1), 79-85.