Transforming a Class into a Literary Award Selection Committee by Sharon Kane

 Sharon Kane has been one most frequent contributors to Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday. It is great to have her posting again. Before you dive into her current post it is worth the effort to visit some of her earlier posts. They cover a range of topics and they can be found here (a post about waiting for award winners), here (YA about Ada Lovelace), here (about revisiting awards),  here (about space and time in YA literature), and one more about how her students respond to A. S. King's wonderful novel, I Crawl Through It.

In addition, Sharon will be one of the presenters at this year's UNLV Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature. She was one of the presenters in the first group to visit UNLV in 2018. We hope you are making plans to visit us this year. See the flier below.

Thanks Sharon

Transforming a Class into a Literary Award Selection Committee: 
A Culminating Experience in a Young Adult Literature Course
By Sharon Kane

Any student in my YA Literature class would tell you that I’m wild about literary awards, not only because so many authors are so deserving of acclaim, and not only because they draw attention to wonderful literature I might not have found on my own, but also because of their pedagogical potential.  I teach YA Lit in the fall, so I look forward each year to introducing my students to the National Book Award process, beginning in mid-September with the announcement of the 10 books chosen for the Longlist in the Young People’s Literature category. We watch book trailers; I gather copies from local public and school libraries; and I invite students to join me in my quest to read as many as I can by the time the list is halved in mid-October when the finalists are announced. We discuss books as we finish them, and we continue following the hype online, in anticipation of the live author readings on the eve of the ceremony where the winners are announced (also live) in mid-November. 

We also follow School Library Journal’s “Pondering Printz” blog, noting the intersection of some of the titles discussed there with those honored by the National Book Foundation, perhaps wondering why some of our own clear favorites are missing. Students commit to checking out the American Library Association’s Youth Media Awards when they are announced during the ALA’s Midwinter convention, even though our class will be over.

The requirements of my course include reading one YA text and one article from The ALAN Review and/or the weekly post on Dr. Bickmore’s YAWednesday blog each week. Students join ALAN, and the culminating assignment is to write a manuscript appropriate for The ALAN Review. (One former student, Derrick Smith, submitted his; “Bringing Fantasy and Science Fiction into the Classroom” was published in Winter, 2012.) In the fall of 2019, I collected drafts right before flying to Baltimore for NCTE, and sent students my “Editor’s Suggestions” during Thanksgiving break. So, when they came in for the last class on December 4 with their final manuscript in hand, they might have thought the course was pretty much finished.
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Not quite.  I introduced them to the inaugural “ENGLISH 384 Literary Award,” and welcomed them as newly chosen committee members. Their job?  To write the titles of the 13 books they read for our course, rank ordered according to how worthy to win the gold medal they considered them to be. Since there was some choice during our middle weeks, individual lists contained different titles, making our job tricky. But students had at least heard others talking about all the books, so we did the best we could.  I emphasized that I was not asking them to rank the books according to extent they liked them, but rather according to literary merit (which I left undefined). Here are the books, or categories, we played with during the semester:

​Week 1.  The Nest, by Kenneth Oppel

Week 2. Goodbye Stranger, by Rebecca Stead

Week 3.  We Were Liars, by E. Lockhart 

Week 4. Jason Reynolds author study. Choices included the NBA finalist, Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks.        

Week 5.  WW II—Resistance theme. Nonfiction choices, including Phillip Hoose’s The Boys who Challenged Hitler and Patricia McCormick’s The Plot to Kill Hitler: Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Spy, Unlikely Hero, were popular, as was the graphic novel treatment of Bonhoeffer in Faithful Spy, by John Hendrix. The historical novel in verse White Rose, by Kip Wilson, was offered.          

Week 6. National Book Award Choice (selected from this year’s Longlist and a number of previous winners and finalists)    

​Week 7.  WW II—Escape theme. Choices included Deborah Heiligman’s Torpedoed: The True Story of the WW II Sinking of “The Children’s Ship,” Gavriel Savit’s Anna and the Swallow Man, and Ruth Sepetys’s Salt to the Sea, among others.          

​Week 8.  Neal Shusterman author study. The discovery of Scythe was a high point in the course; one student, Kaitlyn, came in with a scythe she had made from cardboard and foil as her response.  

​Week 9.  Ability/Disability/Difference theme. Readers could choose to read about characters facing physical challenges, in books such as Padma Venkatraman’s A Time to Dance, or emotional challenges in texts such as Nina LaCour’s We Are Okay and Laurie Halse Anderson’s The Impossible Knife of Memory and Shout. (Of course, all the books show the complexities that break down that artificial and misleading physical/mental dichotomy.)             

Week 10.  Romance theme—Students found love around the world as they read choices including When Dimple Met Rishi, by Sandhya Menon, and S.K. Ali’s Love from A to Z. They read about hardship, obstacles, and pain if they chose Sara Farizan’s If You Could be Mine, or Daniel Handler’s Why We Broke Up. And what could Walt Whitman be doing in a contemporary romance? We Contain Multitudes, by Sarah Henstra, supplied the answer.   

Week 11. Experimental Fiction. Before I gave book talks for A.S. King’s I Crawl through It, Andrew Smith’s Grasshopper Jungle, and Laura Ruby’s Bone Gap, I showed a visual of Andrew Smith wearing a t-shirt reading “Keep YA Weird.” Pet, a 2019 NBA finalist by Akwaeki Emezi, was chosen by some readers.             

Week 12.  New Adult Literature. Choices in this category targeting older teens and twenty-somethings included Elizabeth Acevedo’s With the Fire on High, where high school senior Emoni  juggles aspirations for a career as a chef with her responsibilities as a parent of a toddler. Cath, the college freshman featured in Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl, is a character several students said would stay with them for a long time.  

​Week 13.  All the Crooked Saints, by Maggie Stiefvater.       

After students finished working silently to rank their books, I asked them to write a rationale for their top choice. My final prompt was, “Which character you met this semester has had the strongest impact on you, or will stay with you the longest?”
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I divided the class into 2 groups so that we could work as committees of about 10 members, since a whole class committee would be unwieldy. One committee, with Michaela as the newly appointed chair, went out to the hall to deliberate.  They were told to come back when they had a Gold Medal winner and 2 or 3 finalists. I gave little direction in terms of how to proceed or what criteria to use. They would decide whether to work through discussion toward consensus, or to vote, or to find a unique formula.  I stayed in our classroom with the rest. 

Our group, Committee One, began by listening to everyone giving their top choice, along with a rationale. Here’s an example from Anna:

All the Crooked Saints. The rich descriptions of the land, and sense of hopefulness amid the darkness, evoked the most complex emotional response from me. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time made me cry, The Nest made me anxious, but All the Crooked Saints made me feel hope and anguish, love and loneliness. It personified the desert and made me feel close to the land.

​Some students chose a book because the topic was timely and important; others talked about a book’s structure or style or language or characters. We noted how hard it was to compare middle grade books to those targeting older teens. Everyone listened respectfully to their fellow committee members; no one tried to pressure others into changing positions. Quite naturally, it seemed, some books that readers could agree on rose to the top, and our group was satisfied with this outcome:

Gold: E. Lockhart's We Were Liars

Silver: Jason Reynold’s Ghost; Kenneth Oppel’s The Nest; and Neal Shusterman’s Unwind

​In walked Committee Two.  They announced their decision: 

The Gold: Neal Schusterman's Unwind.

Silver: Awarded to The Nest by Kenneth Oppel and We Were Liars by E. Lockhart

So close! But my students have learned that there’s no such thing as a tie when it comes to literary awards. (This is not universally true, but did apply to all the awards we had studied.)  We could have, we would have, somehow eliminated one of our Golden choices, except………………………

The college clock struck seven.  Our class, as well as our course, was over. It was time for my wonderful, gold medal-deserving group of YA literature enthusiasts to disband.  I think they may have been relieved that the competition ended before any hearts were crushed with disappointment. We left the room, feeling like winners.
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Special thanks to these passionate reviewers and award committee members: Alyssa, Michaela, Megan, Anna, Kaitlyn, Kim, Trent, Lizzy, Victoria, Matthew, Natalie, Alli, Jenna, Rasheed, Liz, Ethan, Sierra, David, Stephanie, Erin, and Marlana. 

Until next time.