YA Book Proposal Project: Fostering Deeper Thinking through Student Choice

YA Book Proposal Project: Fostering Deeper Thinking through Student Choice 
​by Morgan Shiver

We have a first time contributor this week. Morgan Shiver is a PhD Student at Western Michigan University. While she is a new contributor to the blog, we certainly have many friends who have ties to Western Michigan University including Gretchen Rumohr our Co-Curator. Morgan is in good hands with our colleagues at WMU. It is great to have this wonderful contribution. Keep up the good work Morgan. We are already looking forward to you next post.

​Morgan Shiver is a PhD student in children’s literature at Western Michigan University, where she also teaches a variety of children’s and YA lit courses. Her research interests include elderly representations and intergenerational relationships in children’s literature and teaching children’s/YA texts in the college classroom. When she’s not studying, teaching, or having a grad-school-inspired existential crisis, she can usually be found baking, watching bad reality TV, or walking with her four-year-old shih tzu mix, Gus.

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​Over the past academic year, I taught two sections of ENGL 3840: Adolescent Literature at Western Michigan University. ENGL 3840 provides an overview of the YA genre and its conventions, and the students in the course are nearly all English majors and minors, with many planning to become teachers at the secondary level. I chose to focus the course on YA/adolescent books and their film adaptations, so we read How to Train Your Dragon, Simon vs. The Homosapiens Agenda, The Hate U Give, and The Hunger Games and watched all of their film adaptations. 

The correlation between student choice and engagement/motivation in the literature classroom is no secret. Linda Gambrell, former president of the International Literacy Association, establishes “Students Are More Motivated to Read When They Have Opportunities to Make Choices About What They Read” as one of her “Seven Rules of Engagement” for students (2011, p.175). Educators Guthrie, Klauda, and Ho identify “providing students with opportunities for choice” as a type of “motivation support” in classrooms (2013, p.10).
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So, as I developed my ENGL 3840 course, I wanted to incorporate student choice in a meaningful way — this led me to develop a book proposal project, outlined below. The project asks students to select a YA book/film adaptation combo that they’d like to add to our class curriculum and then develop a digital flyer to propose the book/film to the class. As a class, we voted on our top choice, and then we read the winning book and watched its film adaptation at the end of the semester. 

The Project

​My students were allowed to pick any book/film adaptation combo for their proposal flyers, as long as they met the following criteria:

1. The book/film can be considered as a part of the young adult or adolescent genre
2. The film is based on the book (not the other way around!)

I also encouraged them to consider accessibility/availability as they made their selections; a movie that premiered a month ago probably won’t be available for us to rent or buy online, for example.
 
After they’d made their book/film selections, they were tasked with conducting research and creating a proposal (in the form of a 2-3 page digital flyer) that advocated for their book/film to be added to our course curriculum. I recommend Canva as a resource for creating digital flyers.
 
I asked students to include the following in their proposal flyers: 

• The title, author, and year published of the selected book
• The title, director, and year premiered of the film based on the book
• A brief, spoiler-free preview (~100 words) of the combined book/film plot
• A list of 3-5 major themes explored in the book/film
• A written explanation (~150-250 words) of why they’ve chosen this book/film combo and what they think it will add to our class
• MLA citations for two scholarly (peer-reviewed) articles that could be read with the selected book/film
• Two short explanations (3-5 sentences) of how each of the chosen scholarly articles might enhance our class's experience with the selected book/film
• Images or graphic elements that add visual interest for those who will be viewing the flyer

​Once the proposals were completed, the students uploaded them to a discussion board on eLearning (WMU’s learning management system). As a class, we took the time to review and discuss the proposals, and then it was up to my students to vote for their top choice! 

Student Learning/Engagement

While this project is fun and acts as a more creative alternative to a traditional research paper or book report, I wanted to ensure that it still functioned as a serious learning opportunity for my students. The two elements of the project that most directly challenge students’ critical thinking are the defense of why they’ve selected the book/film and the selection of two articles that could be used in conversation with their selected texts. By asking students to articulate why their book/film would be a good addition to the class, the project prompts them to think about how their selected texts engage with or add to some of the major concepts of the course. The article component of the proposal refreshes students’ research skills and asks them to consider how their selected articles could enhance our class discussions. I believe these aspects of the project could be adapted to suit various curriculums at different academic levels.
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The engagement this project evoked from my students was evident from the start. As soon as I introduced the project, I had students approaching me after class to discuss their possible book/film choices. During the voting process, there were passionate campaigns (I remember one student declaring that the baseball scene in Twilight is “peak cinema”). It’s this enjoyment and excitement that — I believe — allows students to grapple with the more academically rigorous tasks in the project process. 

Now, one of the major hurdles of this project is not letting it turn into a book popularity contest or a 25-way tie. I combatted these issues by not allowing my students to vote on their own proposals. Before they voted, we also took time in class to review everyone’s flyers. While reviewing them, I asked students to shout out proposals they thought were especially compelling or interesting; this prompted everyone to actually read the flyers and consider the proposed texts’ value to our classwork. I used Google Forms to facilitate the voting process.

The book proposal project also proved to be a valuable learning opportunity for me as a teacher. Many of my students’ proposals identified gaps in the existing curriculum as they advocated for their book/film choice — texts that featured issues involving gender and mental health or that engaged with different genres like horror or nonfiction were frequent suggestions, as the four books I selected for the course did not explicitly feature those themes or genres. In the fall semester, my students voted to read/watch Nimona, and in the Spring, my class chose to work with Coraline. I don’t think I would have selected either of these texts if I’d just picked the final book/film on my own. 

Example Projects

Below are links to some example flyers from my students. Again, this is a project that could be adapted to work for a wide range of academic levels.
Example 1
Example 2

References

Albertalli, B. (2015). Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda. HarperCollins.
Collins, S. (2014). The Hunger Games. Scholastic.
Cowell, C. (2010). How to Train Your Dragon. Hodder Children's Books.
Gaiman, N. (2013). Coraline. Bloomsbury.
Gambrell, L. B. (2011). Seven Rules of Engagement: What's Most Important to Know About Motivation to Read. The Reading Teacher, 65(3), 172–178. doi.org/10.1002/TRTR.01024
Guthrie, J. T., Klauda, S. L., & Ho, A. N. (2013). Modeling the Relationships Among Reading Instruction, Motivation, Engagement, and Achievement for Adolescents Reading Research Quarterly, 48(1), 9–26. doi.org/10.1002/rrq.035
Stevenson, N. D. (2015). Nimona. HarperCollins.
Thomas, A. (2017). The Hate U Give. HarperCollins.