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Creating Space for a Spectrum of Connections by Kristine E. Pytash and Monica Bartholomew

1/8/2024

 
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 Asking students to make connections to a text is a common strategy that teachers use to help students comprehend literature. The goal is to activate students’ prior knowledge - to connect their existing schemas to the new schema they will encounter in a book. Often connection making is taught in the format of text-to-self; text-to-world; and text-to-text.

Another way of thinking about connection-making is Sims- Bishop’s (1990) well known metaphor of literature as a mirror, window, and sliding glass door. These powerful metaphors are what we often use to orient our work with students when we consider the literature that we are choosing as well as how we are asking students to respond to texts. And while we love Sims-Bishop's metaphor, an article by Jones and Clarke (2007) prompted us to think more deeply about how students connect to texts, so rather, those times when students disconnect. Disconnections include those moments when we don’t feel represented in a text, or because of our own privilege we recognize that we cannot fully relate to the experience of a character. Jones and Clarke argue that disconnections as a form of response, “opens up the spectrum of
connection-making and could potentially help teachers and students to see and talk about similarities and differences in more meaningful and nuanced ways while working toward deeper engagements with texts” (p. 103-104).

When we ask students to make connections, we are expecting that students should connect to a text rather than consider why students may not be able to connect to a text. Disconnections remind us that, for students, literature isn’t always a mirror, window, or door; sometimes literature is a reminder that they are locked out of the house entirely. These disconnections, we’ve come to believe, are a form of reader response that is often underrepresented, probably because we don’t teach students to recognize disconnections or give them ways to think and talk about them.

We became interested in helping students consider disconnections as part of the connection making process. We recognize that navigating these types of conversations can often be challenging and therefore, Monica developed sentence stems to help facilitate this work with high school students and with preservice teachers.

We typically use sentence stems as a way to help guide conversations around books. We are committed to reading young adult literature that offers a wide range of perspectives and experiences. We have used sentence stems with fiction and nonfiction, including Poet X (Acevedo, 2018) and Born a Crime (Noah, 2016). However, we are located in a state that often mandates an English language arts curriculum with an emphasis on canonical literature, typically from the western canon and so we have used sentence stems to support students’ transactions with canonical literature as well.

First, during book club discussions we ask students to use one of the contemplative sentence-stems from the Voicing and Honoring sections (see chart below). Students use the contemplative sentence-stems from the Voicing section to describe the connections and disconnections they experienced while reading. This step is to help support students as they experience what Janks (2019) describes as reading with or against the text. Students are asked to use one of the contemplative sentence-stems from the Honoring section to respond to their classmates.

Second, we believe that critical reflection is important. After each book club discussion, we ask students to write a brief reflection about the connections and disconnections they experienced. We ask them to pause and consider how they felt and the ways that making connections and disconnections influenced their understanding of the book.

Finally, we recognize the importance of engaging in dialogue with students about their experiences. We have found that while students can name connections and disconnections, they often need additional support in considering their own positionality and how their experiences shape their responses. We believe that these conversations are necessary in
helping students understand systems of oppression, power, and ideologies, in addition to talking about how they might respond and act.

​We have found that using sentence stems provides a language that students can use to share and discuss their connections and disconnections to literature in compassionate ways. When students have the language to talk about their connections and disconnections, it allows for critical self-reflection. Including a spectrum of connections that includes disconnections challenges the emphasis on personal connections to literature, by allowing disconnections to
serve as an important avenue for transacting with literature.

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References 
Acevedo, E. (2018). Poet X. HarperCollins. 
Bishop, R. S. (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives: Choosing and Using Books for the Classroom, 6 (3). Perspectives.
Janks, H. (2019). Critical literacy and the importance of reading with and against a text. Journal of Young Adult and Adult Literacy, 62(5), 561-564. 
Jones, S., & Clarke, L. W. (2007). Disconnections: Pushing Readers Beyond Connections and Toward the Critical. Pedagogies: An International Journal, 2(2), 95–115.
Noah, T. (2016) Born a Crime. Penguin Random House. 
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Comments are closed.

    Dr. Steve Bickmore
    ​Creator and Curator

    Dr. Bickmore is a Professor of English Education at UNLV. He is a scholar of Young Adult Literature and past editor of The ALAN Review and a past president of ALAN. He is a available for speaking engagements at schools, conferences, book festivals, and parent organizations. More information can be found on the Contact page and the About page.
    Dr. Gretchen Rumohr
    Co-Curator
    Gretchen Rumohr is 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.

    Bickmore's
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    Meet
    Evangile Dufitumukiza!
    Evangile is a native of Kigali, Rwanda. He is a college student that Steve meet while working in Rwanda as a missionary. In fact, Evangile was one of the first people who translated his English into Kinyarwanda. 

    Steve recruited him to help promote Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media while Steve is doing his mission work. 

    He helps Dr. Bickmore promote his academic books and sometimes send out emails in his behalf. 

    You will notice that while he speaks fluent English, it often does look like an "American" version of English. That is because it isn't. His English is heavily influence by British English and different versions of Eastern and Central African English that is prominent in his home country of Rwanda.

    Welcome Evangile into the YA Wednesday community as he learns about Young Adult Literature and all of the wild slang of American English vs the slang and language of the English he has mastered in his beautiful country of Rwanda.  

    While in Rwanda, Steve has learned that it is a poor English speaker who can only master one dialect and/or set of idioms in this complicated language.

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