The first time I meet this week's guest contributor he was checking names at the entrance of an ALAN Workshop.  Marshall won't remember, I was a graduate student and was just learning about ALAN. He was already contributing to the field in major ways. He had written a state of the research piece for English Education (George, M. (2004). Furthering the Cause: The Study and Teaching of Young Adult Literature. English Education, 37(1), 80-84. ). Over the years we kept having conversations, presented together, overlapped our service on CEE (now ELATE), and now we are both focusing more and more on YA literature. He has been a steady supporter of the blog and has contributed twice before. George, M. (2016, March, 16). What is in a Name? Adolescent Literature? Young Adult Literature? Does it Matter?.
George, M. (June 27, 2017) The Sometimes-Forgotten Genres in Literature Written for Adolescents and Young Adults: Short Stories, Essays, and Poetry. 
​
I love the approach he is writing about this time. We both seem to return to YA books that deal with history and can readily be used in cross-curricular contexts. In this particular post, he is focusing on YA books that deal with War, specifically WWII. Some of the books he mentions I know and love. The others will be added to my reading list. Thanks Marshall.

​In the early 1990s, I had the amazing experience of teaching at an international school in Brazil for three years. The opportunities that the experience afforded me were numerous.  I learned to look at the world in a very different way and through a different lens than I had before. I am now a fluent speaker of Portuguese-being multilingual impacts the way you view people and culture. In fact, my understanding of culture, language, and society evolved like you would not believe (if you are monolingual)! However, that is not the focus of this blog, so let me get to that…
 
While I was hired as a teacher of English Language Arts at the international school, at the end of my first year when the following year’s schedule was being developed, the leadership in the school realized that there was a group of seniors who needed various courses to graduate- some needed an additional course in English, others needed an American history course, and two needed a humanities/fine arts course (most students were getting two diplomas- an American one and a Brazilian one). There were not enough teachers to fill each of these needs in separate classes. Having taken an interdisciplinary course in my undergraduate program (it was one of my favorite elective courses), I volunteered to develop an “American Studies” class that would explore various periods of American history by examining the literature, music, and art from each era. Based on student engagement and feedback (and the fact that all were able to graduate thanks to the creative course offering), the class was deemed a huge success. I repeated a version of the course the following year with an 8th grade social studies class (one must be quite flexible when teaching in relatively small international schools). 

​In the 25 years since I taught those high school and middle school American studies classes, I have come to believe strongly in the potential of interdisciplinary curriculum planning and teaching at all levels- middle school, high school, undergraduate education, teacher preparation, even doctoral studies. While there are opportunities to utilize literature in all content areas, I think some of the most common and perhaps easiest connections are in the field of social studies education and I wrote about this almost 20 years ago.
 
I am drawn to historical fiction and there is an ever-widening body of literature written for adolescents and young adults that explores various periods in both world and national history. I spend a lot of time in middle and high schools in New York City and have the opportunity to observe students in their classes as well as during their independent reading time. While I have not engaged in any sort of systematic study of their interests, I have observed that they often have a real interest in World War II. After speaking with a number of social studies teachers, I have had my observations confirmed by many of them. Like many young people today, I have always been fascinated by the complexities of World War II and will often choose to read works of literature that focus on that conflict. In fact, as I reviewed the Excel file where I have recorded every work of adolescent/young adult literature I have read since January of 2000, I found that I have read over 50 books that were set during World War II. In a Washington Post column a few years ago, Valerie Strauss argued that it is very important to teach young people about World War II and suggested six rules to adhere to when doing so. It’s an interesting read and makes a good case. I would argue now, perhaps more than ever, we need to look to our past to guide us as we move into a future in an ever-changing world.

I think teachers at multiple grade levels and in both social studies and English have multiple opportunities to incorporate literature into their courses. Readers of this blog do not have to be convinced that adolescent/young adult literature can and should play an important part in the learning experiences of our young people. One of my favorite instructional strategies is the book club, as described by Taffy Raphael, Laura Pardo and Kathy Highfield. Alternatively, students can be given the option of reading independently or with a book buddy. Some teachers prefer whole class texts rather than text sets or independent reading. Whatever the approach, I encourage teachers of English language arts and social studies to consider utilizing works of literature written for adolescents and young adults as they explore the many facets of World War II.
 
Following are brief summaries of some of my favorite WWII books. I considered many different ways of organizing this list. I thought of using a thematic approach, but found that each of the books addressed so many different themes it was hard to categorize them that way. I considered creating a high school list and a middle school list, but I struggle against pigeon holing books by level (though I did note publishers’ recommended reading ages to make suggestions as to whether the books are marketed to young adult or middle grade readers, or both). I landed on organizing the list around the primary setting of the books. World War II was indeed a war that spanned the globe. I have not read WWII books set in Africa, the Middle East or Australia and would welcome suggestions in the comment section of this blog. 

Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepyts (YA)
 
This fascinating novel is told from four points of view: a Lithuanian nurse, Joana; a young orphaned Polish girl, Emilia; a Prussian boy Florian, and a German soldier Alfred. This multinational cast of characters provides insight into the final months of the war in Europe, especially during Operation Hannibal, the evacuation of German soldiers and citizens when the Red Army was approaching Germany. Readers learn of a little-known WWII incident, the sinking of the Gustloff, a German ship evacuating German soldiers and civilians.
 
Orphan, Monster, Spy by Matt Killeen (YA)
 
Sarah is an orphaned 15-year-old Jewish girl who speaks numerous languages and looks like an Aryan. After her mother is shot by the Germans, she meets an unlikely ally, a British spy acting as a Nazi official. Sarah joins him in his spying endeavors, posing as his 13-year old daughter attending an elite school for Nazi youth. Her task is to foil a classmate’s father’s efforts to build a superweapon that could win the war for the Nazis. 

​Code Name Verity  and Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein (MG)
 
Code Name Verity is the story of a friendship between a British female pilot, Maddie, and a female spy, “Verity.”  When their plane crashes in Germany, “Verity” is arrested by the Gestapo. Through her interrogations she cleverly tells her story without giving away the information that the Nazis want.
 
Rose Under Fire tells the story of another female pilot who is captured by the Nazis and is sent to Ravensbruck, the notorious concentration camp for women. She survives the horrors of the camp and witnesses the trials against Nazi war criminals after the war.
 
These two books feature incredibly strong women who survive because of their bravery, their commitment, and their sheer will to live. 

​Under a War-Torn Sky and A Troubled Peace by L.M. Elliott (MG)
 
These companion books provide an important glimpse into France during and after the German occupation. The first, Under a War-Torn Sky, chronicles the war experience of a young pilot who is shot down behind enemy lines in France. In his dangerous attempt to avoid capture by the Germans, Henry Forester is helped by the French resistance. Henry comes to truly understand the importance of the work done by these brave men and women.
 
In the second book, A Troubled Peace, Henry has escaped Germany and returned to his home in Virginia. Unable to adapt to his “regular life,” Henry returns to post-war France to see what happened to the women and men who had helped him escape. There, he discovers the chaos that has been left by the ravages of war.  

​The Once, Then, Now Series by Morris Gleitzman (MG/YA)
 
In the first book, readers meet Felix, a young boy who is confused by what is happening to him and his family in Nazi Occupied Poland. Soldiers are burning books, beating and shooting people, and violently taking them away from their families.  Despite witnessing all of these horrors, Felix never loses hope.
 
In the second book, Felix and his friend Zelda escape a prison train that is taking them to a Nazi death camp. Both children have lost their parents, who were murdered by the Nazis. Felix and Zelda struggle to survive in war torn, Nazi occupied Poland. Their entire life is focused on survival- avoiding being turned in by citizens eager for a reward, being shot, or starving.
 
When the third book opens in Australia, Felix is a grandfather who has struggled his whole adult life to bury the painful memories of his childhood. When his granddaughter, Zelda, comes to spend time with him and faces relentless bullying, his memories come rushing back.  

​The Book Thief by Marcus Zuzak (YA)
 
Set in 1939 Germany, this is a story told by “Death” about Liesel Meminger, who has lost her mother and brother and is taught to read by her foster father. As her reading improves, Liesel steals books from Nazi book burnings and from the mayor’s home. The book examines the atrocities of the war as Liesel lives in a village outside Munich during the bombardment of the city and the experiences of a Jewish man hidden in the basement of her home.
 
My Mother’s Secret: A Novel Based on A True Holocaust Story by J.L. Witterick (YA)
 
Franciszka and her daughter provide shelter in their tiny home to two Jewish families who are hiding from the Nazis after the invasion of Poland. They also hide a defecting German soldier in their attic. Told from four different perspectives (though all in the same home) this novel provides great insight into the horror of living in Nazi occupied Europe and how citizens resisted and fought against the evil regime.
 
The Lost Childhood by Yehuda Nir (MG/YA)
 
This memoir provides a first-hand account of the author, who was nine years old when the Nazis invaded Poland. His father was executed, but the rest of the family was able to use their looks and language skills to pass as non-Jewish Poles to avoid being sent to the Nazi death camps like most of their family and friends. Nirs’ family’s life was not easy either, as they had to work for Germans. The horrors of life inside Nazi occupied Poland are explicitly told in this compelling memoir. 

​Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugee in Cuba by Margarita Engle (MG)
 
Many people are not aware that European Jews sought asylum in Cuba when the Nazi regime rose to power and began invading countries across Europe. After being refused asylum in New York, young Daniel, who had narrowly escaped Nazi Germany, was granted entry into Cuba instead. Told in narrative verse, Daniel’s story is a common one to refugees who live in fear of being returned to their oppressors by German spies among the fellow refugees.
 
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne  (MG)
 
Bruno’s father gets a promotion to commandant of Auschwitz and the family has to move from Berlin to the country. Lonely and board, Bruno makes friends with a little boy, Shmuel, who lives on the other side of the fence. Bruno does not understand the horrific reality of what is going on at this camp that his father commands. This devastating story provides a unique view of the juxtapositions that existed in the world of the Nazis. 

Prisoners of the Empire Series by Graham Salisbury (MG)
 
This series of books explores war in the Pacific Theater starting with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941. Book 1, Under the Blood Red Sun, traces the experiences of a Japanese-American boy (Tomi) and his family in Hawaii during and after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. His father and grandfather are interred in American concentration camps and Tomi and his mother must endure painful discrimination. Book 2, House of the Red Fish, continues Tomi’s story as he and his mother face increasing challenges as his former friends and neighbors see him as the enemy. Book 3 Eyes of the Emperor focuses on another Hawaiian of Japanese descent, Eddy, who is serving in the American armed forces. The Army uses Eddy and other Japanese-Americans in unthinkable ways. Nevertheless, Eddie endures as he wants to prove his loyalty to his country-America. Book 4 Hunt for the Bamboo Rat, chronicles the experiences of a Japanese-American recruit, Zenji, who is fluent in both Japanese and English. Once in the Army, Zenji is sent undercover to the Philippines to spy on the Japanese. When captured, Zenji is brutally tortured by the Japanese. He eventually escapes, but spends months in the brutal tropical jungle. 

​Code Talker: A Novel About the Navajo Marines of World War II by Joseph Bruchac (MG/HS)
 
Based on actual historical events, this fictional story of Ned Begay exposes the fascinating and previously classified story of WWII when The US government utilized the native language skills of Navajo soldier to transmit coded messages for their commanders and troops. Ned, who had been taught at a boarding school that his native language was inferior to English, had the opportunity to become a code talker despite previously being rejected from serving in the military. Ned and his fellow code talkers were sent to Iwo Jima, where they participated in the battles there and on Okinawa. The code talkers were crucial to the war effort-without them, the war may have never been won by the Allies.
 
When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue Park. (MG)
 
Because the Japanese occupied Korea during WWII, Sun-hee and her brother are forced to study and speak Japanese in school. They are forbidden from using their native Korean language. Koreans were expected to fight on the Japanese side in the war. Sun-hee (whose Japanese name is Keoko) is shocked when her brother enlists in the Japanese army. Her uncle is part of the Korean resistance so the family appears to be divided. Keoko does not realize that her brother becomes a kamikaze as a way of protecting the family.
 
Incommunicado by Randall Platt (MG)
 
“Jewels” is a 12-year-old girl living in Oregon when the Japanese attack the United States. She and her mother work for Mr. Kaye, a kind Japanese-American who allows them to live in one of his beach cabins in return for their cleaning services. After the attack, the town turns against Mr. Kaye, sure that he is a spy for the Japanese. Jewels goes to great lengths to protect her friend as he is treated badly by the townspeople and is under investigation by the FBI.
 
When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka (MG/HS)
 
An entire Japanese-American family’s life is turned upside down when the US government considers them to be enemy aliens. The father is arrested for treason, while the rest of the family is sent to an internment camp in the Utah desert. The racism and xenophobia of American citizens during the WWII era has great impact on the children in this story (all of the characters remain nameless throughout) who suffered greatly for four years of internment.

​The War That Saved My Life series by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley (MG)
 
This two-book series tells the story of a young English girl with  a club foot, Ada, who struggles to survive in war torn England. In the first book The War That Saved My Life. Ada lives under tragic circumstances, mistreated and abused by her mother. When Ada’s brother is evacuated from London to live in the relative safety of the country, she runs away as well. Ada connects with her foster mother and her life improves greatly, despite the dangers of living in Wartime England. In the second book, The War I Finally Won, Ada has successful surgery that repairs her foot and allows her to lead a relatively regular life (regular despite black out, rationing, air raid warnings). Ada loses her birth mother in a bombing of London, but gains a friend in a Jewish German girl who is living in England during the war. 

On the Wings of Heroes by Richard Peck  (MG)
 
Davey’s brother Bill flies B-17s in the war in Europe. He and his family at home certainly have it easier than Bill does, but the air raid drills, rationing, and rubber and paper scrap drives brings the war home to them in a different way. Waiting for word about Bill’s safety is especially hard for Davey and his parents. Indeed, life on the home front is a challenge for everyone in times of war.
 
Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith (MG/YA)
 
Women on the homefront made great contributions to the war. Ida Mae Jones, a young small-town farm girl tried to do her part by collecting silk stockings for the cause, but wanted to do so much more. Having learned to fly crop dusting planes, she was a gifted pilot and wanted to join WASP, a semi-military unit of women pilots. However, because she was African-American, she was not allowed to join. Because she had light colored skin she managed to join WASP anyway and began flight training. Overcoming discrimination and fear of being discovered, Ida Mae bravely makes important contributions to the war effort.
 
Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights  by Steve Sheinkin (MG/YA)
 
This work of nonfiction tells the fascinating story of a huge explosion that killed more than 300 sailors on the docks of the Navy base at Port Chicago, CA. After the explosion, more than 200 African American soldiers refused to go back to work on the docks until the unsafe and unfair conditions were rectified. Of those, fifty men were charged with mutiny. The brave men faced prison or even execution for their actions, but they believed that they had to take a stand against the prejudice, discrimination, and injustices facing black sailors who were risking their lives for their country. 

​We know that the allies won the war, but what if that had not? While various authors and screenwriters have explored this possibility, Ryan Graudin has done so for young adult readers.
 
Wolf by Wolf by Ryan Graudin
 
What if Hitler had triumphed? In this fantastical series, readers get to consider what would have happened in this nightmare scenario. Living in 1956, where the world is split between the German Third Reich and the Japanese Empire, a survivor of horrific medical experimentation, Yael, is able to “skinshift.” That means that she can assume any female role and agrees to become Adele Wolfe to help the resistance movement in their plot to finally kill Hitler. Yael participates in The Axis Games, an annual motorcycle race that commemorates the Great Axis Victory. Hitler will be at the victory celebration so Yael must win the race … and kill Hitler at the vVctor’s Ball. This fast paced and innovative novel will interest most young adults and may foster critical conversations about the outcome of the war.
 
Blood for Blood by Ryan Graudin
 
Yael’s story continues in this sequel. After Yael’s assassination attempt fails, she ends up in an SS prison but manages to escape. She continues in her quest to kill Hitler. The sequel is equally fast paced and full of unexpected twists and turns. 

Marshall A. George
Hunter College of the City University of New York
Marshall can be reached at: mg2003@hunter.cuny.edu

​Until next week.

I wish everyone knew Sharon Kane. When I was just new academic, Sharon was always around to offer advice and to validate my efforts. Over the years she has been one of the great supporters of the blog and has been a constant presence at the ALAN Workshop and any YA conferences that I have managed to get off the ground. Her earlier blog posts 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), and here (about space and time in YA literature). This post focuses on how her students respond to A. S. King's wonderful novel, I Crawl Through It and, as an added bonus, King's response to her Skype visit with the class.

-I admire how you handled the issue of PTSD, and I think the book ended perfectly for this subject.

-I’ve never read a book where I could relate so much to so many characters (good and bad).

-I’m sure I can say for everyone that we loved seeing a glimpse into your beautiful twisted mind.

-I will take your advice about characters telling me what to write when completing my novel.

-I wish my religious Latina mother had read this book when I was a teenager.

-Thank you for paving the way for female YA authors.

-Thank you … for acknowledging the silenced voices of black and Latino kids.  

​I couldn’t wait to get home to read the responses students had written after reading the book, but before meeting the author. Their reflections provided evidence that I Crawl through It is a novel that makes readers work—hard. Yet these undergraduates were inspired to describe the writing as “graceful and eloquent,” and were stimulated to write creatively themselves. Taylor, for example, in her poem “I Went through It,” wrote verses narrated by characters that made me feel I knew them better; Drew’s “To Cope (Or is it Nope?”) was a list poem that made me shudder, and want better for the teens I love.  Taking my cue from them, I have written the following “found poem” using words from my students’ work/play. Below mine, you can find some of the poems my students produced.

​This book is one that scares you at first,
And makes you wonder what exactly you have picked up to read.
It gives the reader an illusion of understanding without really understanding anything at all.
Each character presented in a raw and uncut manner…
Brilliant. Relatable.
Maybe it is just too much obscurity for me.
What is the deal with the Bush Man?
We are all damaged.
The importance of a name in connection to a person’s identity is so strong
                 that it is odd
                when a person disassociates from it. 
How quickly things can escalate………
Trauma. Trauma. Trauma.
Reset. Reset. Reset.
I thought I would hate it.
A book can make you more tolerant!
It was like a puzzle.
I spent hours walking to and from classes,
               unpacking each and every aspect of the story.
I refuse to be afraid of A.S. King.
I am completely an A.S. King fan.
I Crawl through It could begin a conversation about mental health.
Hug. Love. See pain. Offer beauty.
Stay right side out.
The book that was made to confuse….
I enjoyed the ride. 

​“Blowing up isn't always external. It's not always easy to hear or see. Synapses fire every day in my brain. Thinking is just like exploding until it eventually scars you and you can't interact with people anymore. It's like one big, final detonation.”
― A.S. King, I Crawl Through It
 
Stanzi
 
I too, lost someone.
Not the lost that never
comes back.
 
It’s where
you don’t know
if they’ll ever come back.
But they can.
 
To my sister,
 
I regretted
the things I said,
and didn't say.
 
Not hugging you enough,
not telling you I love you,
enough.
 
Telling you to go away,
too many times.
 
Telling you not to hug me
Anymore.
 
To my sister,
I am sorry.
 
I am glad you’re back.
 
Gustav
 
We’ve all wanted
to
go away, fly away.
 
Maybe in an
invisible helicopter,
that took 9 months
to build.
 
Or a drive
you took at 1am.
 
Or a bottle of pills,
one by one
into your palm.
 
Did you get to where
you wanted to go?
 
Or do you wish,
beg,
to come back.
 
China
 
I didn’t swallow
myself to hide from the world.
 
I didn’t become my stomach
or colon.
 
I stayed right side out.
 
Instead,
I covered myself with
long hair
and long sleeves.
 
I didn’t dare
look in the eyes
of those I loved.
 
Because if I looked at those
I love,
they would know.
I was defeated.
 
I could never tell them.
 
Lansdale
 
I could never lie,
the way Lansdale did.
 
It was the only language she knew,
and all I know, is to tell the truth.
 
Even if it hurt.
Even if it meant losing.
 
I could never lie,
the way Lansdale did.
 
The Bush Man
 
I don’t know why,
The Bush Man
wanted kisses
For his letters.
 
I gave love,
for acceptance.
 
Maybe that’s why.
 
To be accepted.

Outline another day in red
As I realize this is now beyond my control
All I wanted was to feel
Other than the emptiness
That you were so eager to leave on my shoulders
It’s kind of ironic, but nothing
Is the heaviest burden I’ve ever held
And I don’t mean to seem masochistic
But I can’t help but run back to you
I always run back to you
It’s like I’ve been burned so bad
That I can’t even feel
So I hold on despite the damage
Until it all becomes too real
Do you find me pathetic?
I’m stuck in the turbulence of love
I’m not even sure was there to begin with
So I watch as all I have created
In my mind comes crashing down
All around me
And leaves me trapped and surrounded
By the wreckage of what was never there
And I offer to you all I have left
It’s not much use to you
But it means even less to me
And again I find myself running back to you

to cope is to escape from where you are;
     to read a novel about aliens
     to write a story where you're the hero
     to use your imagination in ways inconceivable
     to build an invisible helicopter.
to cope is to protect yourself from hurt, to build a giant wall;
     to limit who you interact with
     to only connect and befriend online
     to carry around a safety blanket
     to always wear a lab coat.
to cope is to never say anything, especially something that could alienate you;
     to keep your mouth shut, to never participate
     to always just not and smile, and never show your brain
     to go along with the crowd, to always be a follower
     to swallow your tongue and swallow your words and yourself.
to cope is to live in a world that you yourself dictate;
     to be the leader, the boss, and not let others define you
     to be the bully, using your words and your brute, to put others in their place
     to limit your world so that you will have set your limits
     to lie, about yourself and your world, to affect the real world.

​Everything will repeat in the end.
This cycle comes full circle, again.
Let’s go back to the world and its meaning,
The problem is all around us
but you’re not believing.
 
Empathy should be basic human decency,
you should know that rape
is still a possibility.
Reality will always be there in the end.
This cycle comes full circle, again.
REACT. FESTER. REPEAT.
An Unpredictable Ball of Nerves
cannot face their own baggage.
Therefore, their problems will remain captive.
You cannot teach your child what you do not know.
This cycle comes full circle, again.
 
On National Television, a respected pastor
groped a young woman.
He reached and grabbed her
side breast,
he held her there while she remained uncomfortable.
She runs from the stage
embarrassed.
But the viewers only notice how she’s dressed.
Reality is slapping you across the face.
Your daughter saw it on the news and felt it too.
If it were her, would you
feel more disgraced?
Would you speak up to challenge his hand or refrain?
 
Everything will repeat in the end.
This cycle comes full circle, again.

​Amy, my students could not have had a better experience to welcome them into the community of authors, teens,  teachers, librarians, parents, professors, and others who love YA Literature.  Thank you for your very special gift.  

When I saw on Twitter that Sharon was reading I Crawl Through It as her FIRST (!!!) book in her YAL class, I had to offer a Skype visit...because to me, that's a pretty gutsy move. My time with Sharon's class was profound for me. I often forget exact references in my books because I write several per year and this book was written years ago. A student asked me about a particular paragraph in the book and I couldn't really answer it. And then another student gave me the page number. It was great to revisit the paragraph in real time, in front of the class, and find the reason I wrote that part. I read it aloud and said, "Look at that last line! That's the reason for this scene!" And then we studied that line: "No blood is real blood unless someone cares," and we talked about what it means within the scope of the book and also through the lens of our culture and what students live through daily in modern-day American high schools. For that moment alone, this Skype visit pretty much changed me. It taught me a bit about why I write what I do, and it allowed me to share that with university students who are essentially filling up their own basket of why they do what they do.
​

Back to Steve: I hope you are reading A. S. King. These books are great. Not just great YA, great literature that speak to the tradition of surrealism and the absurd that has always been on the edge of great literature. Think Swift or Fielding. Think Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce. Think Kurt Vonnegut and Robert Coover or Julio Cortazar, Jorge Louis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende. Okay, it is clear I am a fan. If you are reading Andrew Smith and Shaun David Hutchinson and ignoring A. S. King, you are missing the boat. All of the writers mentioned are fun to read, but it is fair warning to tell you that you better have your irony senors and your creative imagination at the ready.

Until next week.

Jennifer Cameron Paulsen has been making the selections for Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday Weekend Picks for the month of September. They have been fantastic picks and focused on a different theme each week. I hope that you check them out. Jenny and I know each other through the ALAN Workshop. I know that a couple of times we have worked as door monitors together early on Monday morning as people arrive to pick up their books at the ALAN Workshop. By the way, if you haven't registered for the ALAN Workshop, I highly recommend that you get on it. It is time to go to the NCTE website and go to the registration page. One of my interests in teaching and researching Young Adult literature is how this body of literature can be used to combine the curricula of the Social Studies and English Language Arts. I am glad that Jenny has touched on several ways that this might be implemented in the classroom. Take it away Jenny.

Policy has Human Consequences:  An Uninterrupted View of the Sky, a beautiful book by Melanie Crowder, demonstrates the consequences of the “War on Drugs” declared by the US on the indigenous people of Bolivia. In Margarita Engle’s book of verse Silver People, even the trees have a voice, stressing the sense of disturbance of nature itself in building the Panama Canal. These kinds of stories force us to face that actions have consequences, that our world is truly interdependent. ​

There are a number of other ways to use YA, these are just the ones I’ve decided to dig into first. I have a lot of work to do! I continue to seek more #OwnVoices texts, whether fiction or non-fiction or poetry to support my students in their pursuit of knowledge about the world and our collective past, so we can create a better future together for ALL of us.

I welcome your suggestions for my library!

In her 25-year career, Jenny Cameron Paulsen, has been an English teacher and an instructional and technology coach. She currently teaches middle level American history and world studies in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Reading YA hooked her in 7th grade when her best friend gave her a copy of The Outsiders. Teenagers are her chosen people.

Jenny can be contacted at jennifer.paulsen@cfschools.org.

​

I love this time of year!  I get to know and learn from a new group of students. Summer is ending and fall is beginning and, as a result, Las Vegas has great mornings and wonderful evenings. A start to think about the NCTE convention (I need to register tomorrow, but at least I have a hotel!) and the ALAN workshop. I get to chat with colleagues old and new; it is rejuvenating and inspiring. I hope to see many of you there. If don't know you yet, please say hello.

Perhaps, one of the most exciting parts of fall is the announcement of the National Award longlist for Young People's Literature. I love this list and others like it and the statements they make about quality literature. This list also allows us to keep a pulse on issues of diversity in authors, characters, themes, and genres. I watch carefully to see what is included and what isn't.

I have written about the award (You can read our article about cultural diversity in the award in the first 20 years of the ward here.). Some of the past winners are among my favorite books: Brown Girl Dreaming, Inside Out and Back Again, True Believer, and When Zachery Beaver Came to Town.  Of course, there are others that I admire, teach, and recommend. In fact, if anyone wants to make a case that Young Adult literature has an abundance of literary quality, just have a list of all of the final five books for this award since 1996. You would have a list of 115 books that could keep people reading for while. Don't worry spending a lot of time compiling the list, you can find the list here. 
*to all images are hot linked to a place get the book.

To begin with, I have to tell you that I feel like a slacker. I read a 100 or more YA books a year, but I have only read one on this years list, Boots on the Ground. A them.Couple more have been on my "to be read list," but I just haven't worked my to The Poet X, The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, and The Journey of Little Charlie. Over the last several years I have had a better track record. Usually, I have managed to be over 50% and some years as many as 7 of the 10. Not this year. I have some reading to do over the next few weeks. I know that my colleague Sharon Kane (You should check out her past post on the contributors page.) will be examining this list as well. She usually has her students reading the books off the list. 

The following list has some hyperlinks. The authors name is hyperlinked to the a page inside the National Book Award web page. On that page you will find a description of the book offered by the publisher, a brief description of the author, and some links to other informational pages. The titles are link to a Kirkus Review with the exception of A Very Large Expanse of Sea with is linked to an interview in the Los Angles Times.

I have enjoyed browsing through the publishers descriptions of the book and reading the Kirkus reviews. I hope that you will spend some time exploring as well. I love the diversity in terms of authors, theme, genre, and settings. Perhaps, the most important thing you can do is share this list and the descriptions of these books with your student. That is exactly what I will be doing with the graduates I will be seeing next Monday. I will show them the post in advance and discuss a few of the books. I will encourage them to take a couple of minutes to share with their students as well.

This post is a just a bit on the short side, but it packed with some informative reading between now and when the winner is announce in on Nov. 14, 2018 in New York City. 

​Until next week.

This week’s guest contributor is Padma Venkatraman. I have had friendly a relationship with her for as long as I have been an academic and since she has been writing Young Adult Literature. I can still picture her standing at the podium at an ALAN workshop in a beautiful sari discussing her debut YA novel Climbing the Stairs. As she spoke I knew that I had to read it. I wasn’t more than a few chapter into the book and I knew I was going to try and write about it. It short order it turned in to one of my first publications. (Bickmore, S. T. (2011). Craftsmanship, ideology, and reader appeal in Climbing the Stairs. In A. Choubey (Ed.), Women on Women: Women Writers’ Perspectives on Women. (pp. 40-67). Jaipur: Book Enclave.) It was published in India and it is hard to find in the US. You'll just have to take my word about how good this chapter turned out.
 
I love Padma's work. Several years ago, I reviewed some of her work and conducted an interview with her for this blog. You can find it here. Padma has also contributed to the blog by writing about YA verse novels. It is engaging; and she points us to some books that shouldn’t be missed. Take at minute to read or revisit the post.
 
This week she discusses diverse books from an international perspective with a specific focus on how diversity is represented children's and YA literature in Germany. She does a great job with the topic, so I will get out of the way and pass it over to Padma.

We've spent the past eight months in Germany, where my husband and I were honored to recieve invitations to reside as "fellows" at the Hansewissenschafts Kolleg in Delmenhorst. Although our ten-year-old speaks German fluently, her reading level in German doesn't quite match her reading level in English. So, while she devours novels in English (and analyzes each with assiduity and the acerbic attitude of a future book critic) she doesn't read as many German books.

That said, one of the first things we did upon arrival was to pay for a membership at the local library. As we did so, I thought nostalgically about free libraries back home - the public library being, in my opinion, a cornerstone of American democracy. My ten-year old interrupted my thoughts with an observation. "Look at that book! It's racist!"

The book that she's pointing to is a picture book that has a problematic cover, showing an "Indianer" with a feathered headdress, a tomahawk and war paint on his face. Mistaking her horror for enthusiasm, the librarian is quick to bring out similar books, all of which depict characters who resemble Disney's Pocahontas; characters created by European authors who don't seem to have done a great deal of research and don't seem to have a great deal of sensitivity.  My ten-year-old, who, since early childhood, has been exposed to the work of exemplary authors like Cynthia Leitich Smith and Joseph Bruchac, is astounded, and proceeds to lecture the librarian about stereotypes. 

The librarian quickly moves away and my daughter searches on her own for another book. As I look at the shelves, I quickly notice that there are hardly any books at all with diverse protagonists (although I'm pleased to see the library does have a small section that contains kids book in Arabic). In fairness to the librarians, there's one book on display, with a cover my daughter finds unattractive, and a title that I don't find thrilling "Djadaji, Fluchtlingsjunge" (Djadaji, Refugee boy). The author is Peter Häertling, who was honored with the Deutsche Jugenliteraturpreis (a sort of German Newberry) for one of his children's books, and who was also a finalist for the Hans Christian Anderson Award, some years ago. He certainly appears to have been a compassionate person who sought to write about social justice issues. But he wasn't an immigrant. So, however well meant or well researched this title might be, it certainly isn't an #ownvoices contribution. Nonetheless, I borrow it, out of curiosity, if nothing else, and I insist my daughter should try reading it.
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"Why?" she demands, and I tell her I want to know what she thinks of it.

My opinionated 10 year old declares that it is "really boring" and refuses to go beyond the first ten pages. I try it after she gives up, and I don't find it captivating either.

On our second visit to the library, we find another book with a non-white protagonist, this time written by an author who has an immigrant background: Das Mondmädchen by Mehrnousch Zaeri-Esfahani. This lyrically written tale interweaves fantasy with realism and we enjoy the poetic language as well as the beautiful black and white illustrations by Mehrdad Zaeri. But I can't find any more diverse books in stock in this library. 

Nor do I find diverse books at the Asylum Seekers Center, where I volunteer to spend time with refugee children. I am delighted to find several cases of books in excellent condition that I can use when I conduct reading workshops for the children. But I realize quite quickly that not one of these books features a protagonist who isn't straight and white. If the protagonist's religion plays a role, it's always Christianity. Not one protagonist is disabled, either.
 
So I start searching, somewhat haphazardly, for diverse kidlit whenever I can, during the next eight months of my stay. Granted, I don't conduct any kind of objective research. I wouldn't know how, anyway - after all my training was in oceanography, not social science. I just do a few searches on the internet, and visit libraries and bookstores wherever I happen to travel, and engage adults in conversation on this topic whenever I happen to think of it and the occasion seems right.

I'm pleased to discover a wide variety of books that qualify as immigrant literature in German for adults. Author Saša Stanišić, in the November 2008 issue of Words Without Borders, writes: Immigrant literatures are not an isle in the sea of national literature, but a component, both in the depths, where the archaic squids of tradition live, and on the surface, where pop-cultural waves hit the shore. And, as Professor Andreas Schumann states in an interesting  article on the subject (https://en.qantara.de/content/new-trends-in-germanys-immigrant-literature-the-guest-who-is-a-guest-no-longer ), the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, "awarded since 1985 by the Robert Bosch Foundation for "major contributions to German literature by authors whose native language is not German", is a reliable indicator of developments in what can no longer be called "immigrant literature" – from Aras Ören and Rafik Schami in 1985 to the 2005 laureates, Feridun Zaimoğlu and Dimitré Dinev." In bookstores, recent works of immigrant literature (like Melina Nadj Abonji's TAUBEN FLIEGEN AUF) are prominently displayed and staff seem well informed about the subject and recommend several authors and books. Librarians, too, seem well informed about the literary canon and eager to discuss "Migrantenliteratur."

But my inquiry suggests there is significantly less diverse kidlit in Germany than in America. Many "multicultural" stories feature a white savior, and many seem to be written from the point of view of the white character. As for gender equity and inclusion, I don't see a great many examples in the middle grade and picture book categories. Based on casual conversations I have with librarians and bookstore personnel in several German cities, I get the impression that I'm the only customer/patron who has asked specifically for children's books with diverse protagonists. ​

​At every bookstore, if I ask for children's books, I'm shown a section where I inevitably see many old European classics, like Emil and the Detectives (by Erik Kaestner) and the Pippi Longstocking series (by Astrid Lindgren), but not a single authentically diverse book. Instead, I see stacks of comics replete with offensive depictions of people of color. Granted, the authors of these comics are usually from other parts of Europe, not Germany; but they are certainly very popular in Germany, with readers of all ages. 

And almost without exception, if I ask for German books about "die ureinwohner Amerikas" (indigenous people from the American continent), I'm told to read books by Karl May. May, a writer of Westerns, is described as a German institution - and his work, from what I can see by leafing through his books, is riddled with stereotypical portrayals that lack depth and respect. I'm upset to hear how popular and widely read his work remains.
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Most upsetting, however, are the typical responses with which my concerns are met. Not that I ought to be surprised, but at least in America, thanks to the dedicated work done by the leaders of the #WNDB movement, librarians and teachers and booksellers seem more aware of the issue. 

​In Germany, some summarily dismiss the idea that diverse books are necessary. I'm told, for example, that the argument about diverse children needing to see themselves in books is not important in Germany because "kids don't read much these days." I am sometimes met with outright resistance (those kids' parents don't read and they don't value reading - why should anyone write books for them unless they want to lose money), sometimes with ignorance (why are you telling me that kids need to see themselves in books when you seem to have done fine without that).  If I suggest that racist ideas in stories may be tacitly imbibed by young readers, resulting later in insidious prejudice, my listeners often declare that they are good people even though, as children, they may have read books that contained racial/gender/religious stereotypes, so they don't see what the problem is. Another common argument is that the immigrants, be they refugees or not, need to integrate. And integration is often interpreted as meaning that immigrant children need to read books that are classics "so they can better understand German culture" and that immigrant children will actually  benefit by reading books that are populated entirely with monochromatic characters who "truly reflect the values" of German society.

As for values - Emil and the Detectives is a book in which all the characters actively engaged in solving the mystery are white boys and the only girl character in attendance does nothing but bring the boys food and whine about the fact that she can't do anything adventurous because she's a girl, after all (and her job is to provide the men with material sustenance)!

As for Lindgren, I read and re-read the first Pippi book as a child - because, I suspect, it was one of the few who had a truly strong and adventurous female heroine. But even as a child, some of the humor in the book upset me. I detested the nonchalance with which Lindgren described Pippi's father's profession (which is still described in existing German editions of the book in terms that I find repulsive). Then again, of course I deeply respect and admire Lindgren's ability to create such a magnificently bold female character. When I suggest that most German children probably the book without ever being asked to question the rampant racism in it, I'm told Lindgren was just trying to be funny. Sure, it can be funny to laugh at another culture's expense. Sure, it makes some of us feel bigger and better if we decide "others" are somehow less important/beautiful/intelligent/humane etc. etc. But aren't there more refined ways to be humorous? Would a less culturally insensitive Pippi be a bad thing? Would it weaken her character if her crasser statements were substituted with equally raucous  yet sensitive humor? I don't even bother mentioning something else I picked up on and wondered about - at least one of the thieves in one of the Pippi books has a "Jewish" name; a name that a Scandinavian friend said was not Scandinavian; a name that Jewish friend confirmed was indeed Jewish. And the odd choice of name gave me pause.
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One evening, when I mention that Kaestner and Lindgren may not have had an entirely egalitarian idea of humanity as a whole, I manage to deeply affront a whole slew of Germans. Later, a German colleague knowingly describes it as "vertidigung der Kindheitserrinerung" - defense of childhood memories; and he's right - the incident is a testament to how deeply we identify with the books we loved as children. But although Kaestner and Lindgren have created characters that have stood the test of time, it doesn't mean that children should be allowed to consume every book they ever wrote without any reflection or discussion.  

​It always saddens me when my questions regarding diversity and multiculturalism in German children's literature are viewed as insulting and taken personally. Nevertheless, I continue, whenever I can, to engage people I meet in a discussion on this topic, and I try hard to speak issues of white privilege and different forms exclusion and privilege reflected in books. I share thoughts about broadening our understanding of gender and how children's books may help fuel cultural exchange and compassion and mutual respect.
I'm not sure I'm making much headway. But I keep trying.
 
Why?
 
Because Germany has opened it arms to embrace a staggering number of immigrants, and that is admirable. According to an article in the Washington Post last year, 22.5 percent of all people in Germany are migrants or have at least one parent who is an immigrant and 38 %  of all children under 10 in Germany are foreign-born or second generation. So all German children, whatever their culture, gender, or background, however they may choose to identify themselves, will surely live in a Germany more diverse than the one in which their parents grew up.   In some cities, such as in Bremen, where I once lived, there's an even higher proportion of children with a “migrant background.” And I want to help these children settle down in their new home, even if their new home isn't my country. I want do what I can in the years left to me, to help young people build a future world where, I hope, diversity and multiculturalism will be respected and celebrated, and society will be more compassionate and more egalitarian. And one small way to help, I hope, is to promote dialogue on this topic, which is close to my heart, and to support increasing diversity in German children's literature. 

 Lesley Roessing has produced another blog post.  She has written five other contributions. (Find those entries with these links one, two, three, four, and five.). Her posts range from celebrating Nancy Drew, to discussing verse novels, to considering how to confront bullying. Lesley is one of the smartest people I know writing about and teaching YA literature. She has an abundance of information about YA, especially centered on specific themes. Today, she takes on books that focus on the events related to 9/11. It is an homage to people who experienced the event and a reminder to those of us who witnessed from a far. As she points out, the events of that day predate all of the students in P-12 students. What are we doing? For those of us who were adults, or even high school students, living and working on that day remember exactly where we were and what we were doing. As a result of that day members of the military, in all of its branches, are still in combat. We have a relative beginning his fourth deployment. What are we teaching? For seventeen years our country has been spending money and worrying about energy as a result. Lesley helps us consider how we might discuss the events and the emotions around it in our middle and high schools using literature.

By 2016 most states still did not require 9/11 to be taught as a topic. While 49/51 states (and DC) updated some portion of their standards documents since 2001, only 21 states (41%) include the 9/11 attacks specifically as past of a standard, sub-standard, or as an example; 16 states (31%) do not mention the 9/11 attacks or any content related to terrorism; and only 14 states (28%) include some aspect of terrorism or the war on terror (but not 9/11 specifically). Even when included in textbooks, there is very little information given, and students in Social Studies classes make the point that they generally only read about these events in textbooks; they want information that helps them make sense of what they are reading/learning.
 
I find the most effective way to share and discuss the events of September 11, 2001, and actually any historical event, and the nuances and affects of those events is through a novel study—the power of story. When we who were present during this time, talk about 9/11, we share our personal stories of the day and the days that followed—how these events affected us, our friends, our relatives, strangers, our towns, and the nation and world as a whole. Novels and stories serve as mirrors to reflect our reality and to help us look closer; they serve as windows into those who were affected differently that we were and to build empathy for those persons, and they serve as maps to help us navigate a confusing world.

When classes read novels about 9/11, especially in book clubs where small groups of students are reading different books, they access many differing perspectives to a story within their book club but also can meet with, and compare stories from, the other book clubs.
 
I am sharing “Eleven Novels for Nine Eleven” although there are a few more I have not as yet read. I have facilitated book clubs in grades 5 through 9 English-Language Arts and Social Studies classes in a variety of schools over the last two years. Of course some of these novels are more appropriate for elementary readers, some for middle grade readers, and others are more complex for high school readers but each shares a different story and perspective on the events of 9/11 and together they just might show a more complete picture.

​“After today, everything’s changed.”

“Sometimes when a terrible thing happens, it can make a beautiful thing seem even more precious.”

Eleven is the story of Alex who is turning 11 on September 11, 2001. I was concerned that the character would be too young for this topic. I also thought that, the character age’s implied that the novel wouldn’t contain the complexity the topic deserves. but, boy, was I wrong! I was hooked with the complexity of the first 2-page chapter. I wasn’t sure what was happening in this introductory chapter, but it was not a feeling of confusion as much as “It could be this; no, it could be this…” and inference and interpretation, even visualization.

I also forgot that New York City kids grow up faster, taking public transportation throughout the city, but more importantly, I forgot that when you need or expect a young adolescent to rise to the occasion, he will.

Alex loves airplanes and dogs—and he doesn’t realize it, but he loves his little sister Nunu who is relegated to her side of the bedroom they share by a black and yellow “flight line” down the middle of the room. And he loves his father, even though Alex told him, “I hate you,” the night before 9/11. When the Towers fall, Alex rises to the occasion, taking care of his little sister and an abandoned dog, making the sacrifice to return the dog he has always wanted to his owners when the vet finds a chip, facing bullies, making “deals” in the hopes these deals and good works will offset what he said to his father and ascertain his return from the Towers, and comforting Mac, a lonely man who is awaiting his only son’s return from the Towers.

In Eleven author Tom Rogers builds a character who is authentic, a kid who events serve to turn into a young man. Alex’s mother had said to him, “I need you to be grown up today” and, even though he was focusing on his misdeeds of the day, he did. “I’m proud of you, young man…. Young Man. Alex liked how that sounded.”

Warning: Have a box of tissues handy. I was a puddle when I finished the novel. This book is not graphic but does not skirt the events. We hear the news announcement about the four airplanes and, more chilling, a description of an empty hospital—“There were no gurneys rolling through to the ER, no sick and wounded in pain. There wasn’t a patient in sight. And he knew then that none would be coming.” A powerful examination of the events of 9/11 and how they affected ordinary people—and one boy’s birthday.

The events of 9/11 are challenging to describe and discuss, especially with children who were not yet born, which at this point is most of our student population. I think that is so because, as adults, we each have our memories of that day and Life Before. I was a middle school teacher on the day the Towers fell. I remember standing in my classroom as our team teachers watched the morning news. Thankfully, our students were in their Specials and were not witness to the shock and tears on our faces. I don’t remember much of that day, but we were located in Philadelphia and did not immediately feel the effects. But the events o that day have affected our country and all our citizens as well as our contemporary world. The importance of studying and discussing 9/11 as part of American history is highlighted in Jewell Parker Rhoads novel Towers Falling, set in September, 2016.

Nine Ten: A September 11 Story is another novel effective in introducing young adolescent students to the many events of September 11, 2001. Nora Raleigh Baskin’s novel is set during the days leading up to 9/11—in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Columbus, and Shanksvlle, Pennsylvania, where readers follow four diverse middle-grade students affected by the events of 9/11. Sergio, Naheed, Aimee, and Will first cross paths in the O’Hare Airport on September 9. The four young adolescents are Black, White, Jewish, and Muslim and are collectively surviving loss, guilt, poverty, parental absence, neglectful fathers, bullying, the navigation of peer relationships, as well as the angst of middle school, “…everything felt different, as if you suddenly realized you had been coming to school in your pajamas and you had to figure out a way to hide this fact before anyone else noticed.” (p. 48). In their own ways they are each affected by 9/11, and on September 11, 2002, these four and their families again converge at Ground Zero, each there for different reasons, but this time their paths back together have meaning.

There are a multitude of important conversations to be generated by this little novel, a story of Before and After. I was especially grateful that the events and heroes of Shanksville were memorialized. In fact there are many aspects of heroism brought forth in the novel to discuss. But Nine, Ten: A September 11 Story is the story of people and three days in their lives, “Because in the end it was just about people…Because the world changed that day, slowly and then all at once.” (p. 176).

Relationships are built over time, but how much can they withstand? Jake Green and Sameed Madina have always been friends. They have grown up together; they run track together; they play war games together; they have each other backs; they plan to always remain friends “but only till Martians invade the earth.”

But then the events of September 11, 2001, occurred, and Martians did invade the earth, only they looked like Sam and his family—Muslim. Because one of the terrorists had lived in their neighborhood and was a client at the bank where Mr. Madina worked, Sam’s father comes under FBI surveillance, and the neighborhood divides in their support. Not Jake, though. He believes in his friend and his friend’s family, physically fighting the school bully who refers to Sam as a “towelhead” and arguing with his own mother whose own grief keeps her from supporting their neighbors.

When his father is taken into custody, Sam refuses to attend school, abandons his cross-country team, and distances himself from Jake, taking a new interest in the Islam religion. But Jake does not give up, and the boys reconnect to peacefully stop their racist classmates, Bobby and Rigo, from attacking the local mosque. Afterwards, Jake realizes that they both have been affected by 9/11; he has learned that you can be both scared and brave at the same time, but he has also has learned that adversity can be defeated peacefully. And Jake realizes that Sam is now different. “For the first time I see Sam, a Muslim. An American Muslim. But he is still just Sam, no matter what.”

​September 11. A day that changed all our lives in some way. As we see in Nine, Ten: A September 21 Story, there clearly was a Before and After. But there also was a Then or That Day and an After.

All We Have Left was so compelling that I read from dawn to dusk and did not put the book down until I finished. The novel intertwines two stories, that of 18-year-old Travis and sixteen-year-old Alia who were in the Towers as they fell and the story of Travis’ sister, Jesse, who, fifteen years later, is part of a dysfunctional family whose lives are still overwhelmingly affected by That Day and Travis’ death.

Seventeen year old Jesse is not sure who she is, who she should be, who she should hate, and who she can love. Her life is overshadowed by 9/11, her mother’s mourning, and her father’s hate.

But both Alia in 2001, and Jesse in 2016, learn that “Faith and strength aren’t something that you wear like some sort of costume; they come from inside you” (p.329) as does love. And Jesse realizes that she has to work on “treasuring right here, right now, because that’s important.” As one character says but all the characters learn, “You can fill that void inside you with anger, or you can fill it with the love for the ones who remain beside you, with hope for the future.”

What I appreciated about this novel is that is shows yet another side of how 9/11 affected people, especially adolescents, those adolescents who populate American schools everywhere. I strongly feel that students should not only be learning about the events and effects of 9/11, but that, through novels, readers learn more about how events affect people and especially children their ages. 

Refugees adds another dimension to the 9/11 novels.

Dawn is a foster teen who runs away to New York City and becomes affected by the events of 9/11. As she plays her flute on the streets near Ground Zero to earn money for food, she is approached by families of victims who ask her to play for them and the memories of their loved ones. As Dawn comes to believe this is her mission, she teaches herself music she feels appropriate for those of many cultures and stages of life. In doing so, she opens up to strangers and new friends, something she couldn't do with her foster mother.

Johar is an Afghani teenager, weaver, and poet. His father is killed by the Taliban, his mother is killed by a land mine, his older brother joins the Taliban, and his aunt is missing, leaving Johar to care for his three-year-old cousin. He and his cousin flee to a refugee camp in Pakistan where he works for the Red Cross doctor, Dawn's foster mother, another person who must learn to show love.

Dawn and Johar connect through phone calls and emails, and as they all work toward forming a family—one that spans the globe—the reader learns how war, the U.S. involvement, and the events of 9/11 affected those in many countries. This would be a book I would recommend for proficient readers with an interest in war or history.

P.S. After I read this book and posted my original Goodreads review, I was listening to a discussion about the days following 9/11 in the Middle East on NPR and found that I could actually follow it; therefore, I realize that I learned more than I thought from this novel.

The Usual Rules is an emotional and insightful novel about the effects of the events of September 11th on the families and friends of the victims—those left behind.
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The reader learns about the close relationship between 13-year-old Wendy and her mother through flashbacks: her mother's divorce, the sporadic visits of her father, her mother's marriage to her "other dad," and the birth of her half-brother. And then her mother goes to work at her job at the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001—and does not return. Wendy’s world changes. “Then September happened and the planet she lived on had seemed more like a meteor, spinning and falling” (p. 175).

The reader experiences not only Wendy's (and Josh's and Louie's) loss but the suffering and uncertainty of those left behind. Could her mother be walking around, not remembering who she is? As the family hangs signs, we learn how different this loss was for many people who held out hope for a long time without a sense of closure. And this loss was different because it was experienced by many—an entire country in a way. “Instead of just dealing with your own heart getting ripped into pieces, wherever you looked you knew there were other people dealing with the same thing. You couldn’t even be alone with it” (p. 95).

We see the loss through the eyes and hearts of a daughter, a very young son, and a desperately-in-love husband. Wendy leaves Brooklyn and goes to her biological father’s in California. Among strangers, she re-invents her life. As those she meets help fill the hole in her life, she fills the hole in theirs. Books also help her to heal.

Even though there are quite a few characters in this novel, but they all are well-developed, and I found myself becoming involved in all their lives, not only Wendy, Josh, and Louie and even his father Garrett, but Wendy’s new friends—Carolyn, Alan, Todd, Violet… On some level they all have experienced trauma and loss, and within these relationships, Wendy is able to heal and return to rebuild her family.
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Although I did not want this novel to end and to leave these characters, this well-written novel taught me more about the effects of September 11, loss, and the importance of relationships and added a new perspective to my collection of 9/11 novels.

Another novel as a complement to a 9/11 Novel Study would be Maria Padian’s novel about the ways life in an idyllic small Maine town quickly gets turned upside down after the events of 9/11. 

“Things get a little more complicated when you know somebody’s story.…It’s hard to fear someone, or be cruel to them, when you know their story.”

The majority of the 21.3 million refugees worldwide in 2016 were from Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia. The United States resettled 84,994 refugees. Together with immigrants, refugee children make up one in five children in the U.S. More than half the Syrian refugees who were resettled in the U.S. between October 2010 and November 2015 are under the age of 20.
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In Out of Nowhere by Maria Padian, narrator Tom Bouchard is a high school senior. He is a soccer player, top of his class academically, and well-liked. He lives in Maine in a town that has become a secondary migration location for Somali refugees. These Somali students are trying to navigate high school without many benefits, including the English language. They face hostility from many of their fellow classmates and the townspeople, including the mayor; one teacher, at the request of students, permits only English to be spoken in her classroom. When four Somali boys join the soccer team, turning it into a winning team, and when he is forced to complete volunteer hours at the K Street Center where he tutors a young Somali boy and works with a female Somali classmate, Tom learns at least a part of their stories. Tom fights bigotry, especially that of his girlfriend—now ex-girlfriend, but he still doesn’t comprehend the complexity of the beliefs, customs, and traditions of his new friends, and his actions have negative consequences for all involved. While trying to defend the truth, Tom learns a valuable lesson, “Truth is a difficult word. One person’s truth is another person’s falsehood. People believe what appears to be true and what they feel is true.”

Lesson Learned: Tolerance and acceptance is not enough; we all need to reach respect (for others and their cultures, beliefs, and traditions).

“The bigger the issue, the smaller you write.”--Richard Price
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Instead of focusing on the overwhelming statistics generated by the March 11, 2011 earthquake and resulting tsunami in Japan—nearly 16,000 deaths and 3,000 people missing—the event becomes even more intense and compelling as author Leza Lowitz relates the story of one town and one boy and the resilience of many.

The story begins on March 11 when Kai, a half Japanese, half American 17-year-old and his teachers and classmates experience the “jolting of the earth,” and as trained, they evacuate, running for their lives, looking for the highest place, as their town is destroyed. Written powerfully in free verse, the reader feels the fury of nature as the water “churns,” “thrashes,” “surges,” “sweeps,” “charges.” Kai ends up in a shelter having lost his mother, his grandparents, and one of his best friends. His father left years before to return to America.

Faced with overwhelming loss and trauma, Kai walks into the ocean but is saved by one of his classmates and convinced to accept the opportunity to go to New York City on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 where he will spend some time with young adults who lost their parents as teens in the 9/11 attacks. At Ground Zero, Fia tells him, “Bravery means being scared and going forward anyway.”

Kai hopes to find his father in NYC but returns to his village to help the young adolescents who lost their families and to rebuild his town. “I want to be/ like that tree/ deep roots/ making it strong/ keeping it/ standing tall.” And it is to his roots Kai returns and stays—“The quake moved the earth/ ten inches/ on its axis./ I guess/I shifted,” too.”

Up from the Sea, well-written as a verse novel (a format that engages many reluctant readers), would serve as an effective continuation to a 9/11 study. Readers should already be aware of the events of 9/11 to understand the connection between Kai and Tom but will comprehend the trauma and loss experienced, and resilience that is required, by anyone who faces adversity.
 
Classes can read a variety of these novels to learn events from multiple perspectives—in small-group collaborative book clubs, generating provocative, important intra-group and inter-group conversations about the events of 9/11, intolerance, resilience, and relationships. Book Clubs can then share their novels, as well as creating an after-reading text synthesis for increased comprehension of the text(s) read, through presentations to the rest of the class. I have found “I Am’ poems of each of the characters to be particularly effective if students are required to first make a storyboard or summary of the novel events to establish that all key events are included somewhere in the groups’ poems. See #NineElevenNovelStudy for lesson ideas. Through these diverse novels, readers can experience the days before, the day of, the days after, the years following, and the many effects of the events of 9/11 on a variety of children, teens, and adults, these events and effects experienced from differing perspectives.

A middle school teacher for twenty years, Lesley Roessing is currently Director of the Coastal Savannah Writing Project and works as a Literacy Consultant with a K-8 school. She recently retired from Georgia Southern University where she worked with teachers and taught Bibliotherapy. She is the author of Bridging the Gap: Reading Critically & Writing Meaningfully to Get to the Core; Comma Quest: The Rules They Followed. The Sentences They Saved; No More “Us” & “Them: Classroom Lessons and Activities to Promote Peer Respect; and The Write to Read: Response Journals That Increase Comprehension. Lesley is a columnist for AMLE Magazine and former editor of Connections, the award-winning journal of the Georgia Council of Teachers of English. ​Lesley is a literacy consultant for schools in Beaufort, SC and is available to work with schools on designing or facilitating a 9/11 Novel Study or creating other Reading-Writing-Speaking Units for ELA or Social Study classes.

Last week was more than a bit exciting. It was the first week of classes, I was able to make some initial arrangements with the local school district about the nature of the next Summit on YA lit, and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published a piece that critiqued YA Literature. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I am not immune to critique about a body of literature that I love. It happens. Debate is healthy and helps us reexamine the positions we hold. We might clarify our arguments and our positions. That is, if both parties are at least a bit informed on the topic of discussion.

I found out about this WSJ critique from a Facebook post that Rob Bittner shared and commented on. Rob and I have met a couple of times, but we primarily know each other through social media and the fact that we both follow the ebbs and flow of comments on YA Literature that appear on social media.  As he lamented this piece and its tone about the “darkness” of YA literature, I decided I better take a look at it.
​
Much to my surprise, in his WSJ commentary, Mr. Salerno focuses his attention on summarizing the 2018 Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature. This is frankly amazing. I did my best to introduce myself to every attendee. Oh, I might have missed a few people, but not many. To double check, I reviewed the list of paid attendees and guests of the summit. Lo and behold, Mr. Salerno’s name was not on the list. A casual reader of his piece, might assume that Mr. Salerno was there listening and coming to careful conclusions after interviewing some of the authors and academics like Alice Hayes (Alice has commented that she wasn’t interview by this individual) and James Blasingame. Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case. It appears that the information was likely lifted from one of these two articles (First, one reporting on the participation of academics from Arizona State University or second from University of Nevada, Las Vegas that summarized the summit.) or perhaps a combination of both.   

Again, I don’t mind a good debate. At the Summit we had disagreements and discussed next steps; a major focus of the summit that was ignored in the WSJ commentary. We planned lines of research and began research projects. The scope of the conference was much larger in terms of topics and sessions that were provided discussed in the commentary. A quick look at the Summit page on Dr. Bickmore’s YA Wednesday would allow people to see the entire program, find summaries of the academics that presented, and understand that not only did we have four keynote authors, but eight other authors writing in a range of genres and with a variety of styles and tones were also speaking and presenting.
​
In reality, the Summit was invigorating. Participants left with new pedagogical ideas, lists of books that covered a range of topics, new friendships, and partnerships that will lead to new research. Below you will find responses from a several of the Summit participants—participants who actually attended. These responses have appeared on Facebook and other venues, but I felt they need to be collected and archived. Below, you will hear from Chris Crutcher, Kelsey Clause, Amanda Melilli, Kia Richmond, Stephanie Toliver, and Louise Freeman.

​Go Chris, Go!! Making an impact on my life since 6th grade!! 
 
I got bogged down reading the comments of the folks that applauded Salerno for his worldview. Lucky for most of them, they, and their children, haven't experienced most of what gets discussed in the YA lit that's "unsavory"... But that doesn't mean it's not happening to SOMEONE. I'll never understand how people think putting blinders on and ignoring the fact that there are youth dealing with adult-sized issues solves anything. 
 
I'm not going to get too worked up because it is the Wall Street Journal after all... Not a lot of minds you're going to be changing there. 
 
This close-minded article showcases the impact of the work you and your colleagues can have... There's clearly a section of the next generation who aren't going to learn empathy at home. Thank goodness for YA Lit to fill that gap.
 
Maybe we'll extend a personal invitation to Salerno to attend the next Summit and expand his perspective.
 
Kelsey Claus

Educators in the field of children's and YA literature are constantly having to fight this argument (where youth should only be reading about happy things), and to be honest, I couldn't respond better than Chris Crutcher on that topic. So please read his response on Facebook and in this blog post.

However, there is also something scary about this opinion article that drives me nuts as a librarian: the author didn't accurately represent the entire Summit. In fact, he didn't even accurately represent all of the main authors that presented there; he left out Bill Konigsberg who had just as much time and presence at the conference as Laurie, Chris and Kekla. But Bill and his works don't match the argument he was trying to make, so he wasn't mentioned in the article.

Was there some pretty heavy, dark stuff addressed at the Summit? Yes, but that wasn't the ENTIRE summit as the opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal makes it sound like. There were presentations on a huge range of topics (found here: http://www.yawednesday.com/2018-summit.html) including my own that included Light Novels. That's right. Light Novels. You know, those quirky novels from Japan where it's not uncommon for main characters to wake up as vending machines or spiders in some fantasy video game type land? A far cry from the works of Chris, Laurie, Kekla, and Bill, but we had conversations about these types of books as well!
​
In fact, all of the teachers I have met with since the Summit have been asking for help in finding one type of reading material for their classrooms: engaging works that their students will actually read and have complex conversations about. THAT's what I see that our educators got from the Summit. Not some need to shove trauma down their students throats, but a desperate need to find materials that their students can relate to and that makes them want to read more.
The Summit was all about helping educators get their students engaged with the ELA curriculum whether through books dealing with trauma or the fantastic or graphic novels or short stories, and the WSJ article is a gross misrepresentation of the conversations and learning that actually took place there.
 


We're really excited for the next Summit! 

In response to Steve Salerno's WSJ article (https://www.wsj.com/…/the-unbearable-darkness-of-young-adul…), I submit the following (and yes, it’s long):

I wish that Steve Salerno would have actually attended the Summit on the Research and Teaching of Young Adult Literature at the University of Nevada - Las Vegas (organized by Steven T Bickmore) with us in June 2018. Perhaps he would have gotten some of his facts right before casting aspersions on educators, authors, and the youth of America.
​
I am one of the “nearly 50 presenters—top educators and authors from across the land” that Salerno speaks of in his Wall Street Journal essay (“The Unbearable Darkness of Young Adult Literature,” August 18, 2018). Thanks to a research grant and sabbatical from Northern Michigan University, I was proud to attend the Summit, at which shared some of the results of my recent research on mental illness in 21st century young adult literature.

In this presentation, I focused on 2 of the 30 contemporary young adult texts I analyze in my forthcoming book, Mental Illness in Young Adult Literature: Exploring Struggles through Fictional Characters (ABC-CLIO/Greenwood Press): Wintergirls and The Impossible Knife of Memory (both outstanding examples of young adult literature by Summit attendee and author Laurie Halse Anderson). Session attendees were led through a close reading activity focused on characters’ use of stereotypical language related to mental illness (e.g., “freak, zombie, crazy, unstuck in time” in The Impossible Knife of Memory and “skin-bag of a girl, locked up, crazy seeds, circus freak” in Wintergirls) as well as Anderson’s use of authentic terminology (e.g., “catastrophizing, worry, fear, nightmares, fatigue, therapist” in Wintergirls, and “disordered behavior, therapy, Boerhaave’s syndrome, malnourishment, disturbed brain chemistry, psychiatric care facility” in The Impossible Knife of Memory).

Discussions following the activity centered on the benefits of examining assumptions underlying the language used by characters (and, by extension, real people). This kind of lesson dovetails with several objectives in the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts and can help students to consider how stereotyping language is connected to biased attitudes and can, when left unchecked, lead to other discriminatory behavior (as described in the Anti-Defamation League’s “Pyramid of Hate”). Helping young adults think about the language they read – and use – can empower them and perhaps help them make informed choices about their behavior toward others. 

In designing such a presentation (and teaching a similar lesson in my Good Books class this summer at NMU), I was not assuming that “all students arrive at school traumatized in some fashion” as Salerno claims that I (and other Summit presenters) did. Nor was I “determinedly insist[ing] on immersing students in an unsavory worldview, portraying life in terms of its anomalies and unorthodoxies” as Salerno states in his essay.

My goal in talking about Wintergirls and The Impossible Knife of Memory was to offer Summit attendees the chance to discuss how young adult literature can, as Michael Cart says, help teen readers see themselves on the pages of the books, foster “under¬standing, empathy, and compassion by offering vividly realized portraits of the lives—exterior and interior—of individuals who are unlike the reader,” to tell young adults “the truth,” even when it is unpleasant.

I agree with Summit presenter and young adult author Chris Crutcher (who, unlike Salerno, actually has experience in the mental health field as a child and family therapist, and who, unlike Salerno, actually has experience as a secondary teacher). Chris says that stories like his and Anderson’s (featured in sessions such as mine at the Summit), “allow bruised kids to talk about - and therefore better understand - their own situations, and relatively unbruised kids to become more enlightened, and therefore, hopefully, more decent.” Creating more empathetic and informed citizens is part of the work of English language arts teachers, who are charged in the CCSS with helping youth to develop “critical-thinking skills and the ability to closely and attentively read texts in a way that will help them understand and enjoy complex works of literature.”

Salerno asks whether higher rates of depression and suicide are “an organic outgrowth of life’s legitimate trials—or are […] a crisis manufactured, at least in part, by painting life as so much more trying than it is?” It is disappointing that an experienced journalist (and visiting lecturer at UNLV) has to resort to using a faulty method of reasoning (either-or thinking) in his writing. The American Psychiatric Association reports the prevalence of childhood trauma (e.g., physical, emotional, or sexual abuse; violence; war; disasters; etc.) as very high, with more than 65 percent of children experiencing trauma by age 16. Moreover, the National Institute of Mental Health estimates that more than 20 percent of young adults experience serious mental illness. It doesn’t seem reasonable that these rates are the result of a manufactured crisis nor to life being painted as “more trying than it is.”

In his last paragraph, Salerno says that if Summit attendees did indeed “care about young adults and their growth,” as Summit presenter Alice Hays states, then we should “consider recommending books that make the world sound like a more hospitable place to be.” Rudine Sims Bishop argues that literature can act as a window, sliding glass door, or a mirror, showing readers more about their own worlds and lives or the lives of others that might be “real or imagined, familiar or strange.”

The Summit in Las Vegas provided attendees with opportunities to discuss young adult literature of all kinds: sports literature (Alan Brown), science fiction (S.R. Toliver), graphic novels (Dani Kachorsky and Stephanie Reid); historical fiction (Sharon Kane and Ritu Radhakrishnan; and Diane Scrofano Novoa – who even connected YA lit to the musical Hamilton); as well as that connected to bullying (Amanda Melilli), social justice issues (Trista Owczarzak; Rebecca Maldonado, Crag Hill, and Danetra King; Tiye Cort; and Laura Davis), and mental illnesses such as PTSD (Louise Freeman Davis – and myself), substance use (Rachel Rickard Rebellino, Caitlin Murphy, and Karly Marie Grice), and eating disorders (me again).
Salerno’s piece asks why Summit attendees didn’t focus on “something other than darkness and depravity." However, it does not address the fullness of context of the Summit, which DID include sessions on light and humor and love and relationship as well as mental illness and bullying. Nor does it bother to mention how talking about young adult literature better prepared attendees to reenter their lives as more informed, empathetic educators, librarians, and advocates for youth, which might just make the lives of young adults that much better. Wow, after reading his piece, I was hoping for happily-ever-after. Too bad Salerno didn’t deliver.
​
By Kia Richmond

References from Louise

Appel, M. (2011). A story about a stupid person can make you act stupid (or smart): Behavioral assimilation (and contrast) as narrative impact. Media Psychology, 14(2), 144-167.
Djikic, M., & Oatley, K. (2014). The art in fiction: From indirect communication to changes of the self. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 8(4), 498.
Djikic, M., Oatley, K., & Moldoveanu, M. C. (2013). Reading other minds: Effects of literature on empathy. Scientific Study of Literature, 3(1), 28-47.
Fong, K., Mullin, J. B., & Mar, R. A. (2013). What you read matters: The role of fiction genre in predicting interpersonal sensitivity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 7(4), 370.
Freeman, L., & Guarisco, M. (2015). The Wonder of empathy: Using Palacio’s novel to teach perspective-taking. The ALAN Review, 43 (1): 56-68., 43(1), 56-68.
Gabriel, S., & Young, A. F. (2011). Becoming a vampire without being bitten: The narrative collective-assimilation hypothesis. Psychological Science, 22(8), 990-994.
Guarisco, M. S., Brooks, C., & Freeman, L. M. (2017). Reading Books and Reading Minds: Differential Effects of Wonder and The Crossover on Empathy and Theory of Mind. Study and Scrutiny: Research on Young Adult Literature, 2(2), 24-54.
Johnson, D. R. (2012). Transportation into a story increases empathy, prosocial behavior, and perceptual bias toward fearful expressions. Personality and Individual Differences, 52(2), 150-155.
Johnson, D. R., Jasper, D. M., Griffin, S., & Huffman, B. L. (2013). Reading narrative fiction reduces Arab-Muslim prejudice and offers a safe haven from intergroup anxiety. Social Cognition, 31(5), 578-598.
Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342(6156), 377-380
Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on psychological science, 3(3), 173-192.
Mar, R. A., Oatley, K., Hirsh, J., dela Paz, J., & Peterson, J. B. (2006). Bookworms versus nerds: Exposure to fiction versus non-fiction, divergent associations with social ability, and the simulation of fictional social worlds. Journal of research in personality, 40(5), 694-712.
Vezzali, L., Stathi, S., Giovannini, D., Capozza, D., & Trifiletti, E. (2015). The greatest magic of Harry Potter: Reducing prejudice. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 45(2), 105-121.

There are many others who attended the conference who had plenty to say. I recommend going to Facebook and following the comments that follow Chris Crutcher's response. I think it is especially fun if you can find his first post in the morning of Aug 30, 2018. The comments are often not there or hard to follow in a repost. Given that, even many of the reposts of have interesting strings of commentary.

I hosted the conference and Mr. Salerno works at my University, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I am not that hard to find. He could have visited with and even shared his bleak take on Young Adult Literature. We could have had a conversation. It could have quoted me directly instead of lifting quotes from Alice Hayes or James Blasingame from a report of the summit--that by the way was written by someone who attended. 

Oh, Mr. Salerno, if you were there and I missed you, you owe the Summit 175 dollars. 

Until next week.

Wow! Collaboration reaps rewards. Meeting Bryan was one of the great rewards of holding a YA Conference while I was at LSU. After reading his post for this week, I realized just how I missed his presence at the YA Summit at UNLV last June (has it been that long? it was such a great event.) Bryan just adds an intriguing aspect to everything he is involved with. His willingness to redefine different aspects of a writing project makes the event dynamic and exciting. It seems that the teacher and students that become involved just flourish. Below he and his collaborators explain what has been going on.

                                              Joke #1: Why don’t oysters share their pearls? Because they’re shellfish.
                                              Joke #2: Why did the dolphin cross the beach? To get to the other tide.
                                              Joke #3: Do fish go on vacation? No, because they’re always in school.

For many of us who chose a career in education, it seems we, like fish, are always in school. Knowing that many of us have returned/are returning to classroom obligations this week, we thought a few jokes might be a playful way to start a piece on “how we spent our summer vacation.” Despite rumors and myths about ‘time off,’ it is more honest to say that teachers use June, July and August to participate in professional development, to sign-up for pedagogical workshops, and to enroll in courses at local colleges and universities. For many, summer months mean the busy season, including most of us who work with National Writing Project sites.  

​We’ve adopted a 4-rule policy, however, to make it seem like we’re actually on summer vacation: (1) Read everyday, (2) Write everyday, (3) Talk everyday, and most importantly (4) Have FUN! It’s summer, after all! Our priority is to have a no bummer summer while spending a ‘vacation’ fine-tuning instructional practices. From June until August, the Connecticut Writing Project at Fairfield University hosts a traditional writing institute for teachers, part of the NWP tradition that has been named as a transformative experience (Whitney, 2008) and highly effective professional development (Applebee & Langer, 2013; Darling-Hammond, 2017). Unique to our site, however, are the creation of Young Adult Literacy Labs, one and two-week summer writing opportunities for young people that are genre and/or interest focused. These labs are designed to help young people achieve written outcomes during the summer months. In previous years, we hosted a two-week writing camp where multiple genres were blended in a very short time, but in 2014 we conducted a formative experiment (Reinking & Bradley, 2008) and asked ourselves, “What would happen if we redesigned summer programs, allowing teachers who participate in our summer institute for teaching writing to learn alongside youth attending Young Adult Literacy Labs?” The result has been Little Lab for Big Imaginations (3rd-5th grade), Sports Writing (6th-8th), Novel Writing I - Character Matters and Novel Writing II - Plot Matters (6th-8th, 9th-12th), Who Do You Think You Are? The College Essay and Other Narrative Writing (9th-12th) and Project Citizen - Writing For Change (9th-12th). We also initiated Ubuntu Academy, a two-week literacy lab for immigrant and refugee youth (9th-12th) (Crandall, 2017).

Additionally, we asked ourselves, “What if we added more young adult literature into summer programs?” Our site Director, Bryan, attended two Young Adult Literature Conferences hosted by Steven Bickmore where he led a seminar on refugee narratives in young adult literature and another on exploring the potential of YA books to enhance NWP goals. Through interaction with YA Lit scholars, teachers, and writers during these conferences, he returned to Connecticut with an inspired vision to use more young adult literature in CWP-Fairfield’s programs.

The formative experiment resulted in a re-energizing of our summer work, including intentional use of YA texts to promote relevant writing instruction with youth participants. The Young Adult Literacy Labs now average 200 young people each summer (no bummer there), with over half receiving full or partial scholarships. The teachers who participate in our summer institute for teaching writing, too, have several opportunities to work alongside young people in the literacy labs. All are published in our anthology, POW! Power of Words, the collection of our best summer writing.

Throughout the work we reflect through a lens of Writing Activity Genre Research (Russell, 2009) and Ubuntu, the S. African Bantu philosophy for togetherness and community (Caracciolo & Mungai, 2009; Swanson, 2007). We explore how young adult literature, a tool, helps us to build innovative writing communities. In the words of Swanson (2007), “Ubuntu is recognized as the African philosophy of humanism, linking the individual to the collective through ‘brotherhood’ or ‘sisterhood’”(p. 55). A writer becomes a writer, we believe, when he/she feels part of a larger writing community. The literacy labs are designed as democratic spaces to promote togetherness and collaboration. That is why we’ve been intentional with the use of young adult literature.

​For the last two years, Young Adult texts have helped us to enhance our Young Adult Literacy Labs, especially Project Citizen and Ubuntu Academy. Project Citizen is a summer program for argumentation and activism, and was intentionally designed for diverse demographics. Ubuntu Academy is our literacy lab to promote English language learning for newly arrived students. We select YA books that we predict will have a wide appeal among our young writers, but those with much instructional potential. We host Project Citizen,Ubuntu Academy and a summer writing institute for teachers simultaneously so there will be numerous opportunities to collaborate. We also use copies of chosen texts to model possible writing and to initiate conversations between teachers and youth. During the labs, we schedule events so that young people and teachers can interact with one another without the traditional hierarchy of school. Our end-goal is for everyone to achieve a written outcome for publication, and the young adult novels are our catalyst for conversation, interaction, and instruction.

​In 2014, the 1st year of CWP-Fairfield’s redesign, Bryan asked Jessica, then a graduate student, to collaborate on a literacy lab for English language learners called Ubuntu Academy. Bryan found success using texts by Kwame Alexander while leading professional development in K-12 schools and speculated The Crossover might be great to use with beginning writers of English. Alexander’s poetic style offered digestible mini-lessons, especially in regard to vocabulary and word-play. For example, Alexander’s “As In” poems were analyzed while teachers challenged students to write their own. Remy, a high school sophomore from Democratic Republic of Congo, wrote:

Ubuntu
/ʊˈbʊntu/
noun
An African philosophy that means,
“I can be me because of who we are together.”
Don’t think about your own self; think about others.
Treat others as you want to be treated.
 
As in, working together in a team with friends,
because we can achieve our goals to
change the world more easily.
 
As in, a group of unique men and women from different backgrounds
who speak different languages, but who have the same goals.
 
As in, using communication to practice English language
and to get along, get to know, and understand
each other while making new friends.

Through the poetic narration of Alexander’s Josh Bell, young people attending Ubuntu Academy were also prompted to write their own narratives. Simon, a 10th grade student from Rwanda, for example, wrote an autobiography and penned:

I miss my teachers. I miss hunting rabbits in the forest. I would go to the market and sell the rabbits for money. I miss the food from Rwanda, too, like Maize and beans, but in the USA there are only beans. I miss Rwanda, my friends, my school and the people. I miss my Uncle Safi because he gave me money to go to the market for gum and candies. I would swim in the Lake Kevu with my friends Azali, Sabi, & Claude. I miss the mangoes, cassava, potatoes, and juice.
​
Simon’s autobiography, as well as Remy’s poem, resulted from opportunities to read The Crossover and to think about Alexander’s craft. As new writers of the English language, participants benefited from writing instruction during Ubuntu Academy, especially in terms of style and language used by the author. Reading like writers, enhanced their written outcomes.

Since 2014, Ubuntu Academy has enrolled over 122 young people from Vietnam, Ecuador, Bangladesh, Benin, Eritrea, Haiti, Guatemala, Tanzania, Sudan, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. William King, an ESL teacher who works with many of these young people during the school year, has found ways to use the summer reading as a carryover into his school year. William shares, “Using engaging texts, like Outcasts United, has been my way of meeting students where they are. Through reading such work with them, they teach me what I need to know. In turn, I provide them new opportunities and safe spaces for intellectual growth.” In the last few years, young writers in Ubuntu Academy have advanced their language skills through reading Alexander’s Booked (2016) and Rebound (2018), as well as Warren St. John’s Outcasts United (2009). Another influential text was Katherine Applegate’s Home of the Brave (2007), a narrative, like Alexander’s, told in poetic form. We used Applegate’s book as a collaborative tool between Fairfield University Art Museum and participant’s in our program. Teachers in the summer institute, as well as youth in Ubuntu Academy, discussed Applegate’s poems in relation to Rick Shaefer’s Refugee Trilogy, the art exhibit that debuted at Fairfield University the following semester. Ubuntu youth and summer institute teachers wrote in response to Home of the Brave and recorded their writing into podcasts. These podcasts could then be heard by museum patrons while viewing Shaefer’s artwork at Fairfield University.

​One of the poems resulting from this collaboration was “I Wish” by Akbaru Niyonkuru, a Burundi youth who grew up in a Tanzanian refugee camp. In his poem, Akbaru wrote, “I make a wish / My wish should touch only the ones it concerns / I wish only you and I would heal the world / I wish we would grow wise and worldly / That no one could be wounded.” The poem was heard by singer Frederick Johnson and pianist Daniel Kelly, and improvised into a musical collaboration, as well.

Akbaru’s writing was the outcome of a YA text, the sharing of lived experiences between teachers and youth, and and the intentional creation of building community between artists, writers, learners and educators.
​
Ubuntu Academy benefited from the adoption of YA texts, especially those written in verse, and texts depicting relocation stories (for additional texts, see The Tired. The Poor. The Hungry from January 29, 2017). Such literature has provided a foundation for the lessons we create, the vocabulary we share, the genres we promote, and the self-esteem we hope to build. The opportunity to explore YA texts during summer months also helps us to celebrate YA literature with colleagues in our individual school districts. Sharing writing achieved by youth during the summer is great evidence for the power of using such books during the school year.

In 2014, Shaun Mitchell envisioned  a young adult literacy lab for promoting student activists, which quickly became Project Citizen. The goal of Project Citizen is to guide young people to find an issue they are passionate about and, through research, inquiry and self-exploration, suggest solutions in their writing. In the first years, OpEds and newspaper articles were primary mentor texts as Shaun collaborated with Brynn who taught in a journalism lab. In 2017, however, after National Writing Project investment in our summer work, Project Citizen grew into a two-week young adult literacy lab that provides space to introduce newly released young adult novels, as well. Over the last two years, Project Citizen has served 52 young people from a wide variety of schools in urban, suburban and rural settings, including 9 who traveled to Fairfield University from the Cheyenne River Reservation in S. Dakota in partnership with Simply Smiles. Democracy and citizenship are promoted while young writers collaborate on solo and group projects. The writing is posted, too, on a website where they receive feedback from peers across the United States. 

Project Citizen first benefited from knowledge gained from an LRNG Educator Innovator Award funded by John Legend, the MacArthur Foundation and NWP.  We Too Are Connecticut: Digital Ubuntu with Matt de la Peña’s We Were Here, a yearlong collaboration between teachers from six high schools, taught us how unifying a young adult novel can be amongst diverse readers (Crandall, et. al, 2018). Kim and Shaun, who participated in the LRNG Award, wished to highlight other young adult novels during Project Citizen in the same way they used We Were Here in their classrooms. For the first year, we chose Solo by Kwame Alexander and Mary Rand Hess, and Flying Lessons and Other Stories, edited by Ellen Oh, that featured Kwame Alexander, Matt de la Peña, Jacqueline Woodson, Soman Chainani, Grace Lin, Walter Dean Myers, Tim Federle, Meg Medina, Tim Tingle and Kelly Baptist. We encouraged 26 young people to ‘go solo’ with new writing as they offered ‘flying lessons’ on issues they felt important to them. The young people created memes, too, that were posted on social media (e.g., #ProjectCitizen @CWPFairfield) in anticipation of Solo’s publication later that summer.

Use of Solo and Flying Lessons & Other Stories resulted in a diversity of writing. Because we recognize the danger of a single story (Adichie, 2009), we highlighted professional writers’ different styles and modeled multiple ways the authors communicated and argued in their writing. We looked into the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement, as well, and some writers, like Ashanti, a young woman from the Cheyenne River Reservation, wrote OpEds. In “The Status of the Lakota Language,” she crafted:

Our language is in danger. Not only are Lakota speakers becoming fewer in number, they are also becoming older. In 1993, the median age for a Lakota speaker was over 50 years old and the existing speakers are dying and not being replaced by new Lakota-speaking generations. According to one analysis, the language stopped being transmitted during the mid-1950s. The effort to reverse this language shift relies on creating a new generation of Lakota speakers while there are still native speakers available to be teachers.

Ashanti’s writing demonstrates her research, her awareness of audience and her desire to educate others, the learning objectives instructors highlighted while reading the YA texts. The sharing of diverse stories helped us to provide a safe writing community for Ashanti and the others to realize their stories matter, too.

Other writers in Project Citizen composed personal essays. Nathaniel, an urban school 10th grader, for example, wrote in Immigrant Boy:

This is the story of my Abuela, Georgina Martinez, an American citizen. Before she became an American citizen, she was just an immigrant who came from the Dominican Republic. She didn't grow up with much. Her parents owned a shop that sold fresh fruits and vegetables. She was the oldest of four children. She had two daughters in the Dominican Republic and was living an okay life, but wanted more – not for herself, but for her kids. She wanted a better future for them, better than the life she lived. She didn't want them to struggle like she and her family did. They were poor and barely had enough money to make it to the next day.

In his ‘flying lesson,’ Nathaniel recalled the impact his Grandmother had on his life. Reading stories crafted by diverse professional writers opened the doorway for him to find his own story to share. Others, like Kemoy and Michael, one an African American 10th grader from an urban school and the other a White American 10th grader from a suburban school, wrote collaboratively. With influence from Alexander and Hess’s Solo, they penned a two-voice poem called, “In The Eyes of Their Nation,” which included,
 
(K): In the eyes of our nation,
I have to be the
Strongest
 
(M): In the eyes of our nation,
I’m not meant to be an
Artist
 
(K): In the eyes of our nation,
(M): Mainstream media is labeled as
(Both): Fake news
 
(M): In the eyes of our nation,
(K): Our success is determined by
(Both): Hues
 
(M): In the eyes of our nation,
(K): Black folks are dropping like
(Both): Rain
 
(K): In the eyes of our nation,
(M): The government doesn’t care about our
(Both): Pain
 
(K): In the eyes of our nation,
(M): There’s no time for the impoverished to
(Both): Shine
 
(M): In the eyes of our nation,
(K): It’s okay for indigenous land to be taken by a
(Both): Pipeline
 
The collaborative writing achieved instructional goals we had for Project Citizen to unite young people from multiple communities. Reading Solo and Flying Lessons & Other Stories also helped us to initiate dialogue to assist our writers to locate their own personal writing projects (within the genres that appealed to them the most).

Perhaps the best indicator for the success of Project Citizen, year one, was revealed through a collaborative song composed between Luca, a White-American 12th grader, Akbaru, a Burundi-American 11th grader, Lambert, an 11th grade participant in Ubuntu Academy and Dave, a high school English teacher who led a hip-hop workshop during Project Citizen. Their collaboration, which mixed voices of participants, used music and poetry to represent the ‘humbled togetherness’ we wished to achieve.

Their collaboration showcased democracy, citizenship and Ubuntu and resulted from reading, discussing and analyzing Solo and Flying Lessons & Other Stories together. Reading multicultural texts, too, helped us to promote diverse writing with our summer participants.

This summer, the 2nd year, Project Citizen worked in partnership with #UNLOAD - Guns in the Hands of Artists, and used Dear Martin by Nic Stone and Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds, two of the many writers scheduled later this fall for the Saugatuck Story Fest, October 12th-14th, including the Hoops Africa: Ubuntu Matters kick-off event on October 11th. Once again, we chose young adult novels we knew would be of high interest and that would help us to connect with an art exhibit. We offered selections from Fresh Ink, an Anthology edited by Lamar Giles, that included Walter Dean Myers, Jason Reynolds, Nicola Yoon, Gene Luen Yang, Aminah Mae Safi, Sara Farizan, Sharon Flake and others. In particular, “Tags,” a script by Walter Dean Myers, provided text where instructors could workshop dialogue and voice, and model how language is meant to be performed. Such technique, for instance, was used by Kaitlyn, Chloe and Savanna, three young women from the Cheyenne River Reservation, who wrote a choral essay called, “We All Have a Story To Tell.” The collaborative writing began:

The topic we chose was teen suicide on Indian Reservations. We decided to do this because it is a problem. Suicide looks very different in Native communities than it does in the general population. Native American youth suicides and attempt rates are at a crisis level. Native Americans carry the outlook that things won’t get better for them. Because of this, suicide on the Indian reservation has increased over the last 30 years. We chose this topic because we have either struggled with it or were affected by it. We all have a story to tell.

As each of the young women collaborated on this essay, the refrain “We all have a story to tell,” united their individual contributions. Kaitlyn, Chloe and Savannah staged a reading of their writing, as well, and shared it with an audience of parents, community members, and peers.

Another resonant moment during the 2nd year of Project Citizen was the endearingly groupie-eseque way in which students posed questions to author Nic Stone about Dear Martin during a Skype session while they shared admiration for her book. Their nervous giggles and earnestly blunt questions oozed of enthusiasm and, subsequently, transformed their reading and, reciprocally, writing experiences. Stone’s generous Skype-visit allowed youth participants to connect with the writing process in a rare way, pulling back the proverbial curtain on process for something they had just devoured by talking to its creator about craft, perspective, audience and purpose. It also demystified and made more accessible the writing process for less confident or veteran composers/poets/etc, as the author offered them sage advice, “You just gotta write.” It is rare for teens to interact with authors of well-known works, and such ‘face-to-face’ time enhanced the written outcomes of participating writers, as Nic Stone’s visit helped to solidify the writing community we desired.

The confluence of Guns in the Hands of Artists, Dear Martin, Long Way Down and Nic Stone’s Skype visit was timely, as school and mass shootings were reported by youth participants as forefront on their minds. Across class, race and culture, gun violence - reflected in the books we chose - became a lightning rod for engagement and was reflected in the writing and performances, too. For example, during an "open mic" reading following a teacher/student workshop in partnership with #UNLoad: Guns in the Hands of Artists, Navontae, an African American 10th grader from an urban high school, wrote "Dear Shooter,” and shared:

Dear shooter, please don’t shoot
Don’t take your anger out on me
Your thoughts in silence lead to gun violence
But don’t take your anger out on me.

He also reported that shootings were “too commonplace” in his community. Similarly, Mila, a 9th grade Puerto Rican female who attends a suburban school, wrote about school shootings in "Goodbye," one of several poems crafted for her yet-to-be-named 1st novel (one inspired by reading Rebound by Kwame Alexander):

It was 9:35; barely through first period,
But after the first shot, he knew that this was serious.
A man was running through the halls,
Kids were hiding in bathroom stalls,
Cradling their friends like dolls,
Tears streaming down faces, like Niagara Falls.
​
Mila, who attends a high school near Sandy Hook, was fueled by youth activists from Stoneman Douglas High School and set out to narrate the effects gun violence has on youth communities like hers through dramatically telling the story of a school shooting in poetic form.

​Similar to year one, too, we found using YA literature in Project Citizen as helpful. The books we chose inspired young people to be ‘fresh’ with their ‘thinking’ and ‘inking,’and offered workable models for them to compose original pieces of writing. They wrote about health care, nationalism, civil rights, immigration, and much more. We continue to be critically reflective about such summer writing as we think about how to better serve adolescent readers and writers with YA texts. We are thankful to authors, however, for helping us to improve our own pedagogical practices through the novels they scripted that young people want to read.

            Joke #4: Why do robots go on summer vacation? They need to recharge their batteries.
            Joke #5: Why don’t mummies go on summer vacations? They are afraid to unwind.
            Joke #6: Where do eggs go on summer vacation? (This is bad) New Yolk City.

​Fairfield University is 60 miles east of New York City, so we relate somewhat to vacationing eggs. During the summer, teachers need to be recharged and many find programs like ours as a means to unwind. CWP-Fairfield’s redesign has allowed us to experiment with new strategies for teaching writing and to put our own writing craft (as well as instruction) to work. Summer provides a space for us to explore young adult literature with a wide range of readers and composers and to think about how these publications can help youth to build their own craft. In short, we are scaffolding writing communities in southern Connecticut and thinking anew about how we collaborate and partner with one another.
           
Two years ago teacher Dave Wooley attended CWP-Fairfield’s summer institute for teaching writing and collaborated with several young people participating in Ubuntu Academy. During the workshop where he looked at Rick Shaefer’s artwork, Dave penned “Walls,” and rapped:

They’re chantin’ build that wall - I’m hearing hate and anger
And the shouts for the wall are getting louder and louder
They wanna build it high, higher than the towers
Higher than the monsters imagination’s empowered,
Please build me a wall, as high as you can!
Makes me wonder what we’re walling out or walling in.
​
Dave also performed the song during a presentation at the National Council of Teachers of English conference in St. Louis, Missouri, a year later.

His verse continues:

We gotta knock down the walls - be a light in the darkness
Putting up walls - only makes you a target
Reaching out your hand seems a whole lot smarter.
​
CWP-Fairfield, through our summer redesign, worked to create democratic spaces for teachers to be reflective of instructional practices, writing pedagogy, writer’s craft and professional collaboration. This, coupled with young adult novels and Young Adult Literacy Labs, however, have begun knocking down the walls that have too often been built to separate youth and teaching communities. With our philosophy of Ubuntu, we are reaching out our hands to one another, finding ways to improve writing instruction, and realizing the power of listening to youth. This is how we spend our summer vacations and what we mean by the no bummer summer. We’re having fun being inspired by young writers attending our programs.

​Alexander, K. (2014). The Crossover. New York: Houghton Mifflin Hartcourt.
Alexander, K. (2016). Booked. New York: HMH Books.
Alexander, K. & Hess, M.R. (2017). Solo. Michigan: Blink
Alexander, K. (2018). Rebound. New York: Houghton Mifflin Hartcourt.
Applegate, K. (2007). Home of the Brave. New York: McMillan.
de la Peña, M.  (2010). We Were Here. New York: Delacore Press.
Giles, L. (2018). Fresh Ink, an Anthology. New York: Crown Books for Young Readers
John, W. S. (2009). Outcasts United; A Refugee Team, an American Town. New York: Spiegel & Grau.
Oh, E. (ed.). (2017). Flying Lessons and Other Stories. New York: Crown Books for Young Readers
Reynolds, J. (2017). Long Way Down. New York: Atheneum
Stone, N. (2017). Dear Martin. New York: Crown Books for Young Readers

Adichie, C. N. (2009). The danger of a single story. TED Talks.  Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html

Applebee, A. N., & Langer, J. (2013). Writing Instruction That Works: Proven Methods for Middle and High School Classrooms. New York: Teachers College Press.

Caracciolo, D., & Mungai, A. M. (2009). In the Spirit of Ubuntu: Stories of Teaching and Research. Boston: Sense Publishers.

Crandall, B. R., Bedard, K., Fortuna, P., Herzog, K., Mitchell, S., Wahlde, J. v., & Zabilansky, M. (2018). We too are Connecticut: Digital Ubuntu with Matt de la Peña's We Were Here. In J. S. Dail, S. Witte, & S. T. Bickmore (Eds.), Toward a More Visual Literacy: Shifting the Paradigm with Digital Tools and Young Adult Literature. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.

Crandall, B. R. (2017). Writing with Ubuntu in support of refugee and immigrant youth. English in Texas, 46(2), 12-17.

Darling-Hammond, L., Hyler, M. E., Gardner, M., & Espinoza, D. (2017). Effective Teacher Professional Development. Retrieved from Washington, DC:

Reinking, D., & Bradley, B. (2008). On Formative and Design Experiments. New York: Teachers College Press.

Russell, D. (2009). Uses of activity theory in written communication research. In A. Sannino, H. Daniels, & K. D. Gutiérrez (Eds.), Learning and expanding with Activity Theory (pp. 40-52). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Swanson, D. M. (2009). Where have all the fishes gone? Living Ubuntu as an Ethics of Research and Pedagogical Engagement. In D. Caracciolo & A. M. Mungai (Eds.), In the Spirit of Ubuntu: Stories of Teaching and Research. Boston: Sense Publishers.

Whitney, A. (2008). Teacher transformation in the National Writing Project. Research in the Teaching of English, 43(2), 144-187.

While many of you are working to put finishing touches on a syllabus for your YA class, I am wishing I was teaching a YA class this fall. Alas, not my turn. (I guess they don't know I would probably teach it for free.) Don't worry I am still working on a couple of syllabi for other courses before students arrive next Monday. 

I can't help but think about which books I would include, which books I would book talk, and how I would use the weekend picks  as a ready resource for my students who might be reluctant consumers of YA. (I love what my colleagues have chosen so far this year). I keep thinking about what approach I might take: historical, genre, focusing on awards, including Nonfiction, or making sure they discover YA verse novels. Would I include author studies? Should I introduce pedagogy by including literature circle activities? Should I include films with adolescent themes as I know that Angela Insenga and Angel Daniel Matos will be doing? The possibilities are both endless and intriguing. I am a bit jealous, but I will get over it as I watch what what all of you are doing.

First, I would use my colleague's posts for this blog as a way to start a variety of conversations. Most of these blogs are relatively short, but directly address interesting topics.

Here are five that I think are worth revisiting over and over again.

1. I love Padma Venkatraman's post about verse novels' by a verse novelist. You can find it here. She talks about writing her first verse novel, A Time to Dance and a list of others including Inside Out & Back Again, Crossover, and Brown Girl Dream. The last book is a novel I like so much, that I want to reread every time I think about it. I wrote about it for First Opinions, Second Reactions (a journal everyone should follow) about a year ago and i wish every one felt as strongly about it as I do.

2. This one is a cheat. I have been studying YA syllabi for while. I have seen a lot of great ones. People are doing great work. When I first discovered Anglea Insenga's syllabus in blew me away. She was thinking about things that I hadn't considered and now her ideas are always there. She has written for the blog twice and both are exciting. The first is Between the Bookends: YA and Critical Collaboration and the second is YA in the Wild:  Building Literacy through Humanities-Based Service Learning Projects

3. There are a lot of teaches who struggle to include Shakespeare in their classroom. Most of these teachers love Shakespeare and really do want their students to love him as well. At the same time, very few of them consider including Shakespeare inspired YA as a tool to engage students with the bard. Don't get me wrong, I loved teaching Shakespeare and felt that I did a pretty good job engage students, but I did get them all. Some were clearly disinterested, some were just enduring school, and some were actually readers who couldn't be bothered with my agenda as they just went ahead reading what interested them. If I were back in a classroom and working with Shakespeare, I would definitely use Anne Cramer's post: Too Much Of A Good Thing: A Condensed Version of the World of Shakespeare as a guiding light.

4. Robert Prickett has produced several post for the blog. You can find them on the contributors page. Decide to include Robert here because he has an expertise in YA that I don't have. I am not even close. I think he can suggest YA graphic novels in his sleep. AS illustrated by the wide variety of contributors, we all have different strengths and interests. I can introduce my students to my students, but Robert can inform and inspire graphic novels in a ways that are worth revisiting as you take about this genre. I would start with this one: YA Graphic Mysteries by Robert Prickett and Casey Cothran​​

5. Okay, the last one is selfish. I think we are often overlooking the cross curricular and collaborative possibilities of using YA in the curriculum. For my fifth pick I have selected a post that my social studies colleague, Paul Binford, and I wrote about some of our explorations in the area: Bridging Curricular Silos Through Collaboration. It has been a great journey but there are lot of things we are trying to figure out. 

This coming fall we will be present at 2018 NCTE Annual Convention in Houston, TX,
 
Our session title is: Crossing Selma’s Bridge with Visual Discovery Strategy and Young Adult Literature: Allowing Voices from the Past to Echo in the Present
 
The Panelist will include: Laurie Halse Anderson, Steven Bickmore, Paul Binford, Brendan Kiely, Luke Rumohr, Gretchen Rumohr-Voskuil, Rich Wallace, and Sandra Neil Wallace.  
 
We will be focusing on Anderson’s Seeds of America series, Wallace and Wallace’s Blood Brother, and Kiely and Reynolds’ All American Boys.

I would be remiss if I didn't explain how much our colleague Gretchen Rumohr-Voskuil has helped us in our efforts. Last January, the three of us had an article in the MIddle Grades Review that explores this further. You can download our article, Crossing Selma's Bridge: Integrating Visual Discovery Strategy and Young Adult Literature to Promote Dialogue and Understanding, here.

Second, there are some new books that I would share with my students. Several of these are getting good traction, but a few need more attention. 

Jeff Zetner's Good Bye Days This book is beautiful as it explores friendship and grief.

Mary H. K. Choi's Emergency Contact This debut novel grabbed me from the beginning. I blazed through it.

A. S. King's I Crawl Through It.  I am not sure I can explain why I love this book. I do know I was thrilled when I heard that my colleague, Sharon Kane, is using this novel a full class read to start her YA course this fall. You see, I am jealous. 

Peter Brown Hoffmeister's Too Shattered for Mending. News flash!! This book is not to be missed. I find myself suggesting this books all summer to people who have been asking me about what new. Really this book is amazing.

Nic Stone's Dear Martin. Okay, I get The Hate U Give, but with all the apologies I can muster, I keep returning to Dear Martin.

Julius Lester's Day of Tears and To Be a Slave. Julius passed this year and we should not forget his contribution to children's and YA literature.

Dashka Slater's The 57 Bus. This is one of those true stories that really helps us show students the value of a variety of genres.

E. K. Johnston's Pursued by a Bear. Shakespeare, Yo!

Elizabeth Partridge's Boots on the Ground. Honor and respect. These book does a great deal for Veterans and joins of host of YA books--fiction and nonfiction.

To conclude, I want to make it clear that I think there a host of other post on Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday blog that would make a great contributions to a YA course. Last fall, we started almost every class with a common reading of one of the post. It was a great way to introduce a genre, a theoretical lens, an author, or a theme. It was also a quick way to introduce students to scholars and teachers who are researching and teaching young adult literature. They quickly begin to realize that the YA community is vibrant, innovative, creative, and robust.  

Thanks for letting me think a just a little bit about a potential YA course. Since I won't be teaching it, I am focusing on get to NCTE and the ALAN workshop this November. I hope to see you there. I am looking forward to hearing how you constructed your courses.

​Until next week.

This week Dr. Bickmore's YA Wednesday gets the benefit of another scholar who presented at the YA Summit. Dr. Alice Hays provides some wonderful insight about one of the topics she passionately pursues. Dr. Hays carefully outlines how she works to engage students social activism.

As we are gearing up to begin school (or already facing week 3 of looking at your fresh-faced, bright-eyed students,) you may be thinking about how you can engage your students or get them to take a more active role in their education. One way to do this is to shift the dynamic of the classroom to a more student-centered one that may result in getting the students to work harder than you in the long run.
 
Six years ago, I realized my senior composition course had become stale. I taught the assignments as isolated writing types and as a result, it had become a skill-based course in which none of us (teacher or students) were engaged.  This lead me to ponder how I might shift the dynamics of the classroom.
 
I attended a symposium where I heard about someone who focused their writing course on following the journey of a students' t-shirts. While the book they used wasn’t YA (Where Am I Wearing, by Kelsey Timmerman), it was accessible for students and encouraged them to think about the global impact of their choices. I thought it was a brilliant idea. I wasn’t sure that all my students would be as interested in the same thing, though, and I wanted to provide as much choice as I possibly could. When I thought about what I really wanted my students to learn, I realized that beyond becoming better writers and researchers, I wanted them to be prepared to make a difference in the world.  As a result, I decided to center my course around activism. I tied all of our learning goals to this idea of preparing my students to become active citizens within our society. We wrote narratives on our involvement with a social issue, we researched social issues, we gave speeches about our social issues to our class, to the school and to the community. The final project was for each student to develop an action plan addressing the issue they learned about throughout the year. Students then carried out their plan to the best of their abilities. 

That senior composition course was more successful than any I’d taught prior to that semester, and I realized my students were hungry to complete authentic assignments, make a difference in the world around them, and have a sense of control over where they focused their attention. Fast forward three years and I found myself guiding other teachers in this curriculum with a new and exciting twist – the addition of young adult literature.
 
I am fortunate to work with several teachers in both middle school and high school who allowed me to come into their classroom and share my love of activist oriented curriculum with their students. These teachers have used this approach as full semester projects, as well as short-term projects. They all gave their students the opportunity to choose their research topics, time to read relevant novels in small groups, and a chance to develop (and sometimes implement) action plans to address the social justice issue they researched. The addition of young adult literature allowed students with little experience with the issue to develop a stronger sense of identification and empathy for the problem, while allowing students with experience in the issue to see that they were not alone.

Some of the issues that the students focused on included immigration, refugees, racism, religious discrimination, environmentalism, poverty, mental illness and abuse. The books that we used follow. 

All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely focuses on parallel narratives of two boys who share similarities, but are initially placed on opposite sides of a racism/police brutality issue.  Rashad is the victim of a brutal beating by a police officer due to a minor collision followed by a false accusation by a store owner. Quinn is the young man who witnesses the beating, and recognizes that his best friend’s older brother is out of control. The story follows both of their stories as they figure out what their role is within this situation, and how each one of them needs to come to terms with the way they must stand up and say something regarding the situation.  This novel is particularly powerful in that it is an acknowledgement of the pain behind the racism some of your students may have experienced, and gives them an opportunity to share and discuss their experiences. This novel also allows students who may not believe that racism exists (or that victims of police brutality have somehow brought it upon themselves) to enter the space gradually, which may prevent them from putting up defenses to the overall message.  Students who read this novel completed action plans that included putting posters around school, creating a mini-documentary of racist experiences their peers had, and traveling to various classes to show and discuss the realities of racism in the community. 
​

Does My Head Look Big In This  by Randa Abdel-Fattah explores a young woman’s decision to begin to wear her hijab after winter break, exploring issues of religious freedom. This 16-year-old girl realizes that it will be difficult to walk into school wearing this expression of faith so openly, and even her parents are concerned for her decision. Ultimately, she decides to do it, and the novel explores the surprising and not-so-surprising reactions of people within her community. Students who read this book drew connections between their own faith and hers, and were cognizant of the fact that they appreciated their ability to demonstrate their faith in fairly external ways and felt that this same level of equality should be extended to all religions. These projects remained focused on spreading awareness through Twitter pages and Wix websites.  If you are interested in discussion questions for this book, the Multnomah County Library has created a set of discussion questions here: https://multcolib.org/does-my-head-look-big
​

Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg is a book that twists the typical LGBTQ coming out story upside down. In this book, Rafe is sick and tired of being the token gay kid at school. He has extremely supportive parents, and everyone at his fairly liberal Colorado high school accepts him for who he is, but he is tired of having to be the voice for every gay kid in existence. He persuades his parents to let him travel across the country to attend a boarding school where he presents himself as straight. The novel is both humorous yet painful, as you experience Rafe’s struggle with hiding who he truly is. Students who read this book developed a deeper understanding of some of the difficulties of being LGBTQ in a heteronormative society, even if they had already been an LGBTQ ally.  Projects completed by students who read this book included starting the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) club on campus and creating a magazine focused around the documentary-style interview of a transgendered wrestler from the school. 

​Kingsley by Carolyn O’Neal is an environmental issue based novel, which is focused on the experiences of 14-year-old Kingsley, who is the last boy who was ever born on Earth. This dystopian novel is focused on the events that occur after the final bee colony has collapsed, and there is now a virus that is attacking the Y-Chromosome. While the book is much more dense in terms of the writing style and vocabulary  than the other books in this grouping, the students who chose to read it were not put off by its relative difficulty.  The projects proposed for this novel included raising awareness, with an emphasis on planting trees as well as creating a community “bee garden”. 

Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell was the novel read by students who chose poverty as the issue they were interested in addressing.  In this novel, Eleanor is somewhat of a social misfit who struggles to fit in. When she is ostracized by others on the school bus, Park reluctantly lets her sit by him. The two of them strike up a relationship, and over the course of the novel, Park realizes that this girl is experiencing poverty, and he questions whether he can help her to overcome this issue. The students who read this book are exposed to the concept of poverty indirectly, which may allow them to more deeply empathize with the awkward Eleanor and her struggles before brushing her off as too different from them. Students who read this book focused on spreading awareness about poverty or volunteered at charitable organizations such as the United Food Bank. 

​It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini focuses on mental illness and is a semi-autobiographical novel written over the course of one month, after Vizzini was released from a mental institution. In this book, Craig Gilner checks himself into a mental institution after considering suicide. Craig struggles with pressures to be successful in his highly competitive prep school, coupled with friends who just don’t get it. He turns to art as a means of coping and discovers a few things about himself.  This book has been interesting in that everyone I’ve interviewed who chose this book, or one about mental illness, has confessed to struggling with their own issues. This is a powerful book that ends with hope, although I do have some concerns that students who research Vizzini may become discouraged at the fact that he did ultimately commit suicide years later. In discussing this with students, however, they do not seem to be as bothered by it. It may be that it is validation that mental health must continually be nurtured, and it is not a one-time fix issue. Students who chose this issue tended to focus on spreading awareness of facts about depression or mental illness or sharing resources for people who might need this help. 

The Good Braider by Terry Farish depicts the travels of a refugee, Viola, and her mother, from South Sudan to Cairo and then to Portland, Maine. The novel manages to convey the critical necessity behind why they left their home without being overly graphic, and explores the struggles Viola faces as they begin their journey as refugees.  The plot spends quite a bit of time in a refugee camp, an experience that is often glossed over in American news narratives and can be eye opening for many students. Farish’s writing allows students to more fully understand an experience that they may be completely unfamiliar with. Students who read this book focused on projects that included working with charitable organizations, and one student hosted a pots and pan drive for refugees in her community. 

​Chinese Handcuffs by Chris Crutcher focuses on abuse of all types. Chris Crutcher draws on his experience as a family therapist to create characters who are realistic and who are dealing with the nitty gritty details of trauma such as incest, rape, suicide and emotional abuse. While this book is graphic and somewhat difficult to get through, it is important to note that Chris Crutcher has written his books to provide a mirror for students who have been through those situations in order to let them know that they are not alone.  In this particular book, Dillon Hemmingway is a 16-year-old athlete who is a kind person, but is dealing with his brother’s unexpected suicide. He is also dealing with his attraction to his friend, but is confused by her sudden change in behavior, which the reader later discovers is a result of sexual and domestic abuse.  An interesting reaction one student had in reading this was that she could understand how some people might find solace in drugs or alcohol if their lives were that bad, whereas previously she couldn’t understand why anyone would touch those things. It was an unexpected form of empathy for people that she had previously judged.  Students who have read this book have tended to focus on projects that spread awareness of the issues to people who may not understand these various types of abuse. Additionally, they often focus on creating websites as resources for students who may need help in dealing with any of the types of issues encountered in the book. 

​The Circuit by Francisco Jimenez is a semi-autobiographical piece and is an incredibly powerful book to share with students who are interested in immigration issues.  In this first book, Francisco describes his journey to America, and the struggles his family endured to survive. He spends quite a bit of time discussing his experiences in education, and students who have had their own language struggles, or their own immigration experiences will see themselves reflected in this story. Those students with no real understanding of immigration beyond the inflammatory rhetoric in the news will get an opportunity to see the humanity behind the rhetoric through this child’s story.  Students who have read The Circuit have focused on raising school supplies for students like Francisco, or on providing more English Language Learner support at their schools. 

​The following books were ones that have been utilized for 7th graders. While the students read the books and conducted research on their issues, most of them did not conduct action plans as the high school students did, although the discussions they had from the book were powerful. 

Stella by Starlight by Sharon Draper focuses on racism. This novel is set immediately following Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election and the KKK makes an appearance in their sleepy town, causing a great deal of fear for Stella and her family. Sharon Draper writes about the segregation they experience in a straightforward realistic manner, which is important for young readers’ understanding. Throughout the novel, Stella realizes that writing may be one of her powers to help her get through the evil she and her family are experiencing. Students who read this book indicated that the book was powerful and inspired them to want to take action to stop racism. 

​It Ain’t So Awful, Falafel by Firoozeh Dumas focuses on Cindy, who has moved to California from Iran to avoid political upheaval. The novel is set in the 1970’s and is an interesting exploration of the inner turmoil experienced by this family as their home country is turned upside down while they are simultaneously unable to fully fit into their new country. While Cindy’s tale is well written, younger students may not have a frame of reference for the Iranian upheaval to make an in-depth connection with the story, although there is certainly room to draw comparisons. 

Hoot by Carl Hiaasen is an ecological mystery novel that centers on a family of endangered miniature owls whose home is at threat of being destroyed by Mother Paula’s All-American Pancake house. The main character, Rob, is a boy who recently moved to a new school, and in trying to avoid a bully, he ends up meeting his two new friends who join him in their thrilling adventure to try to save the owls.  Interestingly, the students I interviewed had chosen the environment as their chosen social justice issue, and they did not feel like this was about the environment. In choosing a book for students who are interested in the environment as a social justice issue, it might be important to clarify if they are interested in a book like this that deals with animal rights, or if they are wanting something that deals more with the actual climate.  Carl Hiaasen has also written Flush, which deals with water pollution, and might be a better choice for some students.  

​Crenshaw by Katherine Applegate deals with poverty and homelessness through the narrator, Jackson, and his imaginary cat friend, Crenshaw. This book elegantly depicts the human faces behind the people on the street corner and shows how families are not immune from losing everything, no matter how loving or decent they are. Jackson copes with the poverty by relying on Crenshaw for emotional support. This book will give students an opportunity to live through the experiences of this family in and out of homelessness while being able to relate many of their typical family issues to themselves. This book is appropriate for students as low as 4th grade, although the 7th graders who read this novel did enjoy reading it, because they could relate to the situations depicted, and the relationships between the son and father in the book. 

​Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus by Dusti Bowling deals with physical disabilities, and to a lesser extent bullying. This book was selected from a list of books that deal with mental illness, although there are only brief mentions of anxiety in the book.  In this book the protagonist, Aven, enjoys telling people that she lost her arms in any number of ridiculous ways, such as losing her arms in an alligator wrestling match. In truth, she was born without them, and has learned how to cope quite efficiently. She ends up at a new junior high, and meets two other students who are also struggling with their own issues that cause them to feel like outcasts. Together, the three of them solve a mystery and find friendship. Through their combined disabilities, they grow stronger together. While we originally read this book for mental illness issues, the students took a sense of empowerment away from their reading. They focused on the bullying and admired the way that Arven and her friends bonded together to fight off the issues. 

​Ghost by Jason Reynolds is the first in a series of books that focuses on a group of kids who make a middle school track team. In this book, Ghost began running when he ran away from his father who was trying to shoot him and [his mother? His brothers?] in the street, but over time, he began to be the one causing his own troubles. His coach is determined to keep Ghost from throwing away his shot at success and works to help Ghost escape the abuse he is trying to run from. 

This list of books is not exhaustive, and the topics of books that you might use should come from the issues that your students identify as important and needing to be addressed. There are two important things to consider with using young adult literature for social activism. One is that the reader be able to identify in some way with the characters, which makes YAL much more powerful than nonfiction research on its own. The second thing that students identified as much more important than just reading was actually being asked to identify an action they might take.
 
As I reflect on my own quest to create a more active and student-centered classroom, I am grateful that I gave myself and my students permission to break out of our traditional approach. Seeing my students come alive when they presented their findings, and get involved in the community was more of a reward than any set of A papers had ever been. It is my hope that you, too, have a positive experience with curriculum like this.
 
Whatever you choose to do, I hope you have a fabulous school year!