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For the Love of Reading by Melanie Shoffner, PhD

1/13/2021

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The first guest post of 2021 is a beautiful tribute to those of us who love reading and who love buying books for others. Melanie Shoffner is one of my colleagues I consider to be a born leader. In this post, she is again and providing us a model for sharing books with others. Her fourth paragraph below is stunning example of allusions and memories. I found myself mentally creating a list of allusions that would also serve as references to many of the books that shaped my own reading history. I also found secrets in old clocks and explored Welsh mountains. Thanks Melanie for a wonderful start to a new year.

For the Love of Reading
​Melanie Shoffner, PhD

For the last 30 years, my nieces and nephews (and now great niece!) have been enrolled in Aunt Melanie’s Book Club. I’m the aunt who gives books – for birthdays, for Christmas, sometimes just because. I’m also the aunt who gives a red Radio Flyer scooter when you turn two and black steampunk leggings when you turn 22 but there’s always a book or three tucked into the box, to0.

You’d expect nothing less from a former English teacher and current ELA educator. After all, I’ve chosen a profession grounded in engaging with text; I’ve spent the greater part of my life considering what and how and why secondary students and preservice teachers read. I teach that books offer doors to different worlds, windows to diverse experiences, and mirrors of readers’ identities (Bishop, 1990); that reading challenges understandings, beliefs, and perspectives (e.g., Bruce et al, 2008; Thein et al, 2007); that diverse texts disrupt “the historic violence and the erasure of marginalized communities” (Ebarvia et al, 2020, p. 100); that reading can develop empathy and critical thinking (e.g., Alsup, 2015; Vogt et al, 2016). I don’t need to convince this audience that young adult literature can expand and challenge and connect and disrupt, even if we spend a fair amount of time trying to convince others.

But I must confess, these aren’t the reasons determining my text selections. They are often the outcome and they are sometimes the provocation but they aren’t the founding principle of this book club. My goal is less sophisticated, perhaps, but just as important to me: I want my nieces and nephews to love reading.

Reading has always been my escape: my window, my skylight, my rope ladder, my invisibility cloak. Growing up, I found secrets in old clocks and befriended black horses on deserted islands. I explored tesseracts and wardrobes, Welsh mountains and New York art museums. I confronted racism in Mississippi, fear on a mountain, despair from a rope swing. Those adolescent novels offered doors and difference and difficult thinking but I didn’t recognize that at the time: I just knew that I loved reading them, and I wanted to read even more.
​I still love to lose myself in young adult literature. When I sit down with the latest from Angie Thomas or Randy Ribay, I’ve escaped, even if I’m also reading to choose course texts or develop assignments. Out the window, through the gate: I’m far away from the chaos (and the last year has provided entirely too much of that). The end of 2020 found me racing across quads and running through tunnels with Maureen Johnson’s Truly Devious series, enclosed by barbed wire under a Texas sky in Monica Hesse’s The War Outside, and surviving the Siberian wilderness through Kathy Parks’s Notes from My Captivity. Each of these books gave me plenty to think about – who we are, how we survive, why we connect – but they also gave me a chance to leave behind the emails and assignments, the dishes and laundry, the pandemic and politics.
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Photo credit Imani Khayyam.
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That’s what I want for my nieces and nephews: to lose themselves in a book. Of course, I want them to learn and grow from what they read – as the liberal academic auntie in the family, that’s kind of my thing – but I want them to love reading first. I can’t help it; that’s kind of my thing, too. Perspectives can shift with a compelling character and questions can arise with a complex plot, but I want that to happen through a love of reading, not a dread of preaching.

So, when I gave my then-4th grade niece Drama, it wasn’t because Raina Telgemeier’s book included LGBTQ+ characters. She was struggling with reading – “The words are getting harder and I don’t understand them” – but she liked graphic novels and had just read Smile. When I gave my then-12-year-old nephew March, it wasn’t because of its exploration of the Civil Rights Movement. I had just spoken with Andrew Ayden and Nate Powell at the ELATE luncheon, and I was excited to share this book I’d learned about with my history-loving nephew. And for the record, when I gave Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to another niece years ago, it wasn’t because I thought she should run away to wizarding school (although I would have been very supportive if she had).
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Seeing LGBTQ+ kids as normal middle schoolers, understanding the struggle for racial equality, even figuring out how to deal with the unexpected: These are vitally important things to learn, and I want these kids I love to understand those vitally important things. But I also want my nieces and nephews to look forward to the escape, to open the cover of a book and disappear into the story. And I think the latter can drive the former.
​
If you’re wondering about Aunt Melanie’s Book Club choices this year: Lauren Wolk’s Echo Mountain for my now-12-year-old niece and Ruta Sepetys’s The Fountains of Silence for my now-16-year-old nephew. Why? Because these authors weave compelling, complex stories. Because Wolk’s writing is beautiful Wolf Hollow’s “The year I turned twelve, I learned how to lie” may be one of the best opening lines I’ve ever read]. Because Sepetys’s history is fascinating [having spent a semester in Spain recently, I was enthralled with her exploration of the Civil War]. Because the life on Ellie’s mountain and the view through Daniel’s camera cause us to question truth and loyalty and love. But most importantly, I chose them because I love them – both these stories and these kids.
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References
Alsup, J. (2015). A case for teaching literature in the secondary school: Why reading fiction matters in an
age of scientific objectivity and standardization. Routledge.
Bishop, R. S. (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives: Choosing and Using
Books for the Classroom, 6(3), ix–xi.
Bruce, H. E., Brown, S., McCracken, N. M., &Mel Bell-Nolan, M. (2008). Feminist pedagogy is for
everybody: Troubling gender in reading and writing. English Journal, 97(3), 82–89.
Ebarvia, T., Germán, L., Parker, K. N., & Torres, J. (2020). #DisruptTexts. English Journal, 110(1), 100–
102.
Thein, A. H., Beach, R., & Parks, D. (2007). Perspective-taking as transformative practice in teaching
multicultural literature to white students. English Journal, 97(2), 54–60.
Vogt, M. T., Chow, Y. P., Fernandez, J., Grubman, C., & Stacey, D. (2016). Designing a reading
curriculum to teach the concept of empathy to middle level learners. Voices from the Middle, 23(4), 38–45.
​Melanie Shoffner is a Professor of Education at James Madison University (Harrisonburg, VA) and current editor of English Education. Her research and writing examine preservice teacher development, teacher dispositions, and reflective practice.Her most recent work is the co-edited book Teacher Representations in Dramatic Text and Performance: Portraying the Teacher on Stage (Routledge) and the co-authored TCR commentary “Questioning Care in the Academic World.”  She can be contacted at shoffnme@jmu.edu or @ProfShoff.
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Until next week.
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Is There a Text in This Class?  Building a Collaborative Interpretive Community in a class on Multicultural Literature.

1/6/2021

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I am lucky enough to be teaching a course on multicultural literature in the Spring of 2021. I, like many of you, will be starting my second semester of synchronous online teaching at the university level. It is not my preferred method of teaching, but I learned a great deal the first time around. I am game for the next chapter. I am hoping to build a community in which we can discuss difficult topics.
As I start again, I am aware my students will all approach this course with different life experiences. The single common factor might be that they are all taking a graduate course in Literacy Education. What else might they have in common? Teaching experience? Perhaps, but in reality they have taught at different grade levels and at different schools. If you are in education for any length of time you realize that every school has its own climate and culture. You also understand that teachers carry with them their own sense of an educational mission. How they understand instruction will vary. Some will favor a tightly controlled curriculum with little room for flexibility and others will lean into inquiry and try to go where that leads them and their students. 
​

How do I structure a class that will explore Multicultural Literature? Remember, it isn’t an English course. It is a course in Education. In my mind, this implies that we will consider how it might be taught, how it might be received by students, and how we interpret or understand various understandings of the categories and definitions of multiculturalism. Given our different experiences do we share the same assumptions about education--or the world? I doubt it. Will there be, as Stanley Fish asks, “a text in this class?
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As the instructor, I have planned a course and picked some books. For this course, I am combining three foci. The first is Multicultural Education as explained by Gollinick and Chinn in their newest edition (the 11th) of Multicultural Education in Pluralistic Society. In this book they outline seven categories of multiculturalism--class, ethnicity & race, gender, exceptionality, religion, language, and age. The second focus will be to introduce Reader Response Criticism by reading articles and chapters that represent some of the foundation positions of this theory. For the third focus I will be using young adult novels for the examples of multicultural literature. I have chosen thirteen novels that represent at least one of the seven categories outlined by Gollnick and Chinn. In most cases they represent two or more.
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Multicultural Education  is a complicated issue. I believe that much of the unrest and contention that we have felt during the last year of COVID, elections, police brutality, social protest and social unrest is a manifestation that we still don't understand each other or the lives we experience. How do the categories of Exceptionality, Age, Class, Ethnicity and Race, Religion, Gender, or Language? Can we even agree of definitions of these concepts?
I also am including Reader Response theory for at least two reasons. First, to introduce students to the theory as introduced by Rosenblatt. Then, second, to have them develop the habit of reconsidering their first response to a text. We will be doing reading from Probst, Fish, Iser, and Holland among a couple of others. Issues of Multiculturalism are often difficult for us to completely internalize. We may empathize with conditions and opinions, but unless we have experienced them first hand we may not understand the degree to which others experience the same experience. How does abject poverty shape the way someone approaches the world? What is it like to view a society from a religious perspective that is clearly in a minority? What do the issues of the Black Live Matter movement play out of other people of color who may not feel automatically included in their agenda?
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Without question, I have considered double or triple the number of the books as I was narrowing my choices to these 13 books. I would love to hear what you might select given the same requirement to have a course that focuses on multicultural literature and how a K12 teacher might employ these texts in the classroom. Not an easy task.

​As the class experiences these texts together, it is clear that we will experience them differently. Together, I hope that we can have conversations that will help us reconsider our first reactions. Once again, Is There a Text in This Class? I hope so and I hope it leads to a productive community experience.

The Texts in the Syllabus

Until next time.
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    Dr. Bickmore is an associate professor of English Education at UNLV. He is a scholar of Young Adult Literature and past editor of The ALAN Review and the current president elect of ALAN. He is a available for speaking engagements at schools, conferences, book festivals, and parent organizations. More information can be found on the Contact page and the About page.

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