Bringing Children Together

I'll admit, when I first looked at the assigned reading that was on the syllabus for this blog post, I immediately skipped over everything but Jane Elliott's Brown Eyed, Blue Eyed experiment. This is something we watched and extensively discussed in my high school Sociology class. I also found the experiment both incredibly fascinating and informative.

After re-experiencing Elliott's experiment, I eventually found my way back to the other assignments on the syllabus for this week. The article, "Reading Multiculturally", by Hade seemed like it would be dull compared to Elliott's video. How very wrong I was! The very first thing Hade spoke about was the Lion King and there is not much that I like more than Disney movies. However, this particular article stretched how I normally think when it comes to Disney movies. I cannot say that I've ever considered the semiotics behind the various characters, nor have I ever noticed that the plot is more representative of the lives of people as opposed to wild animals. I found his analysis very eye-opening. Beyond this, though, Hade states something I'd like to remember as I enter the teaching culture:

"I believed, like many of my colleagues in children's literature, that the power of literature could work miracles, that all I had to do was to bring children together with the right book." (Hade 236)

Just like Elliott, Hade was striving to find something that would unite his students and remove some discrimination from their lives through an increase in understanding. This is definitely something I would like to do with my students. I feel as if having a class that would subtly focus on building bridges between the students. Hade later expounds on why he wants to bring this multiculturalism to the forefront of the classroom:

"I was told that children don't "naturally" read for race, class, and gender, and I mustn't impose my agenda upon them. But what I am after isn't imposing meaning, it is exposing injustice. To ignore the injustice implied in children's stories is a far more insidious way of imposing ideas than to challenge these ideas openly. Silence is the oxygen of racism and bigotry. Silence allows the dominant assumptions about the inferiority of the poor, women, and persons of color to remain unchallenged." (Hade 238)

I want my students to feel comfortable and open to express their feelings and opinions without fear of repercussions or judgement. Ideally, I want my classroom to be a safe place for children to learn.

A picture is worth a thousand words, right?

Creepy collage from House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Chapter five of Wilhelm's, You Gotta Be the Book corresponds closely with our assigned reading, American Born Chinese. In this chapter, Wilhelm explains how he came to realize the power that simple pictures have over many students' understanding of a text. After struggling with two students who flat out refused to read, he acknowledged their enjoyment of comic books and sketching and turned them around into a practical application. Wilhelm also goes on to list various art/picture related activities that a teacher can incorporate into their respective classrooms. Two of those activities, I have already experienced in my high school career. I found picture mapping and collage making to be both enjoyable and enlightening. With picture mapping, my mind was able to make more concrete connections to what I was reading/had already read. Collages were more on the enjoyable side rather than the educational. Wilhelm rectifies this when he suggests that students not only create a collage that represents their response to a piece of literature, but then use the collage further as a part of a presentation about their response to the literary selection.

Can't go wrong with The Walking Dead!

On page 164 of You Gotta Be the Book, one of Wilhelm's students (Jeremy) reads Maus and Maus II and then exclaims, "Why don't they write more books like this?" I am in complete concurrence with this student. I absolutely love graphic novels, comic books, and manga. I was thrilled when I looked up the reading list for this class over the summer and discovered both a graphic novel that I've read and loved and one that I had not even heard of. If you know me personally, you know that I naturally went out and bought the one I hadn't experienced yet and read through the entire thing in a day. I do not understand why more graphic novels are not taught in the public school system and English classes. I believe that novels such as Maus, Persepolis, and American Born Chinese hold just as much literary merit as something like the The Grapes of Wrath or A Tale of Two Cities (if not more). A graphic novel has it's reader not only reading the text on the pages, but processing and interpreting what they are seeing in the pictures. As this post is titled, a picture is worth a thousand words. Graphic novels enable their readers to easily visualize characters and identify who is speaking and when. Actions are easier to understand as they are frequently presented in a frame by frame manner. Graphic novels should definitely become a more prominent member of all public high school required reading lists.

You Gotta [get your students to] Be [interested in] The Book :D

Page from Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves

Literature is important for all adolescents, whether they realize it or not. It is something that can be utilized in many fashions; it can be used as a tool for understanding oneself, questioning the world, or as an escape from day-to-day problems and stresses. There are so many benefits to reading literature, the challenge for all English teachers is to figure out how to get their students to recognize and further, to embrace them. In Chapter Two of You Gotta be the Book, Jeffrey Wilhelm details why one should read literature. I found this section to be very concise and well thought out.
The three children profiled throughout this chapter also appear in this section when they are quoted regarding their take on why students ought to read literature. Ron asserts that it is because school is supposed to help you live better. Cora maintains that reading is like "a microscope and a telescope...helps you see things that are invisible -- because they're too small or too far away... It makes you think so much more than a video or TV." Joanne states two things: one, "a story helps you to think. It involves you totally in thinking about things you could never think about except in a story." and two, "I feel like reading a good book makes someone new." I would concur with each of these three students. Reading has always been something that I've used as an easy escape from the world. Unfortunately, the vast majority of literature we were required to read in middle school and high school did not interest me, worse than that, the teachers were also essentially incapable of enticing me into reading any of the pieces. One of my goals as a teacher is to strive to engage my students in reading as it is something that will benefit them. One method I'd like to use, I picked up from Wilhelm's book; it is explained below.


As far as teaching ideas go, I liked the Symbolic Story Representation (SRI) idea presented in Chapter Three: The Dimensions of the Reader's Response. Wilhelm details this technique:

"In this technique, students create cutouts or find objects to dramatize what they have read and how they have read it. During or after their reading, the students, using an adaptation of the SRI, created cutouts symbolizing characters, character qualities, groups, or forces from the book; objects, scenes, or settings of importance; motifs, themes, or ideas that played a role in the story; and a cutout symbolizing oneself as a reader."

 This seems like a fantastic lesson idea. Having the students preform a hands-on activity such as this forces them to make connections within the text that results in them having a better/more complete understanding of what they have read. This activity can be applied to essentially any individual lesson in the English classroom as it can be adapted to focus on any of the aforementioned parts (characters, objects, scenes, motifs, & etc.). After the students create said cutouts they can/will use them as they read further into the novel, "The reader moved the cutouts around to dramatize the story and to show the changing relationships of various characters or forces, and used the reader cutout to show where he was in relation to story events, explaining how and from what perspective he/she was experiencing the story." This lesson quickly morphs into the student becoming more critically aware of both what is happening in the piece of literature and of their individual reading strategy. This is definitely a lesson strategy that I plan to incorporate in my classroom.