by Carmen Martínez-Roldán, Columbia University
I’m Dr. Martínez-Roldán, Associate Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. During March I will be inviting educators, teachers, and librarians to share their experiences using international children’s and adolescent literature in their teaching. Each week I will feature the experience of an educator and hope that the reader will feel inspired to share her/his own experiences as a reader of the featured books. In this first blog, Dr. Jo-Beth Allen from the University of Georgia tells us how she uses literature in her university writing courses. In the following paragraphs, she writes about her experience using books that address war-related themes.
Prof. JoBeth Allen:
I use a great deal of children’s literature in a graduate course on K-8 writing pedagogy and a split level (graduate/undergraduate) course on teaching poetry in K-8 classrooms. In both, we start each class with a writing workshop, which I often initiate by reading a children’s book. Most often, these mentor texts portray aspects of culture likely to be unfamiliar to my students, mostly middle class European American women.
I often share books that assist us in taking the perspective of people affected by war, in hopes that the teachers in my classes will help raise a generation of young people who question “military solutions.” Even though I focus on some aspect of the writing for specific lessons, we always begin with a discussion of the content: What struck you about this story? What surprised you? Whose perspective does the author present? While most of the books do not explore cultural backgrounds in depth, they do provide humanizing portraits of characters from other countries.
For example, we read Faithful Elephants: A True Story of Animals, People, and War by Yukio Tsuchiva as an example of informational/ historical writing that is highly persuasive, blurring artificial genre lines at the same time portraying the Japanese zookeepers as highly humane victims of the US bombing of Japan during World War II. Baseball Saved Us, Ken Mochizuki’s depiction of Japanese-American families in an internment camp and of the racism Japanese American children faced even after the war, is an excellent example of character development.
One of my favorite books is The Librarian of Basra: A True Story from Iraq. Jeanette Winter opens the book with a quote: “In the Koran, the first thing God said to Muhammad was ‘Read.’” My students and I know very little about Islam, so this quote is often a surprise to them. Alia Muhammad Baker is the librarian of Basra, and a wonderful everyday hero. She worried that the US war in Iraq would destroy the town library so she asks the governor for permission to move the books. When he refuses, she secretly begins moving the books to her home, a car load every night after dark. The firestorm of bombings begins; it never says by the US, but it was in 2003 so my students know. She asks a neighboring family to help her move the rest of the books into their restaurant. The library burns to the ground, but she saved 70% of the books. When the bombings are over, she hires a truck and moves all 30 thousand books to her house. She dreams of peace, and of a new library.
When I read this with my poetry class, they work in groups to create a folk-hero ballad. The choose a familiar melody, then craft verses that tell the story and a refrain that capture what they determine to be the overall theme. They enjoy writing and then performing their folk-hero ballads – after time to practice and getting over a little stage fright. And while I don’t teach directly about Iraq, or war, I think this book and others I mentioned put human faces and lives on those affected by the inhumanity of war.”
Have you read or used any of the books mentioned by Prof. Allen? What was your experience? What challenges have you encountered using or making meaning of these texts?
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- Themes: Carmen M. Martínez-Roldán
- Descriptors: Books & Resources, Debates & Trends, WOW Currents