By Kathy Short, The University of Arizona
The blogs for this month highlight our reflections on authors’ discussions of global and multicultural issues in children’s and young adult literature. These authors appeared on panels at the Tucson Festival of Books on March 14-15, 2015. We each selected a particular panel to share the dialogue that emerged between authors around an issue, such as resistance, cultural influences, and scientific writing. This first column is a brief description of the festival and the opening keynote by Katherine Paterson. Continue reading
The Common Core State Standards put a major emphasis on the close reading of texts, recommending that students find and cite evidence in the text as they discuss key ideas and details, craft and structure, and knowledge and ideas. Text analysis is viewed as bringing rigor to reading with an emphasis on higher level critical reading skills. Any text read to or by students is used for instructional purposes, to teach something. If students respond to a text by talking about what it reminds them of from their lives, teachers are to steer students back to the task and ask them to talk about what the story is about—to get the details and to support their statements by citing evidence in the text. Text-dependent questions and evidence, not connection, are valued. 
One aspect of the Common Core State Standards that has received a great deal of attention is the increased focus on informational texts. The CCSS document calls for 50/50 split between informational and literary texts in kindergarten, gradually increasing to a 70/30 split in high school.
