Why Use YA Literature to Engage Readers?

For my current English Education course, I am writing a literature review (that I should be doing instead of this blog!). I thought I should share a summary of my findings (the 12 page final review would be a bit cumbersome on a blog). Hope you realize something you hadn't thought about before!

Why Use YA Literature to Engage Readers?

My journey with my literacy topic has been interesting, if not trying. Originally, I wanted to combine two of my strongest interests, low-income schools and Young Adult (YA) literature. After a lot of searching, I found nothing. So I changed low-income schools to reluctant readers. Again, I had a hard time finding 12-15 sources. Finally, when I broadened my topic to engaging readers using YA literature, I found enough scholarly articles to work with.

My research was very interesting. I was surprised to find out that YA texts are rarely, if ever, used in secondary schools; occasionally middle school students are required to read YA novels. I found this surprising because almost all of the novels we read for pedagogical classes have been YA. Instead, current classrooms use the canon, the classics. Many of the opinions from various experts that I researched argue that the use of classics has been creating reluctant readers rather than encouraging them to read. Because students become reluctant, they do not engage with the text or user higher cognitive levels beyond comprehension. To challenge this problem, experts suggest that educators use YA literature.

Experts such as teachers, YA novel writers, and professors at various universities claim that YA literature engages students in ways that the classics cannot. The classics were originally written for an educated, adult audience, not teenagers. But YA literature is. They also argue that YA texts use similar themes that can be used to help students understand changes in their lives, as well as teach them about social responsibility and morals.

Several of the experts refer to the fact that literacy now pertains to a variety of texts: videos, emails, music, etc. Some of them have also found that students are more willing to read YA novels if they have a film based on it. Because of this, they suggest that YA literature can be used to teach many different forms of literacy. This perspective of YA literature makes it educationally more valuable than the canon.

Overall, the experts recommend that educators implement YA literature into classrooms. However, according to surveys and questionnaires, teachers argue that YA texts have not stood the test of time as classics have and that they do not have time for additional novels in class. This is surprising because of the evidence the experts present in support of YA literature. Perhaps future teachers will embrace it more readily?

A Thought on Lectures

As I prepare to become a teacher, I find myself reflecting more and more on my own learning experiences. I think of the strategies that worked and those that bore me and my classmates to near-tears. A strategy that rarely worked for me during my education is a lecture. In Bridging English, Milner, Milner, and Mitchell (MM&M) acknowledge lectures as one of four organizational structures for class time. Even though I loved school, I had many reasons for hating lectures.

Lectures meant blankly staring at the board and taking mindless notes. My teachers hoped that I was engaging with the text and thinking about it, but in reality I was thinking about lunch or passing notes to my friends. When I have something to work on or need to focus, I am not easily distracted, so I can only imagine that other people in my class were daydreaming too. Lectures were not only interesting or engaging, but they were old. I had at least one teacher who wrote the same notes on the board every year. She may have even used the same yellowed notebook papered ones as her originals. I don’t know if it’s necessary to explain what most students did:

“Hey Leah, do you still have your notes from American Government?”

It’s probably easy to conclude that I have a hard time accepting lecture as a positive learning experience. However, the claim of its importance in the classroom has caused me to, yet again, reflect on the possible value of lecturing. As I explained, for me lecture was a process of “Here’s a fact, write it down in your notebook and memorize it. There’ll be a test at the end of next week.” From a student’s perspective, no good. From a teacher’s, an easy way out.

What I found interesting from MM&M are the included rhetorical strategies to make a lecture memorable: analysis, definition and classification, comparison and contrast, and illustration. These go beyond the list of facts and regurgitation. That’s what initially caught my attention, and I continued to think about the benefits of a lecture structured in these ways. Essentially, lectures become teacher-think-aloud opportunities. It’s a chance to show students what their goals are when interacting with subject matter. We can show them how to make comparisons between two texts or from text to self or how to analyze Shakespearean language in a single sonnet. This becomes the first step in scaffolding: students observing. After they have seen it down, they can perform the task with some guidance and eventually they will be able to use the new skill on their own.

The work of MM&M has opened my eyes to the positive possibilities of using lecture in the classroom, as long as it’s done correctly. Students need to be interested, not given a list of facts.

A Book Review & Author Talk: Breakfast with Buddha & Roland Merullo

Today, Roland Merullo came to my university's campus to attend several classes and to read to the public this evening. For those who don't know the work of Merullo, he is the author of 15 books, and his most well-known novel is Breakfast with Buddha.

I first read Breakfast with Buddha as part of my Honors Colloquium last fall semester. Many passages from this book hit home for me, as a college student not fully sure of my independent self, because I could relate to the main character, Otto. This specific course focused on Buddhism in the modern world, so my professor emphasized that we were "on a journey" with Otto and Rinpoche throughout this novel.

For those who have not read this novel, I highly suggest it. If you have read another book by Merullo and disliked it, still pick this one up to try. When he came to speak to the current Honors Colloquium (the professor invited the "alumni" from last year to this session), Merullo talked about how his publisher and editors would prefer for him to write in a similar style continuously, but he says he can't. So if you've read another title by Merullo and wasn't a fan, still take a step into Otto's journey with a Tibetan monk.

I hadn't really considered being able to teach this specific novel in a class because the plot and theme central so much on a spiritual issue. Despite the literary value of this text, I feel as if I would have a difficult time justifying teaching Breakfast with Buddha in a public school. Would I enjoy it if I had the opportunity? Absolutely. However, that might not happen.

While in a question and answer session with Merullo, I was introduced to some of his other books that I would be able to consider as educational texts in a classroom (now I must read them!). The first is a story of a girl with cystic fibrosis, called A Little Love Story.

 Though I haven't read this novel (but I will!), I relate it to the novel Petey that I observed taught in a sixth grade classroom. The main character of that novel goes through many difficulties as a misdiagnosed patient who isn't treated very well. I wonder if Roland Merullo's A Little Love Story couldn't be a text to teacher students that though some people have physical disabilities or constraints, they are still human beings with emotions and dreams.