SciFi Friday
A middle school teacher chronicles his journey of integrating high-interest literature, primarily short stories, into the middle school classroom. From classics to contemporary voices, these stories help weave together social justice, diversity, and critical thinking with content and issues in science.
Five years ago I was faced with a new challenge in my first year teaching science full-time (in the past I had taught science and other subjects, but never just science). Once a week, our phenomenal exceptional children(special education) teacher was going to have to pull several students from science in order to meet their service time in reading. I was heartbroken that I would only get to meet with these students 4 days a week instead of 5, so I met with the EC teacher to brainstorm ways to keep them connected to science when they miss class. What began as this conversation somehow made its way to a bigger talk about what would be the ideal way to meet these students’ needs in reading through science. Before I knew it, we had come up with SciFi Friday — a program that allows me to weave my literature degree with my science teaching!
Every week on Friday, the EC teacher and I co-teach through literature in science. Most weeks this allows us to read short stories with students and reinforce critical reading skills. In order for students to become better readers, they need to know what good reading sounds like. To reinforce this, we read aloud the stories in class. What I thought was an interesting idea has become something students look forward to with anticipation weekly! Not a Friday goes by that some student doesn’t say some version of “Today is Friday? Yes! That means we get to read for SciFi Friday!”
What I didn’t expect from integrating this program into my science classroom are a number of incredible benefits that were not part of the original planning but have made SciFi Friday immensely valuable, like:
- Integrating diverse voices and perspectives into the science classroom. Over the years I have have introduced students to both classic and contemporary authors, writers from many parts of the world, numerous races, LGBTQIA voices, and more. Students are hungry for new perspectives, and short stories allow me to expose them to dozens of writers in a year.
- Great science fiction not only brings a critical lens to important issues facing societies, but it also helps students build empathy and question the status quo. Science is not objective; the more students see its relationship with social justice — both as a tool for improving but also as a discipline shaped by society, the better critical thinkers and citizens they will be.
- These stories are so good! They are a pleasure to read and are each a piece of art. Students are much more likely to seek out incredibly important voices — like Octavia Butler, Ken Liu, N. K. Jemisin, and Rebecca Roanhorse — when they are exposed to the work of these important writers. Fostering a love of reading early and consistently with students is so important, and why does that joy belong just to English Language Arts classes?
I hope to update this space with stories I have used in SciFi Friday, a short description and discussion of them, and potential teaching ideas for the story. If you know of stories you think would fit well in this program, please send them my way! You can reach me at jason.carter@evergreenccs.org or tweet at me: @evergreenjasonc
