How to Write Supportive Social Justice Literature Learning Guides
Creative Learn and Do’s for Teachers, Librarians, Parents, and of course, All the Children!
I am an educator and social activist and I’m privileged to be a thinking partner within the Teacher Leadership Yearlong Institute. I retired from teaching in the Verona District in 2015 where at Stoner Prairie in Fitchburg I co-created and taught in a 4/5th grade community called The Learning Place. During my tenure, my students, my co-teacher, and I annually participated in the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award process, work that contributed to building a year long social justice curriculum. In time, this process grew to include a dozen classrooms around the country via online student blogging.
Since leaving the classroom, I’ve been on the board of directors of the Jane Addams Peace Association, the award’s sponsoring organization, and am soon completing a term as president. I’ve also been teaching part-time with The Center for Advanced Academics (formerly WCATY), an innovative approach to 5th through 8th grade reading, writing, and higher order thinking, first in the Milwaukee Public Schools where our program had a grant to identify and support giftedness in children of color and poverty and most recently across southern Wisconsin.
I’ve experienced creative interaction between these roles right along. During the first months of the pandemic, I blogged out three times a week with activities for middle grade kids featuring a Jane Addams author with all online activities, no physical books needed. These offerings came to be called Learn and Do’s. No surprise, the format for these activities mirrored many aspects of our approach in The Center! Then this spring, I wrote two courses for The Center exploring the interrelationship of reading, writing, and inspiration for change with Jane Addams commended social justice literature at their core. At the same time, I’m working within the Peace Association to write learning guides to accompany our commended titles to be posted on our website and on Teachingbooks.net with whom we collaborate. To bring this full cycle, my teaching partner in The Learning Place, Jenny Peterson, is assisting with establishing a template for this curriculum development!
My questions going into this new academic year revolve around how best to support teachers, librarians, and parents in deeply engaging children with excellent social justice literature. What is the simplest, most helpful, most accessible manner? And how can learning guides/supports be written to help adults not “read and tell” but “read with” and elicit children’s thinking, questioning, natural self-efficacy, and urge to action?
Last year, within the Peace Association’s program committee, we developed curriculum criteria based on the book award criteria, Gholdy Mohammed’s Learning Pursuits, and Learning for Justice’s (previouslyTeaching Tolerance) Social Justice Standards. However, the committee got bogged down when it came to creating specific learning guides. This summer we’ve been able to hire Jenny and a social justice focused librarian/teacher to create sample work for the committee’s review. My hope is that this fall we are able to get feedback from teachers, librarians, and parents with multiple perspectives and lived experience and that we are ready to build learning guides for all our recent and new titles in 2023. We’ll see!!
