Questions Expand and What about Peace?
I am working with others within the Jane Addams Peace Association to create reading guides for books that have been honored by the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award. We have a myriad of questions revolving around how best to support teachers, librarians, and parents in deeply engaging children with this excellent social justice literature. Sample reading guides that were created over the summer for Jane Addams Children’s Book Award (JACBA) honored titles were met this fall with positive feedback from a committee of diverse educators and librarians. After reviewing and commenting on the samples, we agreed that all guides will be reviewed in a similar way by people with a variety of lived experiences before they are published. Should you wish to explore our efforts further here are two draft guides: Opening the Road — Learn and Do (a picture book) Ninth Ward — Learn & Do (a chapter book).
The two questions I posed in my initial reflection at the end of last summer remain central to our consideration and were brought forward by committee members.
1. What is the simplest, most helpful, most accessible manner to share information with educators? This is a question particularly with the picture book guides. How to keep it simple and useful for a range of adults from parents, through youth workers, librarians, and educators? Can one document associated with a book even do this job or do there need to be different guides for different adult roles?
The second initial question persists as well: 2. How can learning guides/supports be constructed to help adults not “read and tell” but “read with” and elicit children’s thinking, questioning, and natural self-efficacy and urge to action? How much information about an open ended approach that engenders dialogue should be included? And connecting with the initial question, how can we be both powerful and succinct? Articulating these questions again and listing my extending questions, puts me in good stead to enter our next committee conversation!
We also found ourselves asking the question, what makes these reading guides distinct from other guides? One of our committee members had even written a guide for the publisher of an honored title! How would our guides differ from what the author or publisher has offered? Would they differ? The award’s sponsor, the Peace Association’s mission is: To deepen understanding of peace and justice for children and their adults through reflection, dialogue, and social action. We could see that our sample guides sought specifically to deepen understanding of justice through reflection, dialogue and social action. But what about peace?
Some background. The JACBA is the oldest peace and justice award for children’s literature in the nation — 70 years in 2023! While many wonderful social justice book awards have arisen in recent decades, the JACBA is the only award that highlights the theme of peace. To quote Jane Addams herself, “Peace would no longer be an absence of war, but the unfolding of worldwide processes making for the nurture of human life.” She saw the fostering of “sympathetic knowledge” as the building block of peace. (Newer Ideals of Peace, 1907). In modern terms, the award criteria asks, “How can people work with compassion, empathy, and activism to advance Jane Addams’ belief that achieving true peace means more than ending war; it means ensuring justice for all people?”
“Sympathetic knowledge,” compassion, empathy, and activism seem the distinguishing features of peace building that we can emphasize in our reading guides. Some of this is already present in our social justice focus. Perhaps more specific articulation around peacebuilding happening when actions are motivated and filled with compassion and empathy is in order? More fodder for our next group conversation!
You may have noticed throughout this post, I’m referring to and hanging on our group considerations past and present. I’ve discovered in my volunteer work supporting social justice children’s literature that there is no substitute for taking initiative and there is no way to move forward without building consensus among people of diverse perspectives and lived experiences. It occurs to me this is peacebuilding in action. Let’s go for it!
