# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Every year, we have tried to create a meaningful end to the year. A meaningful way for all of us to come together one last time, to cement the year we have had. To realize just how far we have come. In the past few years, it was our This I Believe speeches, given on the last few days where students sometimes decided to delve into their past as they looked at their future.

This year, I wanted something different and an idea I have heard both Donalyn Miller and Teri Lesene mention came to mind; the reader memoir. A seemingly simple narrative that would allow us to see the growth of our students as writers while they reflected upon their reading. A way for us to hear the truth that they carry within them, to see the hopes or fears they have for their future reading life.

So three weeks ago, as we started our final reading challenge (a self-selected book club or an independent reading challenge), I unveiled the project, to see the slides, go here. Write about your life as a reader. The good, the bad, the future, the past. Tell me about who you are now, how you have grown, the books you have cherished and those you didn't. About what made you a reader or turned you away from reading.

At first, some kids were skeptical, after all, why would they want to write about that, and yet as the memoirs themselves start to roll in, I cannot help but sit in awe as my students dive into their own reading experiences to share who they are as readers now.

"If we lived in a world without books, I'd make my own..."

"When we're asked to read in class, I actually read."

"I don't think I was meant to be a reader."

"My parents would sit with me and my siblings, reading us stories, and we would huddle close and listen. Then I would begin to slump, falling asleep to the flowing words."

As my students' words surround me, I cannot help but be grateful for the words they have chosen to share, the truths they have given me as I prepare for another set of readers and nonreaders next year. What a way to end, by knowing them even more. What a way for them to end, by knowing themselves a little more. Perhaps, this will be something they also remember.
If you like what you read here, consider reading my newest book, Passionate Readers - The Art of Reaching and Engaging Every Child. This book focuses on the five keys we can implement into any reading community to strengthen student reading experiences, even within the 45 minute English block. If you are looking for solutions and ideas for how to re-engage all of your students consider reading my very first book Passionate Learners - How to Engage and Empower Your Students. Also, if you are wondering where I will be in the coming year or would like to have me speak, please see this page.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Who I Am as a Reader - A Reading Memoir Writing Project

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Every year, we have tried to create a meaningful end to the year. A meaningful way for all of us to come together one last time, to cement the year we have had. To realize just how far we have co...

# data[].attributes.body
Could be a good mentor for argument

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's important for people to tell you what side they are on and why, and whether they might be biased. A declaration of members' interests, of a sort. So, I am going to be talking to you about reading. I'm going to tell you that libraries are important. I'm going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I'm going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.

And I am biased, obviously and enormously: I'm an author, often an author of fiction. I write for children and for adults. For about 30 years I have been earning my living through my words, mostly by making things up and writing them down. It is obviously in my interest for people to read, for them to read fiction, for libraries and librarians to exist and help foster a love of reading and places in which reading can occur.

So I'm biased as a writer. But I am much, much more biased as a reader. And I am even more biased as a British citizen.

And I'm here giving this talk tonight, under the auspices of the Reading Agency: a charity whose mission is to give everyone an equal chance in life by helping people become confident and enthusiastic readers. Which supports literacy programs, and libraries and individuals and nakedly and wantonly encourages the act of reading. Because, they tell us, everything changes when we read.

And it's that change, and that act of reading that I'm here to talk about tonight. I want to talk about what reading does. What it's good for.

I was once in New York, and I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons - a huge growth industry in America. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth - how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be, 15 years from now? And they found they could predict it very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year-olds couldn't read. And certainly couldn't read for pleasure.

It's not one to one: you can't say that a literate society has no criminality. But there are very real correlations.

And I think some of those correlations, the simplest, come from something very simple. Literate people read fiction.

Fiction has two uses. Firstly, it's a gateway drug to reading. The drive to know what happens next, to want to turn the page, the need to keep going, even if it's hard, because someone's in trouble and you have to know how it's all going to end ... that's a very real drive. And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going. To discover that reading per se is pleasurable. Once you learn that, you're on the road to reading everything. And reading is key. There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading. People who cannot understand each other cannot exchange ideas, cannot communicate, and translation programs only go so far.

The simplest way to make sure that we raise literate children is to teach them to read, and to show them that reading is a pleasurable activity. And that means, at its simplest, finding books that they enjoy, giving them access to those books, and letting them read them.

I don't think there is such a thing as a bad book for children. Every now and again it becomes fashionable among some adults to point at a subset of children's books, a genre, perhaps, or an author, and to declare them bad books, books that children should be stopped from reading. I've seen it happen over and over; Enid Blyton was declared a bad author, so was RL Stine, so were dozens of others. Comics have been decried as fostering illiteracy.

No such thing as a bad writer... Enid Blyton's Famous Five. Photograph: Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy

It's tosh. It's snobbery and it's foolishness. There are no bad authors for children, that children like and want to read and seek out, because every child is different. They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories. A hackneyed, worn-out idea isn't hackneyed and worn out to them. This is the first time the child has encountered it. Do not discourage children from reading because you feel they are reading the wrong thing. Fiction you do not like is a route to other books you may prefer. And not everyone has the same taste as you.

Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian "improving" literature. You'll wind up with a generation convinced that reading is uncool and worse, unpleasant.

We need our children to get onto the reading ladder: anything that they enjoy reading will move them up, rung by rung, into literacy. (Also, do not do what this author did when his 11-year-old daughter was into RL Stine, which is to go and get a copy of Stephen King's Carrie, saying if you liked those you'll love this! Holly read nothing but safe stories of settlers on prairies for the rest of her teenage years, and still glares at me when Stephen King's name is mentioned.)

And the second thing fiction does is to build empathy. When you watch TV or see a film, you are looking at things happening to other people. Prose fiction is something you build up from 26 letters and a handful of punctuation marks, and you, and you alone, using your imagination, create a world and people it and look out through other eyes. You get to feel things, visit places and worlds you would never otherwise know. You learn that everyone else out there is a me, as well. You're being someone else, and when you return to your own world, you're going to be slightly changed.

Empathy is a tool for building people into groups, for allowing us to function as more than self-obsessed individuals.

You're also finding out something as you read vitally important for making your way in the world. And it's this:

The world doesn't have to be like this. Things can be different.

I was in China in 2007, at the first party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention in Chinese history. And at one point I took a top official aside and asked him Why? SF had been disapproved of for a long time. What had changed?

It's simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if other people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine. So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys or girls.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you've never been. Once you've visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

And while we're on the subject, I'd like to say a few words about escapism. I hear the term bandied about as if it's a bad thing. As if "escapist" fiction is a cheap opiate used by the muddled and the foolish and the deluded, and the only fiction that is worthy, for adults or for children, is mimetic fiction, mirroring the worst of the world the reader finds herself in.

If you were trapped in an impossible situation, in an unpleasant place, with people who meant you ill, and someone offered you a temporary escape, why wouldn't you take it? And escapist fiction is just that: fiction that opens a door, shows the sunlight outside, gives you a place to go where you are in control, are with people you want to be with(and books are real places, make no mistake about that); and more importantly, during your escape, books can also give you knowledge about the world and your predicament, give you weapons, give you armour: real things you can take back into your prison. Skills and knowledge and tools you can use to escape for real.

As JRR Tolkien reminded us, the only people who inveigh against escape are jailers.

Tolkien's illustration of Bilbo's home, Bag End. Photograph: HarperCollins

Another way to destroy a child's love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books. I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children's library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children's' library I began on the adult books.

They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader - nothing less or more - which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight-year-old.

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

I worry that here in the 21st century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them. If you perceive a library as a shelf of books, it may seem antiquated or outdated in a world in which most, but not all, books in print exist digitally. But that is to miss the point fundamentally.

I think it has to do with nature of information. Information has value, and the right information has enormous value. For all of human history, we have lived in a time of information scarcity, and having the needed information was always important, and always worth something: when to plant crops, where to find things, maps and histories and stories - they were always good for a meal and company. Information was a valuable thing, and those who had it or could obtain it could charge for that service.

In the last few years, we've moved from an information-scarce economy to one driven by an information glut. According to Eric Schmidt of Google, every two days now the human race creates as much information as we did from the dawn of civilisation until 2003. That's about five exobytes of data a day, for those of you keeping score. The challenge becomes, not finding that scarce plant growing in the desert, but finding a specific plant growing in a jungle. We are going to need help navigating that information to find the thing we actually need.

Photograph: Alamy

Libraries are places that people go to for information. Books are only the tip of the information iceberg: they are there, and libraries can provide you freely and legally with books. More children are borrowing books from libraries than ever before - books of all kinds: paper and digital and audio. But libraries are also, for example, places that people, who may not have computers, who may not have internet connections, can go online without paying anything: hugely important when the way you find out about jobs, apply for jobs or apply for benefits is increasingly migrating exclusively online. Librarians can help these people navigate that world.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar-operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content.

A library is a place that is a repository of information and gives every citizen equal access to it. That includes health information. And mental health information. It's a community space. It's a place of safety, a haven from the world. It's a place with librarians in it. What the libraries of the future will be like is something we should be imagining now.

Literacy is more important than ever it was, in this world of text and email, a world of written information. We need to read and write, we need global citizens who can read comfortably, comprehend what they are reading, understand nuance, and make themselves understood.

Libraries really are the gates to the future. So it is unfortunate that, round the world, we observe local authorities seizing the opportunity to close libraries as an easy way to save money, without realising that they are stealing from the future to pay for today. They are closing the gates that should be open.

According to a recent study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, England is the "only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations are taken into account".

Or to put it another way, our children and our grandchildren are less literate and less numerate than we are. They are less able to navigate the world, to understand it to solve problems. They can be more easily lied to and misled, will be less able to change the world in which they find themselves, be less employable. All of these things. And as a country, England will fall behind other developed nations because it will lack a skilled workforce.

Books are the way that we communicate with the dead. The way that we learn lessons from those who are no longer with us, that humanity has built on itself, progressed, made knowledge incremental rather than something that has to be relearned, over and over. There are tales that are older than most countries, tales that have long outlasted the cultures and the buildings in which they were first told.

I think we have responsibilities to the future. Responsibilities and obligations to children, to the adults those children will become, to the world they will find themselves inhabiting. All of us - as readers, as writers, as citizens - have obligations. I thought I'd try and spell out some of these obligations here.

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

We have an obligation to support libraries. To use libraries, to encourage others to use libraries, to protest the closure of libraries. If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom. You are silencing the voices of the past and you are damaging the future.

We have an obligation to read aloud to our children. To read them things they enjoy. To read to them stories we are already tired of. To do the voices, to make it interesting, and not to stop reading to them just because they learn to read to themselves. Use reading-aloud time as bonding time, as time when no phones are being checked, when the distractions of the world are put aside.

We have an obligation to use the language. To push ourselves: to find out what words mean and how to deploy them, to communicate clearly, to say what we mean. We must not to attempt to freeze language, or to pretend it is a dead thing that must be revered, but we should use it as a living thing, that flows, that borrows words, that allows meanings and pronunciations to change with time.

We writers - and especially writers for children, but all writers - have an obligation to our readers: it's the obligation to write true things, especially important when we are creating tales of people who do not exist in places that never were - to understand that truth is not in what happens but what it tells us about who we are. Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, after all. We have an obligation not to bore our readers, but to make them need to turn the pages. One of the best cures for a reluctant reader, after all, is a tale they cannot stop themselves from reading. And while we must tell our readers true things and give them weapons and give them armour and pass on whatever wisdom we have gleaned from our short stay on this green world, we have an obligation not to preach, not to lecture, not to force predigested morals and messages down our readers' throats like adult birds feeding their babies pre-masticated maggots; and we have an obligation never, ever, under any circumstances, to write anything for children that we would not want to read ourselves.

We have an obligation to understand and to acknowledge that as writers for children we are doing important work, because if we mess it up and write dull books that turn children away from reading and from books, we 've lessened our own future and diminished theirs.

We all - adults and children, writers and readers - have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.

Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I'm going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It's this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on.This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.

We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we've shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.

We have an obligation to tell our politicians what we want, to vote against politicians of whatever party who do not understand the value of reading in creating worthwhile citizens, who do not want to act to preserve and protect knowledge and encourage literacy. This is not a matter of party politics. This is a matter of common humanity.

Albert Einstein was asked once how we could make our children intelligent. His reply was both simple and wise. "If you want your children to be intelligent," he said, "read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales." He understood the value of reading, and of imagining. I hope we can give our children a world in which they will read, and be read to, and imagine, and understand.

This is an edited version of Neil Gaiman's lecture for the Reading Agency, delivered on Monday October 14 at the Barbican in London. The Reading Agency's annual lecture series was initiated in 2012 as a platform for leading writers and thinkers to share original, challenging ideas about reading and libraries.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A lecture explaining why using our imaginations, and providing for others to use theirs, is an obligation for all citizens

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In 1992, as a first-year PhD student at Berkeley, I told the English department chairman, a famous Americanist, that I wanted to write a dissertation on Vietnamese and Vietnamese American literature. "You can't do that," he said, fretting over my ambition to teach in a university English department. "You won't get a job." Since even my Marxist mentor agreed with the chair, I took the safer route and wrote a dissertation on Asian American literature, a subject in which some people had gotten tenure-track professorial positions.

Still, this was not an easy path. As a scholar of Chicano literature told me with a note of anger in his voice: "We have to read their literature, but they don't have to read ours." He meant that we, in the minority, would always have to know the minds of the majority, a favor the majority knew it did not have to return. Knowledge of this kind meant survival for the minority. Ignorance of this kind was an expression of privilege for the majority.

I've been thinking of those years again because, somehow, the decades-long war over what to include in the literary canon rages on. The latest front is at Barnard College in New York City, where some English majors want greater diversity in their curriculum. "After years of experience, I would say 'too bad' " to those students, Anne Lake Prescott, a senior scholar and professor emerita of English, told the university newspaper. "In order to understand later literature you need to have read some Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson. This is good background for an English major. The brutal part of my mind says, 'If you don't like it, don't major in English.' Many professors would feel that if you don't give the basics of the British literature supplemented by American literature, you simply can't understand some of the moderns."

This "brutal" thinking is ever more vocal in American culture. The rise of anti-immigrant and anti-refugee xenophobia on the right finds a parallel in attacks against " identity politics " on the left. The right blames newcomers, foreigners and minorities for the cultural and economic decline of the country. The left blames the same groups for insisting too strongly on their identities, which allegedly alienates some white people, distracts from the need to focus on inequality and, in academia, threatens the canon. People like me and the Barnard students who want to read different kinds of literature are the barbarians at the gate, the supposed purveyors of these identity politics.

But these complaints ignore the most dangerous kind of identity politics: white identity politics, which has always been with us. Except it was never called "white," since American politics has implicitly been white politics throughout most of the nation's history. What has changed is that the barbarians' increased demands have made whiteness more visible, most especially to white people themselves. No wonder this manifests, partly, as a dispute about the canon.

I came of age during the so-called culture wars of the late 1980s and 1990s, when university debates over what constituted American and Western culture transfixed the nation. At the center of the fight was the canon of Western literature, a parade of European men from Homer to Joyce. Reformers did not dispute that a Western canon needed to exist, but they demanded more space for works by women, people of color, the working class, the queer and the non-white. (The revolutionaries wanted to abolish the canon and the idea of "great books" altogether.) In contrast, scholars E.D. Hirsch and Allan Bloom argued that if the core of the great books was not synonymous with the Western canon, then the values of the West - and the cohesiveness of America itself - would erode. By the late '90s, the wars seemed settled, with "multiculturalism" appearing to have triumphed, even if it manifested only as a "diversity requirement" that students read Chinua Achebe and the Koran alongside the "classics."

But as is the case with many wars, there has been a long aftermath, and maybe even a renewal.

I arrived at the University of California at Berkeley in 1990, already suspecting that I was one of the barbarians threatening Western culture. I had gone to an elite, mostly white high school in San Jose, where I was one of the few students of Asian descent. We knew we were different. Every day at lunch, we gathered in a corner of the campus and called ourselves "the Asian invasion." I was primed to become what I did at Berkeley - an Asian American. The term was coined in 1968 by radical Berkeley students. Before then, we were "Orientals" at best, the "yellow peril" at worst, excluded from the Western canon except when Western cannons were aimed at us. (To people to whom all Asians looked alike, it didn't matter that Asian Americans were not the same as Asians: We were all foreigners who didn't belong.)

I am a descendant of Caliban, the character who learned the master's language, including how to curse in it. Still, my love for English, and the Western canon, runs deep. In college, as an English major, I read many of the Greek classics, Chaucer, Shakespeare, a good number of the Romantics and the Victorians, plus a considerable amount of American literature. I never thought of becoming a scholar of English. (How could I go home to my Vietnamese refugee parents, who worked 12- to 14-hour days in their grocery store, and say that I wanted to study Jane Austen or Lord Byron?) But I could enjoy the study of literature until I had to go to law school and begin a life of quiet desperation.

Then I became an ethnic studies major, too. I discovered Asian American literature, whose origins date to the late 1800s. I also found African American literature, from the slave narratives onward. And then there was Chicano literature, which helped me understand better what it meant to have grown up in San Jose, with a best friend named Jesús; Native American literature, which reminds us that the American Dream is born from genocide; postcolonial literature, which made me realize that I was postcolonial as well, having been born in Vietnam, colonized by the French; and feminist literature, which set me on the path I am still on today, attempting to understand just how deeply patriarchy and misogyny have shaped me.
[Characters in children's books are almost always white, and it's a big problem]
Only after exposure to all these literatures - none of them "canonical," even if they included some books that were "great" to me - did I think I could go to graduate school and pursue a doctorate in English, where I attempted to honor my parents in my own way, by writing on Vietnamese and Vietnamese American literature. The department chair put an end to that: Insufficient fealty to the Western canon (which my proposed subject clearly did not include) imperiled my job prospects, because even then, identity politics, as it would soon become known, was a threat to the curriculum at universities across the country.

The birth of identity politics all those years ago has drawn a backlash with an explicit emphasis on white identity politics. In Donald Trump, white identity politics has found a sympathetic president. White identity politics is armed with an AR-15 and a sense of grievance born from understanding, for the first time, what W.E.B. Du Bois said of the African American experience at the turn of the 20th century: "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, - an American, a Negro."

For people of color, double consciousness is second nature, something we experience every day, something I am reminded of whenever I am the only nonwhite person in an academic or literary setting, which happens often. But too many white people are not used to two-ness, to seeing themselves as both an American (or a European) and a white person. This awareness of one's own privilege as part of the majority is completely absent from the traditional great books curriculum, and its themes would be unrecognizable to centuries of authors who emerged from the majority in their homelands.

Some white people accept their visibility and make room for other voices; they include the late Emory Elliott, an American-literature scholar whose edited volume " The Columbia History of the American Novel" covered "classic" authors as well as submerged, overlooked and forgotten ones who make up the vast complexity of American literature (and culture). But this kind of inclusion makes other whites feel themselves to be under attack - and under threat of erasure. It is these people to whom Trump spoke when he said, in his inaugural address, "You will never be ignored again." People who believe they are being forgotten in favor of minorities are not just English professors who say, "If you don't like it, don't major in English." They are also people who say, "Love America or leave it." Their version of defending the canon and expelling troublesome writers expresses itself through building a border wall and deporting people.

But it's too late to get rid of all of us. We are here because white people were there, invading - sorry, civilizing - our countries of origin. Americans descended from Vietnamese refugees, undocumented Nicaraguan immigrants and African slaves cannot unlearn English. In my case, I love English and will not leave it, even if some people use it to say, "Go back to where you came from." (They can't say "Speak English," since I teach it.) I write books hoping that people like me will one day be part of the canon, even if its defenders would never welcome us. We are not destroying anything by demanding to be part of the canon or the curriculum or the country. Those building walls are the ones allowing their fear to destroy what they wish to preserve.

Here's what the brutal part of my mind says. The gunners of the Western canon have always declared that there is no requirement to read the Other, since there is no equivalence. We are just the natives, English our second language. The gunners would agree with Saul Bellow when he asked: "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad to read him." Never mind that Bellow presents a false choice between culture and chaos, or that he confuses the matter by gesturing at oral cultures rather than literary ones. (And would it be so perilous to learn things from radically different cultures that do not value the same things we do?) Why don't we read Murasaki Shikibu's " The Tale of Genji," Cao Xueqin's " The Dream of the Red Chamber" or Nguyen Du's " The Tale of Kieu," all of which predate Tolstoy and Proust?
[I read books by only minority authors for a year. It showed me how white our reading world is.]
But Bellow also misses the point, which is that the cultures that produced the canonical greats also produced mass slavery and colonization that killed millions. Both Shakespeare and slaughter are part of Western civilization. Can we recognize both these faces of the West? Not if we read only Shakespeare.

We must read Shakespeare and authors who are women, Arab, Muslim, queer. Most of the world is neither white nor European, and the United States may be a majority-minority country by mid-century. White people will gain more by embracing this reality rather than fighting it. As for literature, the mind-set that turns the canon into a bunker in order to defend one dialect of English is the same mind-set that closes borders, enacts tariffs and declares trade wars to protect its precious commodities and its besieged whiteness. But literature, like the economy, withers when it closes itself off from the world. The world is coming anyway. It demands that we know ourselves and the Other.
Read more from Outlook: Meet the parents who won't let their children study literature Why are there so few girls in children's books? Black history is U.S. history - but some of my students don't want to hear it
Follow our updates on Facebook and Twitter.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
partner-exclude; hpeverythinglede; hpeverythinginclude; hpeverything; viet thanh nguyen; english literature; english lit; western canon; great books; culture wars; multiculturalism; diversity;

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Books by immigrants, foreigners and minorities don't diminish the 'classic' curriculum.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 1992, as a first-year PhD student at Berkeley, I told the English department chairman, a famous Americanist, that I wanted to write a dissertation on Vietnamese and Vietnamese American literature. "You can't do that," he said, fretting over my ambition to teach in a university English department.

# data[].attributes.headline
Research on Diversity in Children's Literare

# data[].attributes.subject
Research on Diversity in Children's Literare

# data[].attributes.body
links to several articles

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Research on Diversity in Youth Literature | Vol 1 | Iss 1

# data[].attributes.headline
PBS -- Why the book is better than the movie

# data[].attributes.subject
PBS -- Why the book is better than the movie

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Great American Read • Watch Episodes • PBS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Great American Read • Watch Episodes • PBS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Which is better, the book or the movie? Explore the question with Lindsay Ellis in It’s Lit! from PBS Digital Studios. Catch new episodes on Mondays. #GreatReadPBS

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Whether you're going all-in for National Poetry Month in April, or making poetry a regular part of your class's reading diet, it's always a good time to check out some poetry books for kids and teens. We've gathered 40 of our favorite poetry books for kids in grades Pre-K through high school. All can be used as mentor texts-some even include teaching tips and examples. From celebrations of the natural world, to tender coming-of-age poems, to plenty of hilariously silly options, there's something on this list for everyone.

(Just a heads up, WeAreTeachers may collect a share of sales from the links on this page. We only recommend items our team loves!)

Best Poetry Books for Kids in the Primary Grades

Share all the traditional nursery rhymes you remember from childhood with your young students with this beautifully-illustrated treasury. The introduction makes a great case for continuing to share nursery rhymes with kids in today's world, too.

When Daniel sees a sign for "Poetry in the Park," he asks, "What is poetry?" His experiences provide an answer, lots of sample poetic lines, and a great entry point into writing poetry for young students.

Eleven poems set in the tranquility of a Japanese garden. This counting book introduces the haiku form of poetry to young readers.

Each turn of a page reveals the subject of a short but powerful verse about an item in nature. Lots of inspiration for students to write their own poems about nature in the same format.

Kiyoshi wonders how his grandfather, an accomplished haiku poet, finds his poetry. His grandfather shares his wisdom with a poetry-filled walk around their city neighborhood. Check out this blog post from the author for helpful poetry teaching tips.

This collection of poetry explores the rich traditions of celebrating the full moon as it passes across our sky and is a celebration of poetry, culture, geography, and science.

A delightful trove of poetry that covers many topics-animals, family, play, and silliness.

This poetry collection uses the contexts of cooking and enjoying food to share vibrant poems on a variety of themes. We especially love "Recipe for Disaster" and "Recipe for Memories." So many curriculum possibilities here!

Do your students think poetry isn't for them? Convince them with a collection of poems about a favorite topic. This collection has so much playful, smart, poetic language about everything soccer, from missing shin guards to persistence.

Douglas Florian is a master at creating clever, punny imagery in his poems for kids. This fun collection teaches kids about the landscape and animals of the North and South Poles while also building their appreciation for poetry.

The gateway to a Shel Silverstein addiction. One of seven Silverstein poetry collections that generations of readers have enjoyed.

Revolting Rhymes tackles six favorite tales that are classic Roald Dahl. Each features Dahl's darkly comic style and a surprise ending. If your students love this book, they might also enjoy Vile Verses and Dirty Beasts.

So many beautiful shades of brown! Children will fall in love with these delightful poems.

This celebration of blackness, written in verse, can be enjoyed for both its poetic language and content. Show students how poems can convey crucial messages in beautiful ways.

Got spider enthusiasts in your class? Hook them on poetry with this hybrid collection of nonfiction information and catchy verses about every kind of arachnid you can imagine. Yikes!

16. Science Verse by Jon Scieszka (2-5)

A collection on the poetry of science is a rare find. This book is highly entertaining and will also get your students thinking creatively.

The title of this collection perfectly sets the tone for these impressive poems that tackle the trials of childhood.

This collection of poems is inspired by the glory days of 1950s Harlem jazz. Each poem is a tribute to one of the influential musicians of this iconic age.

A classroom favorite! These two-part poems are perfect for poetry lovers and reluctant beginners alike.

Sometimes called visual poetry or word pictures, concrete poetry presents beautiful words and ideas in shape form. These imaginative examples, illustrated by the brilliant Chris Raschka, will surely inspire your young poets.

Another charming collection to add to your upper elementary classroom library.

Jack Prelutsky is a master of the silly, tongue-twisting, giggle-inducing poetry that kids love.

This fun collection encourages reluctant young readers to enjoy poetry and marvel at the wonder of words.

Set in each of the four seasons, each haiku in this collection shows a boy goofing off while experiencing nature. Author Bob Raczka explains, "Nature is a place where guys love to be."

This collection is filled with colorful images of nature. It also features poems that express the emotions evoked by the changing seasons.

Best Poetry Books for Kids in Upper Elementary and Middle School

Poetry and mindfulness fit together so nicely. Teach both with this unique book from a top-notch children's poet.

Moving and powerful portraits of eleven enslaved people who were sold at auction. Their stories illustrate the importance of life experiences and dreams that nothing can take away.

Full of humor and surprises, this award-winning work by Rachel Rooney is described by one reviewer as "a box of joy and laughter."

This collection offers a rich sampling of poetry from the 19th century through today. It also features a wide variety of types, styles, and themes for students to explore.

This collection includes a variety of poems and a guidebook to teaching poetic forms. It also explains 29 forms and gives great examples.

This New York Times bestseller is a vibrant and exciting collection whose poetry and beats will resonate with readers.

Best Poetry Books for Kids in High School

Concrete poetry for teens that tackles subjects such as hairdos, extracurriculars, and annoying younger brothers. It's a funny, sarcastic take on life as a high schooler.

Eleven-year-old Robert voices his observations and thoughts in this middle school-focused collection of concrete poems.

An impressive collection of poems by award-winning poets and relative newcomers. Each poem speaks to the simple truths that emerge from asking the question: Who am I?

An honest collection of poems that addresses the vast emotions teenagers experience.

A hopeful and encouraging collection of poems by poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Dedicated to the memorable people she's met, Nye's message is one of empathy and peace.

This guidebook, filled with creative writing exercises and original poems, is a great teaching tool. It will also encourage teens to write poetry about their lives.

Original works by 19 teen poets known as the Get Lit Players. With their award-winning performances of classic and spoken-word poems, they are inspiring many teens across the country.

This collection of poems, told through the voices of a boy and a girl, explores the mysteries of teen love, from tender beginning to "final flameout."

This collection features works by 100 new, young poets. Full of originality, the poems address many life events, from tragedy to bliss.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
40 Essential Poetry Books for Kids in Grades PreK-12

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Whether you're going all-in for National Poetry Month in April, or making poetry a regular part of your class's reading diet, it's always a good time to check out some poetry books for kids and teens. We've gathered 40 of our favorite poetry books for kids in grades Pre-K through high school.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jimmy Announces Tonight Show Summer Reads

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Kelly Gallagher's Text Sets - Booksource

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This picture book for young children shows lots of different types of families hanging out in a park. Young children of different religions and ethnicities are enjoying a day in the park and while they may look different, each child eats, plays, and falls down. "It's a very simple representation of diversity," Perez said.

In a riff on the traditional counting book, One Family adds a different family member on each page, showing that families come in many forms and often include far more people than a mother and father. This books is a great way to start talking numbers with young kids, while also reflecting the increasing diversity in family structure kids experience. Perez especially enjoys the illustrations, which she calls "retro" and less cartoony than many books for young kids.

Juna's Jar is as story of friendship and fantasy. When Juna's best friend Hector moves away without saying goodbye she is very sad. Her older brother helps her add items to the family's empty kimchi jar every night and when Juna falls asleep, the items she added come to life in her dreams, helping her search for Hector. Perez says the illustrations are endearing and the kimchi jar is a central image. "It would be normal in a Korean family and it just sort of throws that in there," Perez said. "It's about dreams and hope and friendship."

One Word From Sophia, by Jim Averbeck, illustrated by Yasmeen Ismail
Grades: Preschool-3
Ages: 4-8 years

In this silly picture book about a young girl who wants nothing more than a pet giraffe, the author subtly demonstrates people of color in positive roles. The story is ostensibly about Sophia and the "magic word" she needs to use to get her way, but as she travels from one family member to another begging for a giraffe the reader sees an educated family. "It shows positive roles for families," Perez said. "It represents that families can be different and diverse, but cultured and educated, which is lacking in other books." She often recommends this book to library patrons with good results.

This sweet picture book about a boy traveling across a city with his grandmother on a public bus holds many lessons of compassion. As they ride the bus, the grandmother points out different sites to her grandson and demonstrates kindness to everyone. The reader is lulled into making certain assumptions about the pair that are upset by a twist at the end.

This biography about a Ghanaian boy born with one leg less developed than the other is a testament to determination. Emmanuel works very hard to overcome people's judgments about him and ends up taking care of his family when his father disappears. He even goes on to become a professional athlete. "It's very picture story style, but it's biographical," Perez said.

This is the story of three newcomer students starting school at the same time. One is from Guatemala, another from Somalia and the third from Korea. In the first weeks at their new school they feel very isolated and confused. They knew the language and how everything worked in their home countries, but at the new school everything is different. Slowly, they begin to connect with classmates in nonverbal ways and make their classroom a new home. "This one could be a perfect window for a child seeing a new student coming in," Perez said. It could help children empathize with some of their classmates and understand what they might be feeling.

This picture book features a Latina girl whose grandmother has just come to live with the family in the United States. The little girl does not speak Spanish and her grandmother doesn't speak English, so they struggle to communicate. The girl wants to help cheer up her grandma, who is having a hard time adjusting, so the family gets a parrot to remind the old woman of her island home. The parrot ends up being the go-between for the little girl and her grandmother.

This children's book by well-known novelist Edwidge Danticat raises some sad and serious issues through story. A little girl is writing letters to her mother who is being held in a detention center. "She uses those letters and notes that she wrote to her mom to convince the judge to let her come home," Perez said. And, while the subject matter is serious, Perez says often children are much more capable of understanding and empathizing than adults think. Stories can be a great way to give kids a glimpse at a sad topic, but Perez always recommends parents or guardians read the book themselves first before deciding whether it's right for their child.

"I love this book because the author has a very particular illustrating style," Perez said. "His images look like ancient Mexican art." This non-fiction book for slightly older readers focuses on the life story of José Guadalupe Posada, whose drawings of skeletons have become identified with the Mexican Day of the Dead iconography. The book incorporates both illustration styles for a beautiful result.

This spooky fantasy book rooted in Caribbean folktales features a young girl trying to save her island from ghost-like entities called "Jumbies." Perez says children this age love fantasy and this book is a slightly different take on a familiar genre. "I love that she's a great protagonist; a very awesome example of a strong female," Perez said.

This is the third and last book in Rita Williams-Garcia's series about three sisters living in Brooklyn. In the first book the sisters go visit their mother in the summer during the Civil Rights Movement. They learn why their mother left them, meet some famous Black Panthers and generally get a taste of Oakland in the 1960s. The second book focuses on how the sisters deal with the new woman their father marries. And the third book, Gone Crazy in Alabama, features the three girls visiting their grandmother in Alabama during the Civil Rights era. They learn about feuds in the family and just how strong family bonds can be.

"I have two sisters so I could relate to it," Perez said. "It's about how sisters fight and get along in the end." She loves the way Williams-Garcia captures characters' voices and layers family dynamics throughout the story.

This book about the famous Lakota warrior seems like a perfect book report choice, but Perez says it goes far beyond educational content. The pages inside look like a notebook, as though someone is documenting Sitting Bull's story in real time. Perez says it reminds her of Native ledger art. "It's a mixture of sketching, photographs and text that appeals to lots of different ages," Perez said.

George is a timely book dealing with a different kind of diversity -- the experience of a transgender student in school. "It's the perspective of soemone going through something we may not understand," Perez said. George identifies as a girl and refers to herself in the story with feminine pronouns, while everyone else refers to her as a boy. The written word is uniquely suited to spotlight the differences in pronouns and George's fight to be recognized for who she is.

"It's just an introduction to compassion and empathy for people who are struggling with internal issues that we may not understand," Perez said.

Peter Lee's family used to be obsessed by baseball before tragedy struck. Now, his mother is depressed and no one seems to pay attention to baseball anymore. In an attempt to heal his family, Peter joins a team and his dad becomes the coach. This Chinese-American family has to navigate dynamics with mostly white players, including a girl disguised as a boy (the story takes place in 1972). While baseball doesn't solve all Peter's family's problems, it does help them see that there's hope after at tragedy. "Baseball lovers will love it, but it's not the only thing going on in there," Perez said.

A typical, spoiled American girl is forced to visit Vietnam with her father and grandmother over the summer. While she dreams of being on the beach with her friends, her father and grandmother are trying to figure out what happened to her grandfather during the Vietnam War. As she delves into the story of her grandfather she learns to accept the Vietnamese part of her identity alongside her American one. Perez loves this book because it demonstrates the insights teens can come to on their own. While it sounds serious, she says it's actually funny and lighthearted in many ways.

Set in Vermont in 1969, 12-year-old Mimi is obsessed with the Apollo 11 mission getting ready to launch. As a half black, half Japanese girl, Mimi identifies with space, often feeling like an alien in her mostly white town. She's also really into science at a time when girls aren't supposed to like science. "What's really interesting is it's written in lyrical verse," Perez said.

"Echo is one of the craziest books I read this past year," Perez said. "It's an amazing story that just blows you away." Part fairytale, part historical fiction, Echo weaves together four or five different story lines, each connected by a harmonica. The stories are diverse, featuring a family in Nazi Germany during World War II, a Mexican-American family caring for the orchard of a Japanese-American family that has been sent to internment camps and adopted brothers whose fortunes change. The audiobook has also gotten rave reviews for featuring harmonica music throughout.

In the Footsteps of Crazy Horse, by Joseph Marshall III, illustrations by Jim Yellowhawk
Grades: 5-9
Ages: 10-14 years

This is a coming-of-age story about a boy who is half-Lakota, but doesn't look it. He learns about his heritage through his grandfather's tales. This story is written by a member of the Lakota tribe.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
20 Books Featuring Diverse Characters to Inspire Connection and Empathy | KQED

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This picture book for young children shows lots of different types of families hanging out in a park. Young children of different religions and ethnicities are enjoying a day in the park and while they may look different, each child eats, plays, and falls down. "It's a very simple representation of diversity," Perez said.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Thank you for your interest in submitting a #BuildYourStack resource! The goal of the Build-Your-Stack blog post series is to help teachers build their book knowledge and their classroom libraries through booklists and recommendations curated by NCTE members.

Questions? Email us at buildyourstack@ncte.org.

Build-Your-Stack Resource Posts

Instructional Resources + Recommended Books (400-600 words maximum)

Pair a favorite classroom idea with a brief review of a specific book or books that work well with it. Your piece should use a personal, conversational voice and speak to your own experience as a teacher or that of a teacher you have observed closely. If appropriate, cite the source for your idea. Your description should offer succinct, easy-to-follow instructions and just enough detail to allow other teachers to use it successfully in their own classroom.

While these posts may derive from content you have written previously, we'd like them adapted to the Build-Your-Stack theme rather than simply reposted from a previous context.

We welcome posts in written and/or video form. If you choose to include a video, short videos always work best, and for accessibility purposes we need a transcript so they can be closed- captioned. Please see below for additional video guidelines.

The books that are reviewed should match the idea being shared. For example, if you are sharing an idea for reading nonfiction science texts, the books should be in that genre. The book reviews should give readers a sense of what is special about these books in particular and why they should be added to one's stack. Include links to either the author's page for the book or a Goodreads page for the book, but not a link to an online store. We want to be careful not to endorse particular marketplaces.

Wherever possible, authors of these posts should make connections with appropriate NCTE resources; staff can supplement the pieces with these connections as well. Be mindful that your selections reflect multiple perspectives in their themes, authors, and so forth.

NCTE will create the social images that go with these posts, pairing the Build-Your-Stack logo with the book covers of the texts explored in the post itself.
Examples of topics we'd like covered in resource posts:

What tips do you have for facilitating choice reading in your classroom?

What are some texts that lend themselves to read-alouds?

What are favorite texts for exploring other disciplines?

Where do you go to find new books?

How do you quickly get up to speed on your students' interests and areas for growth so you can become a book matchmaker?

What are your favorite ways to use books as mentor texts for students' own writing?

How do you bring the voice of authors into classroom discussions around books?

I am always reading with an eye toward a potential read-aloud. Read-aloud time is one of the most important parts of our school day. It is a time when we come together as a community around a book. The talk around the book is always powerful, and this is the time that we grow as readers and as humans. Because there is time built into a read-aloud for talk, we can only read 6 to 9 novels each year as a community. So it is important that I choose wisely. If I am not careful, I will read books that are all very similar in genre or author perspective. But it's my goal to use this important time of our day to build community and have important conversations that stretch us.

When I read with an eye toward a read-aloud I am looking for:

A book that will start conversations around an important issue,

A book that is written specifically for middle grade readers

A book that invites us to think about things we may not have thought about before or to think about something from a perspective we may not have considered previously.

A book that stretches us as readers in some way.

I've discovered two new books that I am keeping in mind as possible read-alouds for next school year. These are Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes and The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle by Leslie Connor. Both of these books address important issues and are written in a way that invite deep thinking and thoughtful conversations from middle grade readers. Ghost Boys tells the story of a young black boy who is killed by a police officer while The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle shares the journey of Mason Buttle, an incredible and complex character who is bullied by classmates.

From a reading perspective, these books offer so much. In The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle, the relationships between characters, the interactions with family and friends, and the treatment of Mason Buttle by his classmates all give the reader new ways to think about characters and character development. The author invites a great deal of inferring from readers. Although this is a quieter book, there is a great deal for readers to think deeply about.

In Ghost Boys, the story is told from the perspective of Jerome, who has recently been shot by a police officer. Because this is told after the fact and Jerome has already died, readers are led back and forth in time, as we learn what happened before, and follow the family after, Jerome's death. There is also a plot connection to Emmett Till, which gives us an important piece of history embedded in a fiction text.

Because both of these books have so much to offer middle graders as readers and as human beings, these are two I am glad to have on my stack of possible read-alouds for next school year.

You can see the fully formatted post here.

Build-Your-Stack Book Highlights Recommended Books (150 words maximum)

These are shorter pieces that NCTE can use as Facebook posts or features in INBOX. They should be no more than 150 words and include the following:

Book title, author, publisher

High resolution image of the book cover

1-2 sentence summary of the book-make this compelling and conversational

1-2 sentence pitch for why teachers should add this book to their stack. Consider pitches that appeal to current events, addressing difficult topics with students, reading an example of exceptional writing, diving deep into multiple interpretations, etc.

(Optional) 1 sentence about a recommended student audience for this book

These could also be short videos. See below for additional video guidelines.
NCTE will create the social images that go with these posts, pairing the Build-Your-Stack logo with the book cover of the text explored in the post.

The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle by Leslie Connor HarperCollins Publishers This is a tale of the journey of Mason Buttle, an incredible and complex character who is bullied by classmates. This is a great addition to your stack if you're looking for books that invite inference. The relationships between characters, the interactions with family and friends, and the treatment of Mason Buttle by his classmates all give the reader new ways to think about characters and character development.

Video Guidelines
If you plan to submit a video for your Build-Your-Stack submission, please keep the following guidelines in mind:

Please follow the formats indicated above. Videos should not be longer than two to three minutes for resources posts or one minute for book highlights.

Record in horizontal mode if you're using your phone. Stability is important; if possible, use a stand.

Try not to include background noise or music as it can be distracting.

Look for good lighting in front of your face. Backlighting can make the video too dark.

Send us the largest video file you can. You may need to use a service like Dropbox or Google Drive.

Include a transcript for accessibility.

Editoria l Process
Note: #BuildYourStack blog posts features NCTE member-curated content. Membership status will be checked before publication. If you're not an NCTE member yet, we'd love to for you to join today.
NCTE staff review all blog posts submitted for consideration. All pieces chosen for publication will be copyedited; occasionally a post may be returned to the author for clarification or revision.

We aren't able to guarantee publication of any blog post, submitted or invited, until the post has been through the review and approval process. We generally like to have a month to six weeks for the review and editing process of a submitted blog post.

Build Your Stack posts are currently published on a bi-weekly basis. Sometimes, to accommodate the blog schedule, a post may be accepted but scheduled for publication later in the year. We'll do our best to keep authors informed as to status of submissions, but authors are always welcome to email for an update on a submission.

For general guidelines about writing for the NCTE blog, click here.

Submit Your Blog Post

We welcome #BuildYourStack blog post submissions from NCTE members.

Submit now

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
#BuildYourStack Submission Guidelines - NCTE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Questions? Email us at buildyourstack@ncte.org. Pair a favorite classroom idea with a brief review of a specific book or books that work well with it. Your piece should use a personal, conversational voice and speak to your own experience as a teacher or that of a teacher you have observed closely.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Drawn from PW's Fall Children's Announcements Issue, here are our editors' selections for 21 children's and young adult books that can't arrive soon enough. And check out our picks for this season's most anticipated adult books as well.
Picture Books
Dreamers by Yuyi Morales (Holiday House/Porter, Sept.) - In this exceedingly timely book, Caldecott Honor artist Morales ( Viva Frida) traces the journey that she and her young son took when they immigrated from Mexico to the United States, and the succor that books and libraries offered as the two made their way in a new place.

Giraffe Problems by Jory John, illus. by Lane Smith (Random House, Sept.) - The creators of Penguin Problems may well have outdone the original in this companion tale about a giraffe who feels bad about his long neck; a turtle who is blue about his dinky one; and the shared dismay, assistance, and courtly manners that ensue.

Unlimited Squirrels: I Lost My Tooth! by Mo Willems (Disney-Hyperion, Oct.) - A beginning-reader series launch from Willems mixes truth and fiction in this well-paced story about a scurry of squirrels and a lost baby tooth, appended with facts and jokes.

Presto & Zesto in Limboland by Arthur Yorinks and Maurice Sendak, illus. by Maurice Sendak (HarperCollins/di Capua, Sept.) - In 1990, Sendak created 10 images for an orchestral performance of Czech nursery rhymes, and his friend Yorinks later proposed that they write a story to accompany them. They did, and it's a joy to have another glimpse at Sendak's magic.

What Can a Citizen Do? by Dave Eggers, illus. by Shawn Harris (Chronicle, Sept.) - The creators of 2017's Her Right Foot use manifesto-style language and elaborate cut-paper illustrations to embody the messy realities and exciting potential of the civic enterprise. As Eggers writes, "Who can a citizen be?/ A citizen is just like you."
Middle Grade
by Alan Gratz (Scholastic Press, Oct.) - This followup to Gratz's bestselling Refugee accompanies two young soldiers during WWII, one conscripted to the Japanese military, the other an American Marine, as they fight across the island of Okinawa.

Louisiana's Way Home by Kate DiCamillo (Candlewick, Oct.) - Newbery Medalist DiCamillo follows Raymie Nightingale with this companion novel-the tale of Louisiana Elefante and her grandmother, a middle-of-the-night flight, and a generational curse.

Rosie Revere and the Raucous Riveters: The Questioneers Book #1 by Andrea Beaty, illus. by David Roberts (Amulet, Oct.) - A spinoff of the bestselling STEAM-based picture books, this chapter book series debut features a crew of WWII airplane-building mavens, called the Raucous Riveters, who ask Rosie for a painting assist-she, along with Ada Twist and Iggy Peck, gets to work.

The Third Mushroom by Jennifer L. Holm (Random House, Sept.) - In this sequel to The Fourteenth Goldfish, Ellie and her brilliant scientist grandfather-still in a pubescent boy's body and attending middle school as her "cousin" Melvin-team up on a county science fair project.

We Rise, We Resist, We Raise Our Voices: Words and Images of Hope, ed. by Wade Hudson & Cheryl Willis Hudson (Crown, Sept.) - From a diverse group of more than 50 children's book creators, the 30 illustrated pieces-essays, poems, stories, and letters-that comprise this empowering anthology aim to encourage and inspire children. It is, as its foreword states, "a resource for rescue from any pitfalls of the day."
Young Adult
Bridge of Clay by Markus Zusak (Knopf, Oct.) - "In the beginning there was one murderer, one mule, and one boy." From the bestselling author of The Book Thief comes his first novel in 13 years, about a band of brothers and their missing father, the brother who builds a bridge, and the hardships of creating.

Dear Evan Hansen by Val Emmich et al. (Poppy, Oct.) - Based on the Tony Award-winning musical, this adaptation follows teenager Evan Hansen, for whom a well-meaning lie results in a tortured conscience, and offers an authentic first-person narration about family dynamics and the importance of kindness.

by Neal Shusterman and Jarrod Shusterman (Simon & Schuster, Oct.) - This father-and-son duo has created a climate-change dystopia in which California's denizens muddle through life during a drought-until the water runs dry and desperation sets in.

Hey, Kiddo by Jarrett J. Krosoczka (Graphix, Oct.) - In a graphic memoir, Krosoczka conveys the joys and complications of his young life in Worcester, Mass., including his relationship with his mother (a heroin addict) and his grandparents, who raised him.

by Ibi Zoboi (Balzer + Bray, Sept.) - "It's a truth universally acknowledged that when rich people move into the hood... the first thing they want to do is clean it up," begins this Bushwick-based modernization of Pride and Prejudice, from the author of American Street.

What If It's Us by Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera (HarperTeen, Oct.) - Authors Albertalli and Silvera team up for a sweet-natured love story between two very different boys, Arthur (written by Albertalli) and Ben (Silvera), who meet in a New York City post office. The course of meet-cute never did run smooth.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Most Anticipated Children's and YA Books of Fall 2018

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Drawn from PW's Fall Children's Announcements Issue, here are our editors' selections for 21 children's and young adult books that can't arrive soon enough. And check out our picks for this season's most anticipated adult books as well. Picture Books Dreamers by Yuyi Morales (Holiday House/Porter, Sept.)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
NCTE Position Statement Regarding Rating or "Red-Flagging" Books - NCTE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Approved by the NCTE Executive Committee, July 2013, revised July 2018 Overview Unfettered student access to high-quality literature through curricula, independent choice reading, and "full authentic texts rather than adaptations" (NCTE, 2006, ¶7) is a central tenet in English education, and to that end, NCTE has developed policies that strongly discourage censoring practices in schools at all grade levels.

# data[].attributes.body
Great to use for Response

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Andrea Gibson - Your Life (Official Video)

# data[].attributes.headline
NCTE Position Statement on Teachers' Knowledge of YA Lit

# data[].attributes.subject
NCTE Position Statement on Teachers' Knowledge of YA Lit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This statement, formerly known as Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children's and Adolescent Literature, was updated in July 2018 with the new title, Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children's and Young Adult Literature. Originally created by NCTE Children's Literature Assembly (CLA), 2004, revised July 2018 OVERVIEW
Purpose: Given increased calls for diversity in the English language arts curriculum and growing awareness of the need for young people to see themselves in the books they read, NCTE has commissioned an updated statement on preparing teachers with knowledge of children's and young adult literature.

Key Message: Research shows that when students are given the chance to read books that respect the questions, challenges, and emotions of childhood and adolescence, they read with greater interest and investment (Buehler, 2016; Mueller, 2001). Research also shows that teachers who are readers themselves do a better job of engaging their students in reading (Morrison, Jacobs, & Swinyard, 1999). Thus, teacher educators must support preservice teachers as they build rich and deep knowledge of children's and young adult literature over the course of their certification programs. Then teachers must invest in their own continued growth, learning, and development as children's and young adult literature advocates throughout their professional lives.

Context: A committee of English educators has updated NCTE's 2004 statement Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children's and Adolescent Literature by calling teachers at all stages of their careers to cultivate knowledge of books for young people, be readers of these books themselves, affirm diversity in book selection, and teach children's and young adult literature in ways that honor the books' literary quality as well as their potential to spark personal and social transformation.
STATEMENT
Evidence indicates that teachers' knowledge of children's and young adult literature is inconsistent and uneven from community to community, school to school, and classroom to classroom. Preservice teachers do not read any more than the general population (McKool & Gespass, 2009). Many of today's teachers have never taken a class in children's and young adult literature, and some states have eliminated the requirement for a dedicated course in children's and/or young adult literature for teaching certification. A growing number of schools no longer employ a librarian, who may be the only professional in the building who has formal training in children's and young adult literature, collection development, and matching young readers with books. Without librarians, the burden for reading advisory and material selection falls to classroom teachers, who often lack the training needed to perform these tasks.

Therefore, teacher education programs have the opportunity-and the responsibility-to

introduce preservice teachers to books for children and teens;

develop preservice teachers' understanding of the inherent value of these books for both general reading and classroom use;

raise preservice teachers' awareness of the power of these books to affirm lived experience, create empathy, catalyze conversations, and respect the questions, challenges, and emotions of childhood and adolescence;

call preservice teachers to embrace the roles of reading advocate and book matchmaker alongside their work as implementers of curriculum;

inspire preservice teachers to commit to reading these books throughout their professional lives;

cultivate in preservice teachers a commitment to teaching these books in ways that honor their literary quality as well as their potential to spark personal and social transformation;

build preservice teachers' capacity for continued growth, learning, and development as advocates of children's and young adult literature.

As an organization, NCTE compels teachers at all stages of their careers to invest in books for young people-as readers of those books and as advocates for their worth in the classroom.
Recommendations
NCTE recommends that teacher educators and teachers commit to the following four principles in the service of increasing their ability to teach and advocate for children's and young adult literature.
1. Know the literature.
Preservice teachers should cultivate book knowledge throughout various methods courses and across their entire teacher preparation program, regardless of state certification requirements. They should develop broad and sustained knowledge of quality books in the fields of children's and young adult literature, including fiction, nonfiction, and multimodal texts.

At the same time, they should build knowledge of resources-including review journals, websites and blogs, social media discussions, book awards, and author appearances at local libraries and bookstores-that can provide them with information about quality new books and their potential for classroom use and reading advisory.

They should also invest in relationships with librarians and organizations such as NCTE and ALAN (Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of NCTE) that can help them build capacity to discuss and recommend books, evaluate literature, remain current, and discover new ways to teach children's and young adult literature effectively.
2. Be readers.
Teachers who are engaged readers do a better job of engaging students as readers. According to Morrison, Jacobs, and Swinyard (1999), "perhaps the most influential teacher behavior to influence students' literacy development is personal reading, both in and out of school" (p. 81). Teachers should commit to leading literate lives and becoming connected to reading communities-whether in person or through social media-that support them as readers and literacy professionals. Teachers should understand the value of different modes and platforms for reading (Garcia & O'Donnell-Allen, 2015) and build their capacity to read with a critical, discerning eye (Newkirk, 2011).
3. Affirm diversity and exercise critical literacy.
In alignment with NCTE's Resolution on the Need for Diverse Children's and Young Adult Books (2015), NCTE challenges teachers and teacher educators to assume a transformative activist stance (Stetsenko, 2016) that supports a future of equality for all youth by engaging students with diverse books, which offer readers what scholar Rudine Sims Bishop (1990) calls windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors. It is essential that youth have access to books in which they can see themselves and engage with the lives of others (see, for example, platforms created by the current and former National Ambassadors for Young People's Literature, including Jacqueline Woodson, Gene Luen Yang, and Walter Dean Myers). NCTE believes that books help readers transform their lives and expand their visions of the world.

Nevertheless, there is a dearth of diverse books for youth in the United States as seen in yearly statistics about trends in multicultural children's book publishing prepared by the Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) of the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The #WeNeedDiverseBooks and #ReadInColor social media campaigns have illuminated the paucity of diverse books in the marketplace. Although the CCBC recently observed that children's picture books feature an increased number of characters with "brown skin . . . of unspecified race or ethnicity, with no visible culturally specific markers in either the story or the art," the CCBC questions whether books with racially ambiguous characters provide actual windows, mirrors, and sliding doors for today's readers (Horning, Lindgren, Schliesman, & Tyner, 2018, n.p.). NCTE joins the CCBC in urging educators to not only advocate for more authentically diverse children's and young adult books from US publishers, but also to support authors, illustrators, publishers, and booksellers whose work represents multiple perspectives and cultural diversity in the lives of all children.

In addition to being advocates and supporters of diverse literature for youth, educators who assume a transformative activist stance must build their capacities for discernment and critical evaluation so they are prepared to choose children's and YA books wisely and strategically from the books available to them. Simply because a book features diverse characters does not mean that the book endorses equality and/or cultural understanding (Apol, Sakuma, Reynolds, & Rop, 2003; Dávila, 2012). For example, some popular works of contemporary, "multicultural" realistic fiction privilege the assumption that all residents of the United States should embrace dominant mainstream culture [e.g., My Name is Yoon (Recorvitis, 2003); One Green Apple (Bunting, 2006)]. Some of these books reinforce assimilation social narratives (Yoon, Simpson, & Haag, 2010) and/or endorse monocultural language and identity (Ghiso & Campano, 2013). Educators and students should collectively cultivate critical literacy practices to critique the social narratives that are endorsed by the books they select (Leland, Lewison, & Harste, 2012; Morrell, 2007) and talk back to the literature (Enciso, 1997).

Educators who affirm diversity and exercise critical literacy as part of a transformative activist stance recognize that they are always learning and expanding their capacities for transformation. They are open to guiding difficult discussions about inequality with students and are willing to tolerate the possibilities of "wobbling" while they explore uncharted territories with students (e.g., Fecho, 2005; Garcia & O'Donnell-Allen, 2015). They recognize that children's books are political (Nodelman, 2008; Stephens, 1992) and are the artifacts of the authors', illustrators', and/or publishers' views of the world (Willis & Harris, 2003) and/or US history (Thomas, Reese, & Horning, 2016). Moreover, these educators follow national conversations via media and blogs about diverse books, especially related to issues of power and representation (e.g., Reading While White; American Indians in Children's Books).
4. Use appropriate pedagogy.
Teaching children's and young adult literature is about more than getting students to fall in love with reading. Preservice teachers also need to learn appropriate and effective strategies for helping students find books that will engage them as readers and as participants in critical, significant conversations about their lives (NCTE, 2006; Tschida, Ryan, & Ticknor, 2014). This requires a deep knowledge of excellent books and the willingness to carefully curate a classroom library that provides appropriate choices for all students (Crisp, Knezek, Quinn, Bingham, Girardeau, & Starks, 2016; NCTE, 2017). Preservice teachers also need to know evidence-based strategies for supporting student knowledge of literary crafting-that is, how authors develop characters, construct plots, and employ other literary elements to create an exemplary work. Examining literary craft does not mean that the focus is on dissecting a book's structure or meaning. Rather, teachers should be skilled at helping students develop a common language for determining what makes a book excellent literature. Finally, teachers need to know how to advocate for the freedom and autonomy to create classrooms that support research-based pedagogical strategies for teaching children's and young adult literature (Mathis et al., 2014; NCTE Children's Literature Assembly, 2004).
WORKS CITED
Apol, L., Sakuma, A., Reynolds, T. M., & Rop, S. K. (2003). "When can we make paper cranes?" Examining pre-service teachers' resistance to critical readings of historical fiction. Journal of Literacy Research, 34, 429-464.

Buehler, J. (2016). Teaching reading with YA literature: Complex texts, complex lives. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Bunting, E. (2006). One green apple. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin.

Crisp, T., Knezek, S. M., Quinn, M., Bingham, G., Girardeau, K., and Starks, F. (2016). "What's on our bookshelves? The diversity of children's literature in early childhood classroom libraries." Journal of Children's Literature 42(2), 29-42.

Dávila, D. (2012). In search of the ideal reader for children's non-fiction books about el Día de Los Muertos. Journal of Children's Literature, 38(1), 16-26.

Enciso, P. (1997). Negotiating the meaning of difference: Talking back to multicultural literature. In T. Rogers & A. Soter (Eds.), Reading across cultures (pp. 13-41). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Fecho, B. (2001). "Why are you doing this?" Acknowledging and transcending threat in a critical inquiry classroom. Research in the Teaching of English, 36(1), 9-37.

Garcia, A., & O'Donnell-Allen, C. (2015). Pose, wobble, flow: A culturally proactive approach to literacy instruction. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Ghiso, M., & Campano, G. (2013). Ideologies of language and identity in U.S. children's literature. Bookbird, 51(3), 47-55.

Horning, K., Lindgren, M., Schliesman, M. & Tyner, M. (2018). A few observations: Literature in 2017. CCBC Choices 2018. Madison, WI: Cooperative Children's Book Center. Retrieved from: http://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/books/choiceintro18.asp

Leland, C., Lewison, M., & Harste, J. (2012). Teaching children's literature: It's critical. New York, NY: Routledge.

Mathis, J. B., Aziz, S., Crisp, T., Graff, J. M., Kesler, T., Liang, L. A., Sekeres, D. C., & Wilfong, L. (2014). Teaching children's literature in the 21st century. Journal of Children's Literature, 39(1), 56-61.

McKool, S. S., & Gespass, S. (2009). Does Johnny's reading teacher love to read? How teachers' personal reading habits affect instructional practices. Literacy Research and Instruction,48(3), 264-276.

Morrell, E. (2007). Critical literacy and urban youth: Pedagogies of access, dissent, and liberation. New York, NY: Routledge.

Morrison, T. G., Jacobs, J. S., & Swinyard, W. R. (1999). Do teachers who read personally use recommended literacy practices in their classrooms? Literacy Research and Instruction, 38(2), 81-100.

Moss, B., & Young, T. A. (2010). Creating lifelong readers through independent reading. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Mueller, P. N. (2001). Lifers: Learning from at-risk adolescents. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

National Council of Teachers of English. (2006). Resolution on preparing and certifying teachers w ith knowledge of children's and adolescent literature. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

National Council of Teachers of English. (2015). Resolution on the need for diverse books. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

National Council of Teachers of English. (2017). Statement on classroom libraries. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

NCTE Children's Literature Assembly. (2004). Preparing teachers with knowledge of children's and adolescent literature. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

Newkirk, T. (2011). The art of slow reading: Six time-honored practices for engagement. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Nodelman, P. (2008). The hidden adult. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Recorvitis, H. (2003). My name is Yoon. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Sims Bishop, R. (1990). Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives, 1(3), ix-xi.

Stephens, J. (1992). Language and ideology in children's fiction. New York, NY: Longman.

Stetsenko, A. (2016). The transformative mind: Expanding Vygotsky's approach to development and education. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Thomas, E., Reese, D., & Horning, K. (2016). Much ado about A fine dessert: The cultural politics of representing slavery in children's literature. Journal of Children's Literature, 42(2), 6-17.

Tschida, C., Ryan, C., & Ticknor, R. (2014). Building on windows and mirrors: Encouraging the disruption of "single stories" through children's literature. Journal of Children's Literature, 40(1), 28-39.

Willis, A., & Harris, V. (1997). Preparing preservice teachers to teach multicultural literature. In J. Flood, S. Brice Heath, & D. Lapp (Eds.), Handbook of research on teaching literacy through the communicative and visual arts (pp. 460-469). New York, NY: Macmillan Library Reference USA.

Yoon, B., Simpson, A., & Haag, C. (2010). Assimilation ideology: Critically examining underlying messages in multicultural literature. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 54(2), 109-118.
STATEMENT AUTHORS
This document was revised by an NCTE working committee comprising the following:

Jennifer Buehler, Chair - Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO

Denise Dávila - The University of Texas at Austin

Amy McClure - Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, OH

Donalyn Miller - Author and Consultant, Colleyville, TX
This position statement may be printed, copied, and disseminated without permission from NCTE.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children's and Young Adult Literature - NCTE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This statement, formerly known as Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children's and Adolescent Literature, was updated in July 2018 with the new title, Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children's and Young Adult Literature.

# data[].attributes.headline
NCTE Position Statement on Adolescent Literacy

# data[].attributes.subject
NCTE Position Statement on Adolescent Literacy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This statement, formerly known as A Call to Action: What We Know About Adolescent Literacy Instruction and Ways to Support Teachers in Meeting Students' Needs, was updated in July 2018 with the new title, A Call to Action: What We Know about Adolescent Literacy Instruction. Originally developed by NCTE's Commission on Reading, May 2004, revised July 2018
The purpose of this document is to provide a research-based resource for media, policymakers, and teachers that acknowledges the complexities of reading as an ongoing, developmental process and addresses the needs of secondary readers and their teachers. In 2004, NCTE's Commission on Reading wrote A Call to Action: What We Know about Adolescent Literacy and Ways to Support Teachers in Meeting Students' Needs. In over a decade since, the everyday experience of reading in adolescents' lives has expanded dramatically. Literacy encompasses much more than reading and includes writing, and a variety of social and intellectual practices, including digital and interdisciplinary literacies. Literacy learning is an ongoing and non-hierarchical process in which each academic content area poses its own literacy approaches and challenges. In addition to content-area literacies, adolescents rely on out-of-school literacies in their identity development. Part of the belief system underlying this statement is that students often have literacy skills that are not made evident in the classroom and teachers must make special efforts to include them (Morgan, 1997).

Related:

Adolescent Literacy: A Policy Research Brief produced by the National Council of Teachers of English (2007)
Dimensions of Adolescent Literacy
Reading is defined as a complex, purposeful, social, and cognitive process in which readers simultaneously use their knowledge of spoken and written language, their knowledge of the topic of the text, and their knowledge of their culture to construct meaning (Moore, Bean, Birdyshaw, & Rycik, 1999). Reading is not a technical skill acquired once and for all in the primary grades, but rather a developmental process throughout the reader's life. A reader's competence continues to grow through engagement with various types of texts and wide reading for various purposes over a lifetime.

Just as teachers must consider their own philosophical underpinnings of teaching, including their own values and beliefs that guide decisions, students, too, need to master literacy practices unique to each situation. As students grow, students must adapt new literacy resources in and out of school. There are key actions to consider in adolescent reading:
1. Incorporation of Disciplinary Literacy Instruction
In middle and high school, students encounter academic discourses and disciplinary concepts in literary, historical, informational, scientific, and technical texts that span such fields as science, mathematics, and the social sciences. This kind of academic reading requires specialized reading strategies to access complex texts (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). These new forms, purposes, and processing demands require that teachers show, demonstrate, and make visible to students how literacy operates within the academic disciplines (Keene & Zimmermann, 1997; Tovani, 2000; Duffy, 2009). Student conversations about reading that focus on metacognition and their language knowledge help adolescents build confidence in their reading and become better readers (Goodman & Marek, 1996).

2. Integration of Multiple and Social Literacies

Adolescents are bombarded by "multiple message streams" (Hicks & Steffel, 2012) and are required to use literacy as a social and political endeavor in which they engage to make meaning and act upon their worlds. Their texts range from digital texts to classic literature including gaming endeavors, interactions with popular music, and social media. In the classroom it is important for teachers to recognize and value the multiple literacy resources students bring to the acquisition of school literacy (Moje, Young, Readence, & Moore, 2000; Moje et al., 2004; Moje, 2007).

3. Orchestration of Engagement and Motivation

Engagement and motivation are tightly linked (Guthrie, 2008). Students needs to build confidence to meet new literacy challenges; confident readers are more likely to be engaged (Lent, 2009). Adolescent readers need sustained experiences with diverse texts in a variety of genres that includes digital texts and specialized nonfiction text structures. Students have opportunities to read multiple perspectives on real-life issues and experiences. Although many of these texts will be required by the curriculum, others should be self-selected and of high interest to the reader. Wide independent reading develops fluency, builds vocabulary and knowledge of text structures, and offers readers the experiences they need to read and construct meaning with more challenging texts. Texts should be broadly viewed to include print, digital, and visual media.

4. Appreciation of Multicultural Perspectives and Cultures

Multicultural literacy is seeing, thinking, reading, writing, listening, and discussing in ways that critically confront and bridge social, cultural, and personal differences. As educators we work to expose students to multiple perspectives as we avoid the "danger of a single story" (Adichie, 2009). The majority of inexperienced adolescent readers need opportunities and instructional support to read many and diverse types of texts in order to gain experience, build fluency, and develop a range as readers (Greenleaf, Schoenbach, Cziko, & Mueller, 2001; Kuhn & Stahl, 2000). Through extensive reading of a range of texts, supported by strategy lessons and discussions, readers become familiar with written language structures and text features, develop their vocabularies, and read for meaning more efficiently and effectively.

Related:

21st-Century Literacies: A Policy Research Brief produced by the National Council of Teachers of English (2007)

"Reading in the Digital Age" by Beth Shaum, May 12, 2015, Literacy & NCTE blog
Implications for the Teaching of Reading

Effective teachers model how students access specific content-area texts.

In effective schools, instructional conversations about how, why, and what we read are important parts of the literacy curriculum (Applebee, 1996: Schoenbach, Greenleaf, Cziko & Hurwitz, 1999). In fact, discussion-based approaches to academic literacy content are strongly linked to student achievement (Applebee, Langer, Nystrand, & Gamoran, 2003). However, high-stakes testing, such as high school exit exams, is not only narrowing the content of the literacy curriculum but also constraining instructional approaches to reading (Amrein & Berliner, 2002; Madaus, 1998) Limited, "one right answer" or "main idea" models of reading run counter to recent research findings, which call for a richer, more engaged approach to literacy instruction (Campbell, Donahue, Reese, & Phillips, 1996; Taylor, Anderson, Au, & Raphael, 1999; Guthrie, 2002).

Conversations and discussions regarding texts must be authentic, student initiated, and teacher facilitated. Such discussion should lead to diverse interpretations supported by evidence of a text that deepen the conversation.

Literacy is a dynamic interaction of the social and cognitive realms, with textual understandings growing from students' knowledge of their worlds to knowledge of the external world (Langer, 2002). All students need to go beyond the study of discrete skills and strategies to understand how those skills and strategies are integrated with life experiences. Langer et al. found that literacy programs that successfully teach at-risk students emphasize connections between students' lives, prior knowledge, and texts, and emphasize student conversations to make those connections.

Teachers need to acknowledge that we all have cultural frameworks within which we operate, and everyone-teachers and students alike-needs to consider how these frameworks can be challenged or changed to benefit all peoples.

Effective literacy programs move students to deeper understandings and greater independence of reading texts while increasing their ability to generate ideas and knowledge (Newmann, King, & Rigdon, 1997). Utilizing a model of reading instruction focused on basic skills devoid of meaning can lead to the mislabeling of some secondary readers as "struggling readers" and "non-readers" because they lack extensive reading experience, depend on different prior knowledge, and/or comprehend differently or in more complex ways. A large percentage of secondary readers who are so mislabeled are students of color, newly arrived students, and/or students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Abundant research suggests that the isolated skill instruction they receive may perpetuate low literacy achievement rather than improve their competence and engagement in complex reading tasks (Allington, 2000; Alvermann & Moore, 1991; Brown, 1991; Hiebert, 1991; Hull & Rose, 1989; Knapp & Turnbull, 1991; Sizer, 1992). In addition, prescriptive, skills-based reading instruction misidentifies the problem as the students' failure to learn, rather than the institution's failure to teach reading as the complex mental and social activity it is (Greenleaf, Schoenbach, Cziko, & Mueller, 2001). Wilhelm (2004) argues for the learner-centered approach to reading instruction because it encompasses the following features:

Learning is social and transactional.

Learning is an apprenticeship to a community of practice.

Learners move on a continuum from novice to expert.

Teachers provide assistance to the adolescent.

Good teaching is always in the learner's zone of proximal development.

Different students have a variety of needs, so instruction must be flexible.

Related:

Reading Instruction for All Students: A Policy Research Brief produced by the National Council of Teachers of English (2012)
What Adolescent Readers Need
Practice thinking critically about how they engage with texts to include

application of metacognitive strategies.

recognition of bias and high-quality sources.

argumentation with evidence.

Critical examination of texts that helps them to

recognize the purpose of text structure and how the writer uses it to create effect.

infer beyond literal interpretations.

question and investigate various social, political, and historical context.

understand multiple meanings and richness of texts and layers of complexity.

Assessment that helps them to focus on

the larger purpose and big ideas of the curriculum, and on metacognitive strategies for thinking during literacy acts (Smith, 1991; Darling-Hammond & Falk, 1997; Langer, 2000).

preparation for assessment (from ongoing classroom measures to high-stakes tests) that should focus on the critical components of multicultural perspectives, motivation, multiple and social literacies, and shifting literacy demands.

Choice and volume of reading

Opportunities to read often from books of their own choosing

Access to a vast library of books and texts that vary in levels and text structures (Miller, 2009)

Dedicated time to read every day (Allington, 2009)

What Teachers of Adolescent Readers Need

Adequate and appropriate reading materials that tap students' diverse interests and represent a range of interest and complexity

Continued support and professional development that assist them to

honor adolescents' rich literate and cultural backgrounds to increase subject area engagement

teach literacy in their discipline so students can access more specialized texts

recognize when students are not making meaning with text and provide appropriate, strategic assistance to greater success

facilitate student-initiated conversations regarding texts that are authentic, applicable, and relevant to real-life experiences

create environments and provide time to allow students to engage in critical examinations of texts as they dissect, deconstruct, and reconstruct in an effort to engage in meaning making and comprehension processes

References
Adichie, C. N. (Presenter). (2009). The danger of a single story. TED.com. [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story

Allington, R. L. (2000). What really matters for struggling readers: Designing research-based programs. New York, NY: Allyn & Bacon.

Allington, R. L. (2009). If they don't read much . . . 30 years later. In E. H. Hiebert (Ed.), Reading more, reading better (pp. 30-54). New York, NY: Guilford.

Alvermann, D., & Moore, D. (1991). Secondary school reading. In R. Barr, M. L. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, & P. D. Person (Eds.), Handbook of reading research (vol. 2, pp. 951-983). New York, NY: Longman.

Amrein, A. L. & Berliner, D. C. (2002, March 28). High-stakes testing, uncertainty, and student learning. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 10(18). Retrieved from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v10n18/.

Applebee, A. (1996). Curriculum as conversation: Transforming traditions of teaching and learning. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Applebee, A., Langer, J., Nystrand, M., & Gamoran, A. (2003). Discussion-based approaches to developing understanding: Classroom instruction and student performance in middle and high school English. American Educational Research Journal, 40(3), 685-730.

Brown, R. G. (1991). Schools of thought: How the politics of literacy shape thinking in the classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Campbell, J., Donahue, P., Reese, C., & Phillips, G. (1996). National Assessment of Educational Progress 1994 reading report card for the nation and the states. Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education.

Darling-Hammond, L., & Falk, B. (1997). Using standards and assessments to support student learning. Phi Delta Kappan, 79, 190-99.

Duffy, G.G. (2009). Explaining reading: A resource for teaching concepts, skills, and strategies (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Guilford.

Goodman, Y., & Marek, A. (1996). Retrospective miscue analysis: Revaluing readers and reading. Katonah, NY: R. C. Owens Publishers.

Greenleaf, C., Schoenbach, R., Cziko, C., & Mueller, F. (2001). Apprenticing adolescent readers to academic literacy. Harvard Educational Review 71(1), 79-129.

Guthrie, J. T. (2002). Preparing students for high-stakes test taking in reading. In A. Farstrup & S. J. Samuels (Eds.), What research has to say about reading instruction (pp. 370-391). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Guthrie, J. T. (2008). Engaging adolescents in reading. In J. T. Guthrie (Ed.), Reading motivation and engagement in middle and high school (pp. 1-16). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Hicks, T., & Steffel, S. (2012). Learning with text in English language arts. In T. J. Jetton & C. Shanahan (Eds.), Adolescent literacy in the academic disciplines: General principles and practical strategies (pp. 120-153). New York, NY: Guilford Press.

Hiebert, E. (1991). Literacy for a diverse society: Perspectives, policies, and practices. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Hull, G. A., & Rose, M. (1989). Rethinking remediation: Toward a social-cognitive understanding of problematic reading and writing. Written Communication, 8, 139-154.

Keene, E. O., & Zimmermann, S. (1997). Mosaic of thought: Teaching comprehension in a reader's workshop. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Knapp, M. S., & Turnbull, B. (1991). Better schools for the children in poverty: Alternatives to conventional wisdom. Berkeley, CA: McCutchan.

Kuhn, M. R., & Stahl, S. A. (2000). Fluency: A review of developmental and remedial practices (Report No. 2-008). Ann Arbor, MI: Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement.

Langer, J. (2000). Teaching middle and high school students to read and write well: Six features of effective instruction. Albany, NY: National Research Center on English Learning and Achievement.

Langer, J. (2002). Effective literacy instruction: Building successful reading and writing programs. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Lent, R. C. (2009). Literacy for real: Reading, thinking, and learning in the content areas. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Madaus, G. (1998). The distortion of teaching and testing: High-stakes testing and instruction. Peabody Journal of Education, 65, 29-46.

Miller, D. (2009). The book whisperer. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Moje, E., Young, J., Readence, J., & Moore, D. (2000). Reinventing adolescent literacy for new times: Perennial and millennial issues. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 43(5), 400-410.

Moje, E., Ciechanowski, K., Kramer, K., Ellis, L., Carrillo, R., & Callazo, T. (2004). Working toward third space in content area literacy: An examination of everyday funds of knowledge and discourse. Reading Research Quarterly, 39(1), 38-70.

Moje, E. (2007). Developing socially just subject-matter instruction: A review of the literature on disciplinary literacy. In N. L. Parker (Ed.), Review of research in education (pp.1-44). Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.

Moore, D., Bean, T., Birdyshaw, D., & Rycik, J. (1999). Adolescent literacy: A position statement. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Morgan, W. (1997). Critical literacy in the classroom: The art of the possible. New York, NY: Routledge.

Newmann, F., King, B., & Rigdon, M. (1997). Accountability and school performance: Implications from restructuring schools. Harvard Educational Review, 67, 41-74.

Schoenbach, R., Greenleaf, C., Cziko, C., & Hurwitz, L. (1999). Reading for understanding: A guide to improving reading in middle and high school classrooms. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Shanahan, T., & Shanahan, C. (2008). Teaching disciplinary literacy to adolescents: Rethinking content-area literacy. Harvard Educational Review, 78(1), 40-59.

Sizer, T. (1992). Horace's compromise: The dilemma of the American high school. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Smith, M. I. (1991). Put to the test: The effects of external testing on teachers. Educational Researcher, 20(5), 8-11.

Taylor, B. M., Anderson, R. C., Au, K. H., & Raphael, T. E. (1999). Discretion in the translation of reading research to policy (Report No. 3-006). Ann Arbor, MI: Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement.

Tovani, C. (2000). I read it but I don't get it. York, ME: Stenhouse.

Wilhelm, J. (2004). Reading is seeing: Learning to visualize scenes, characters, ideas, and text worlds to improve comprehension and reflective reading. New York, NY: Scholastic.
Selected Resources for Teachers
Allen, J. (2000). Yellow brick roads: Shared and guided paths to independent reading. York, ME: Stenhouse.

Atwell, N. (1998). In the middle (2nd ed.). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Beers, K. (2003). When kids can't read: What teachers can do. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Beers, K., & Probst, B. (2013). Notice & note: Strategies for close reading. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Gallagher, K., & Kittle, P. (2018). 180 days: Two teachers and the quest to engage and empower adolescents. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Ivey, G., & Baker, M. (2004). Phonics instruction for older students? Just say no. Educational Leadership, 61(6), 35-39.

Lenski, S., Wham, M. A., & Johns, J. (2003). Reading and learning strategies: Middle grades through high school. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt.

National Reading Panel (2000). Teaching children to read. Washington, DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Robb., L. (2000). Teaching reading in middle school. New York, NY: Scholastic.

Smith, M., & Wilhelm, J. (2002). "Reading don't fix no chevy's": Literacy in the lives of young men. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Tovani, C. (2000). I read it but I don't get it. York, ME: Stenhouse.

Tovani, C. (2004). Do I really have to teach reading? Content comprehension, grades 6-12. York, ME: Stenhouse.

Wilhelm, J., Baker, T., & Dube, J. (2001). Strategic reading: Guiding students to lifelong literacy. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
Statement Authors
This document was revised by an NCTE working committee comprising the following:

Tiffany Rehbein, Chair, East High School, Laramie County School District #1, Cheyenne, Wyoming

Cris Tovani, teacher, instructional coach, and author, Centennial, Colorado

Matthew Skillen, Elizabethtown College, Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania

Cornelius Minor, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, New York
This position statement may be printed, copied, and disseminated without permission from NCTE.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Call to Action: What We Know About Adolescent Literacy Instruction - NCTE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This statement, formerly known as A Call to Action: What We Know About Adolescent Literacy Instruction and Ways to Support Teachers in Meeting Students' Needs, was updated in July 2018 with the new title, A Call to Action: What We Know about Adolescent Literacy Instruction.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
12 Inspiring Memoirs and Biographies for Teens

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We love handing over an excellent biography or memoir to the young adult readers we know. There's no better way to help them connect with history and take a walk in someone else's shoes. Here are some of our favorite recent memoirs and biographies for teens.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Books helped me gain independence. So it saddens me just a bit to see my son reading on his own.

By Viet Thanh Nguyen

Mr. Nguyen is a contributing opinion writer.

Image

Credit Credit Josh Cochran

Do you remember when you learned to read? Like most of us, I don't. Still, many people can take comfort in knowing that this event, beyond memory, involved our parents. The parents who took us to school, who read books to us at home, who could speak to us in a shared language. But in my case, one of the things I lost as a refugee, without even knowing it at the time, was a childhood where my parents would have read to me.

I came to the United States when I was 4, with my parents and older brother. Our language at home was Vietnamese, but somehow, by 6 or 7, I had learned how to read in English. My parents could speak English, but I have no memory of them reading to me, and if they did, they would not have been reading to me in English. It must have been my teachers who taught me, just as my 5-year old son's teachers taught him. Earlier this year I went away for a week and when I came back, the little boy who I had been reading to for years was suddenly reading by himself.

Being a father makes me reflective, especially as I look at my son and remember myself at his age. Early in our American years, my father chuckled when I called the kitchen a "chicken" in English. He affectionately recalled for me how, when I was a baby in Vietnam, I saw the cows eating grass and called it "salad." Like my father, I take pleasure in seeing my son learning a language, and through it, stories. I love the way he loves stories, the raw emotions he brings to them, the way he thrills to, or is terrified by, a powerful narrative. I know when a book is great because he cuddles up to me and asks to have it read to him again and again. The closeness a parent feels with a child, where boundaries are permeable, is mirrored in how a powerful story pulls a reader through a page and through the words and into the story itself.

The story of my parents involved crossing a different boundary, the border of this country. We lost many things at the border, beginning with our shared language. Growing up and seeing my parents struggle with building a life for themselves and my brother and me, I could feel our closeness dissipating along with my Vietnamese. The better my parents were at taking care of their children by working endless hours, the less time they had to spend with us. It was the classic immigrant and refugee dilemma - sacrifice yourself for your children and in the process sacrifice your intimacy with them.

Read More from THIS WRITER

Books saved me from feeling alone. I love books so much that I gave my son, for a first name, a writer's surname - Ellison. Ralph Ellison was not a writer of children's books, but a writer of the big truths, of the frightening world, of the unknown interiors of ourselves. Children's books, of course, deal with those things, too. Perhaps that's why I didn't like Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are"when I was 6 or 7. The story of a little boy lost in the wild, having journeyed there by boat and separated from his parents, seemed too much, in retrospect, like my life as a refugee. But my son loves Sendak's book, and I love that book now, too. It was only as an adult that I could confront the childhood fears in it.

I first found the book in a public library. Books were not a priority for my parents, so we never had them in the house. I would go to the public library every week and stuff my backpack full of books, which were barely enough for a week. I never owned my own until high school. My son has a bigger library than I ever had. While my parents showed me they loved me by making sure that I always had enough to eat, I show my love for my son by making sure that he always has enough to read (as well as to eat). For me, the library was a second home, and I want my son to have his own home in my home.

By 11 or 12, I knew how to get to my second home by myself, on foot or on the bus. But in remembering that childhood library, what I also know is that libraries are potentially dangerous places because there are no borders. There are countries called children's literature and young adult literature and adult fiction, but no border guards, or in my case, parents to police the borders and protect me. A reader could go wherever he or she wanted. So, at 12 or 13, I read Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" and Larry Heinemann's "Close Quarters."

All that stayed with me for decades from Roth's novel was the infamous scene where a young Alex Portnoy masturbates with a slab of liver that will be his family's dinner. As for Heinemann's Vietnam War novel, the graphic depiction of how American soldiers brutalized Vietnamese people, including raping them, enraged me. I wanted revenge on Heinemann's novel, until I reread it as an adult in preparing for my own novel, and realized he was right. Like Sendak, he wanted to show where the wild things are - inside of us. As did Roth. When I became a writer, I paid homage to both of them in my novel "The Sympathizer," where the shocked child has finally become the writer willing to shock.

Crossing the border into confronting those wild things that I did not understand and that my parents could not protect me from was part of how I began the journey to adulthood and writing. Seeing my son reading, I realize he is taking one step further on his own road to independence, to being a border-crosser, someone who makes his own decisions, including what he reads and what he believes. Perhaps that's why seeing him read on his own is tinged with melancholy. I remember my own loss and I sense the loss that is yet to come, when he is no longer all mine, as he is when he wakes in the morning and says some of the sweetest words I will ever hear: "Daddy, read me a book."

Viet Thanh Nguyen, a contributing opinion writer, is the author, most recently, of "The Refugees," and the editor of "The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives."
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR4 of the New York edition with the headline: Seeing My Son Read Is a Bittersweet Joy. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Books helped me gain independence. So it saddens me just a bit to see my son reading on his own. By Viet Thanh Nguyen Mr. Nguyen is a contributing opinion writer. Do you remember when you learned to read? Like most of us, I don't.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos started innovating his way to the top when he was just a baby. This is the true story of how one man built an empire no one believed in.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
1. Reading increases your vocabulary.

A University of London longitudinal study tested vocabulary skills of the same people at ages 16 and 42 and found at the younger age the average test score was 55 percent. Later in life scores averaged 63 percent on the same test, indicating that humans continue to learn language skills even as adults. And the study participants who frequently read for pleasure made the highest gains on the test.

2. Reading literary fiction improves your ability to understand the mental states of others.

Researchers at the New School for Social Research in New York have determined that reading literary fiction--books that have literary merit and don't fit into a genre--enhances what scientists call "Theory of Mind (ToM), or an ability to understand the mental states of others. This skill "enables the complex social relationships that characterize human societies," the authors write.

3. Reading can lower your stress level.

A study conducted at the University of Sussex in England found that only six minutes of reading was enough of a distraction to reduce participants' stress levels by 68 percent. The relaxation effect achieved by reading was stronger than listening to music, drinking a cup of tea or coffee or taking a walk.

4. Reading can make you self-confident.

That's according to Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts, who said identifying with introverted yet admirable central characters made her feel as if she was in the mainstream as a child. "Books, especially children's books, are one of the few media to portray introverts as intellectually and emotionally aflame, as opposed to aloof, flawed, or dull," she writes. "This is especially important for children, who seem to read only for plot but are actually forming their view of the world -- and of their places in it."

5. Reading changes the circuitry of the brain.

Researchers at Emory University in Atlanta conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of 21 undergraduate students all tasked with reading the novel Pompeii by Robert Harris. Days after reading sections of the book, results showed heightened connectivity in the areas of the brain involved in receptivity for language as well as physical sensation and movement.

6. Reading is a habit practiced by successful people.

It's because high achievers believe in self-improvement. In fact, countless successful executives have shared with me the books they say have helped them get ahead in business and life. Perennial favorites include: Shoe Dog by Phil Knight; Finding my Virginity by Richard Branson; and The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why You Should be Reading Books Every Day, According to Science

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
1. Reading increases your vocabulary. A University of London longitudinal study tested vocabulary skills of the same people at ages 16 and 42 and found at the younger age the average test score was 55 percent. Later in life scores averaged 63 percent on the same test, indicating that humans continue to learn language skills even as adults.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
1. "We be of one blood, ye and I." [The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling]

Aaaah. This one short sentence speaks of so much, all at once - love, family, friendship, soul mates, devotion. Big ideas for a children's story (and quite rightly so...). I often say this sentence to my husband and now our son is here too, it has become something of a family motto. This sentence is succinct, non-gushy and beautiful - my favourite of the whole list.

2. "If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it. A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely." [The Twits by Roald Dahl]

I simply cannot imagine a Top 10 of children's literature without Roald Dahl. Dahl is still an absolute legend to a certain generation and this is perhaps my favourite extract of all his writing. What a gorgeous way to think about beauty, both inside and out. And what a positive message to pass on to our little ones in an age obsessed with Photoshop and airbrushing, superficiality and surface.

3. "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not." [The Lorax by Dr Seuss]

OK, confession time. Dr Seuss completely and utterly passed me by as a child. I didn't know any of his books and my parents didn't read them to me - he just wasn't on my radar. However, now that I'm a Mummy, I cannot get enough of him. I love his vivid rhyming, crazy imagery and the non-preachy moral that underlies much of his work. This quote is from 'The Lorax', a children's book about environmentalism, capitalism, deforestation and globalisation (not a synopsis you often type!). All in rhyme. With a positive message about making a difference in the future. What's not to love?!

4. "I think I can. I think I can. I think I can. I know I can." [The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper]

Simple, rhythmic, encouraging, soothing. This engine-like rhythm sounds wonderful read aloud and it's exactly the kind of phrase that lodges itself in a child's mind to be recalled at those times when self-doubt creeps in.

5. "If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together... there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we're apart... I'll always be with you." [Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne]

This is technically from a film rather than the original book but as it's so lovely, I'm sneaking it in. I can make the rules for my own Top 10, right?! However, there is a danger that this extract has become a little too familiar now. I've seen it plastered over countless Facebook walls designed to inspire and motivate. However, if we ignore all that baggage that comes with its familiarity and look at those words afresh, I think it's impossible not to be moved. As a child, isn't this all we wanted to hear from our loved ones? Heck, even as an adult, it's still pretty nice!

6. "The most wonderful and the strongest things in the world, you know, are just the things which no one can see." [The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley]

As children, my sister and I shared a beautifully illustrated copy of this book. The pictures of the children escaping the cruelty of poverty and chimney sweeping to instead swim underwater and encounter the world beneath the sea are still imprinted on my adult mind. I chose this quotation as it talks a little of the magic of the unseen - something that it never hurts to remember, even as adults.

7. "And Max, the king of all wild things, was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all." [Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak]

At the very end of this magical story, little Max just wants to go home - 'to be where someone loved him best of all'. As a child, I think this feeling of being both brave and yet wanting to be wrapped up safely at home is a familiar one. Sendak captures this so perfectly, I think - Max is still the king, after all, but king or not, he needs his dinner and his bed.

8. "Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand." [The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams]

This is such a gorgeous story about toys, and about the power of love. It gets me every time...

9. "Those who don't believe in magic will never find it." [The Minpins by Roald Dahl]

Another entry from Roald Dahl. A simple and short sentence, but one which invites us to suspend our disbelief and look for magic everywhere. As with some of these other quotations, they manage to be exciting for their child readers and yet simultaneously heartbreaking for their adult readers as we remember our unbridled curiosity and inquisitiveness at that age. This makes me feel both childlike and jaded, all at the same time.

10. "A person's a person no matter how small." [Horton Hears a Who by Dr Seuss]

Another sneaky entry from the good doctor. To be honest, I could have chosen any one of several dozen quotations from him but I love how this one seeks to give even the smallest child a voice and importance and empowerment. Isn't it wonderful how a single sentence can do all that?!

So, there we have it. My very own Top 10. Aren't our children lucky to be growing up with so many incredible stories to choose from? And aren't we lucky that we have the perfect excuse to read them all and live them all over again?!

If you're not just a fan of the classics and you're looking for some exceptionally personalised stories for kids, browse our range of personalised books great as a gift for any occasion.
Written by Katy Wright, new Mummy to her 11 month old son, living in Hertfordshire with yoghurt in her hair most of the time. Proud owner of a PhD in contemporary literature and with a background in university teaching. Generally obsessive about books, stories and education.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
10 Beautiful Sentences from Children's Literature | Wonderbly

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Aaaah. This one short sentence speaks of so much, all at once - love, family, friendship, soul mates, devotion. Big ideas for a children's story (and quite rightly so...). I often say this sentence to my husband and now our son is here too, it has become something of a family motto.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Get ready to be AMAZED and INSPIRED after watching this brilliant 4-year-old give a speech about the benefits of reading at a middle school teachers' back to school training. 

Video credit:...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A book in a child's hand is a gateway to learning, opening a door into other worlds. Teachers know this inherently, which is the reason many K-12 educators invest in classroom libraries, curating collections of books that students can access without ever leaving their room.

This year, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) is putting so much emphasis on building these classroom spaces that they're devoting 35 specific sessions - and a significant chunk of their entire annual convention in Houston, Texas, this year - to an effort dubbed " Build Your Stack ."

"We want our students to see themselves in books and to also understand others and the world more deeply through reading books," NCTE's president-elect Franki Sibberson told Education Dive by email. "The classroom library should invite readers to find books they may already love and it should also invite them to stretch and to grow as readers and as human beings."

Giving students a choice

That's the attitude of Steele Jackson, as well, a teacher so passionate about his classroom library he even about it before the start of the 2018-2019 school year at Sanford Middle School in Opelika, Ala. This is his first year teaching 5th grade, and his school does grant him some funds to purchase supplies - which can include books.

Jackson's classroom library is designed so children have multiple choices on what they want to read, as he believes having that autonomy to choose can help plant the seed to grow into a thriving student.

"If a book is too hard, my students know and understand that it's OK to grab another book that is easier," Jackson told Education Dive by email. "If they still want to read a book that is well over their ability level, I allow them to have a buddy read with them. Giving students choice on how and what they read can be the most powerful thing a teacher can do to foster a love of learning in their classroom."

Classroom libraries are never meant to replace school libraries, but as another avenue to enhance curriculum. In fact, NCTE sees them existing side-by-side with school libraries. The latter is "the hub of the school," said Sibberson, adding that a classroom library is then "the anchor for a community of readers."

Building a classroom library may seem daunting for some teachers and administrators who want to add these spaces to their school. Both may have questions on which books to buy, how to present them in a classroom, and, understandably, where to find the resources to allow teachers to purchase titles.

Many of these questions will be answered at this year's NCTE event, which will have sessions including "Immigrant Stories in Children's Literature," "New Latinx Fiction" and "New Nonfiction," to name just a few. But for those who can't take the time - or find the resources - to take off for a few days in October, there are other ways to get started.

For one, Sibberson believes that educators should make sure that their classroom libraries are never stagnant and focus on changing and rotating books during different times of year. New titles and topics can maintain excitement among students. Sibberson also suggests organizing books so students see the covers and not their spines, as well as keeping titles that represent multiple genres and subjects.

Jackson also makes sure his classroom library is comfortable and welcoming to students, putting rugs, pillows and even cushioned chairs around so they can relax and get lost in a great story.

Finally, Jackson notes that investing a lot of money isn't necessary, either. He recommends tapping friends, family, other teachers and even administrators to donate books to the classroom, while also mining local thrift stores where titles can be picked up for under a dollar.

"A few places have just given me books for free because I told them I was going to use the books in my classroom," he said. "Free books are out there, you just have to ask."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Classroom libraries can plant the seed for a lifelong love of learning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A book in a child's hand is a gateway to learning, opening a door into other worlds. Teachers know this inherently, which is the reason many K-12 educators invest in classroom libraries, curating collections of books that students can access without ever leaving their room.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In today's current political and cultural climate, it's crucial that everyday Americans engage in important conversations about race, bias, discrimination, and privilege. For people of color, these conversations are nothing new; they are a requirement in communities where experiences of racism, bias, and bigotry are a part of everyday life. But for many white people who have never been burdened by a system built specifically to keep us down, these conversations can seem confusing, uncomfortable, and awkward, which is what makes them even more necessary. If you're not sure how to talk about issues of race in America, try picking up one of the many incredible books about race instead of asking people of color to explain it to you.

If you really want to be a better ally, if you really want to be on the front lines in the war against racism and discrimination in the United States, you have to take the initiative to educate yourself. It isn't up to people of color to inform or reform white people, as " White people, stop asking us to education about racism," a collective piece from an African American voice on Medium, so clearly explains: "Don't ask us to provide the information for you. Instead, participate in your own education. We've already given you enough of our free labor. Don't ask us for anymore."

If you're trying to unlearn the American biases designed to keep people of color down, here are 10 books about race in America you can start with:

Get Even More From Bustle - Sign Up For The Newsletter

From hair trends to relationship advice, our daily newsletter has everything you need to sound like a person who's on TikTok, even if you aren't.

Subscribe to our newsletter >

This article was originally published on

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
10 Books About Race To Read Instead Of Asking A Person Of Color To Explain Things To You

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In today's current political and cultural climate, it's crucial that everyday Americans engage in important conversations about race, bias, discrimination, and privilege.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Future Of The Reading Brain In An Increasingly Digital World

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hours and hours of screen time. How much are digital distractions changing the way kids think, and even read?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There are some quotes from YA books we're all familiar with. There are the short YA book quotes which become iconic with specific books or cultural moments-think "Okay? Okay," from John Green's The Fault In Our Stars or "May the odds be ever in your favor" from Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games or even "Stay Gold, Ponyboy" from S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders. But there is a whole world of YA book quotes out there, and even for readers who aren't familiar with YA fiction, these YA book quotes will inspire, encourage, and motivate you to live your best life. All of these quotes are from YA books, rather than quotes from speeches, essays, or other non-book outlets by young adult authors.

Find below 51 YA book quotes in the categories of relationships, bravery, self-acceptance, and more. And, as always, feel free to add your own favorite YA book quotes in the comments. Let's make this a collection of great words from the world of young adult literature.

YA Book Quotes About Love, Relationships, and People

1. "If you have two friends in your lifetime, you're lucky. If you have one good friend, you're more than lucky." -from That Was Then, This Is Now by S.E. Hinton

2. "You may be born into a family, but you walk into friendships. Some you'll discover you should put behind you. Others are worth every risk." -from They Both Die At The End by Adam Silvera

3. "People really are like houses with vast rooms and tiny windows. And maybe it's a good thing, the way we never stop surprising each other." -from Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli

4. "I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa." -from Before I Fall by Lauren Oliver

5. "I think that maybe forgiveness is like change-it comes in small steps." -from The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E. Pearson

6. "Even in its first faint traces, love could alter a landscape. It wrote unimagined stories and made the most beautiful, forbidding places." -from Wild Beauty by Anna-Marie McLemore

7. "I am coming to terms with the fact that loving someone requires a leap of faith, and that a soft landing is never guaranteed." -from This Lullaby by Sarah Dessen

8. "Sometimes, when people get treated as less than human, the best way to help them feel better is to simply treat them as human. Not as victims. Just you as you." -from All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely

YA Book Quotes On Speaking Up and Using Your Voice

9. "When people don't express themselves, they die one piece at a time.You'd be shocked at how many adults are really dead inside-walking through their days with no idea who they are, just waiting for a heart attack or cancer or a Mack truck to come along and finish the job. It's the saddest thing I know." -from Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

10. "Books are easily destroyed. But words will live as long as people can remember them." -from Ignite Me by Tahereh Mafi

11. "It doesn't matter how big the body, it's what you do with it." -from The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier

12. "If you want to rebel, rebel from inside the system. That's much more powerful than rebelling outside the system." -from Legend by Marie Lu

13. "We who have means and a voice must use them to help those who have neither." -from These Shallow Graves by Jennifer Donnelly

14. "Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there's no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic." -from Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor

15. "The real courage is in living and suffering for what you believe." -from Eragon by Christopher Paolini

16. "I feel like I need to speak out, because if no one speaks out, if no one says, this is me, this is what I believe in, and this is why I'm different, and this is why that's okay, then what's the point? What's the point of living in this beautiful, great melting pot where everyone can dare be anything they want to be?" -from When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon

YA Book Quotes On Fear and Strength

17. "Brave doesn't mean you're not scared. It means you go on even though you're scared." -from The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

18. "Making a decision isn't about knowing every potential consequence. It's about knowing what you want and chasing a path that takes you in that direction" -from Huntress by Malinda Lo

19. "The funny thing about armor is that it doesn't just keep other people out. It keeps us in. We build it up around us, not realizing that we're trapping ourselves." -from The Unbound by Victoria Schwab

20. "Each of us must confront our own fears, must come face to face with them. How we handle our fears will determine where we go with the rest of our lives. To experience adventure or to be limited by the fear of it." -from Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume

21. "We can't know what's going to happen. We can just try to figure it out as we go along." -from Amy and Roger's Epic Detour by Morgan Matson

22. "Fear is only your enemy if you allow it to be." -from An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir

23. "Fear doesn't shut you down; it wakes you up" -from Divergent by Veronica Roth

24. "I've seen most of what there is to be afraid of in this world, and to tell you the truth, the worst of them are the ones that make you afraid in the
light. The things that your eyes see plainly and can't forget are worse than huddled black figures left to the imagination. Imagination has a poor memory; it slinks away and goes blurry. Eyes remember for much longer." -from Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake

YA Book Quotes On Being Yourself and Believing In Yourself

25. "We are, largely, who we remember ourselves to be. That's why habits are so hard to break. If we know ourselves to be liars, we expect not to tell the truth. If we think of ourselves as honest, we try harder." -from White Cat by Holly Black

26. "My life is not packaged,
Not tidy. There are leftover strands and jagged
Edges that cut even my friends." -from Street Love by Walter Dean Myers

27. "What is the point of being alive if you don't at least try to do something remarkable?" -from An Abundance of Katherines by John Green

28. "Just because you can't experience everything doesn't mean you shouldn't experience anything." -from Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon

29. "Time comes to us softly, slowly. It sits beside us for a while. Then, long before we are ready, it moves on." -from If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson

30. "The measure of a man is not how much he suffers in the test, but how he comes out at the end." -from UnWholly by Neal Schusterman

31. "I think you gotta be who you want to be until you feel like you are whoever it is you're trying to become. Sometimes half of doing something is pretending that you can." -from Dumplin ' by Julie Murphy

32. "Words are how others define us, but we can define ourselves any way we choose." -from We Are The Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson

33. "I believed, and still believe, that you can build your dreams brick by brick. That you can accomplish anything with persistence." -from I Believe In A Thing Called Love by Maurene Goo

34. "Sometimes the best way to find out what you're supposed to do is by doing the thing you're not supposed to do." -from Just One Day by Gayle Forman

35. "Take care not to listen to anyone who tells you what you can and can't be in life." -from The Girl Who Could Silence The Wind by Meg Medina

Funny Quotes From YA Books

36. "You should eat a waffle. You can't be sad if you eat a waffle" -from ttfn by Lauren Myracle

37. "Do you ever think if people heard our conversations they'd lock us up?" -from Jeremy Fink and The Meaning of Life by Wendy Mass

38. "What makes big boobs and perkiness so attractive to boys? I mean, really. Two round, mounds of fat and a fake smile. Yeah, winning attributes." -from Oh My Goth by Gena Showalter

39. "Ah coffee. The sweet balm by which we shall accomplish today's tasks." -from Ironside by Holly Black

40. "I mean, really. Who sends their kid to boarding school? It's so Hogwarts. Only mine doesn't have cute boy wizards or magic candy or flying lessons." -from Anna and The French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

41. ""A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."
I really hate this expression. I bet fish would totally want bicycles." -from Princess On The Brink by Meg Cabot

42. "Don't get stabbed. It makes everything awkward." -from The Madness Underneath by Maureen Johnson

YA Quotes About Reading

43. "She delighted in the smell of the ink, the rough feel of the paper between her fingers, the rustle of sweet pages, the shapes of letters before her eyes." -from My Lady Jane by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows

44. "It was impossible to feel alone in a room full of favorite books. I had the sense that they knew me personally, that they'd read me cover to cover as I'd read them." -from Noteworthy by Riley Redgate

45. "It's amazing how the more you read, the less you know." -from Scarlett Epstein Hates It Here by Anna Breslaw

46. "Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry." -from Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare

47. "When I read, I feel emotion all on my own. Emotion no living person is making me feel." -from Pivot Point by Kasie West

48. "[T]he books we love, they love us back. And just as we mark our places in the pages, those pages leave their marks on us." -from Nevernight by Jay Kristoff

49. "No one with a book is ever alone, even in the darkest moments." -from Ash and Quill by Rachel Caine

50. "Libraries were full of ideas-perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons." -from Throne of Glass by Sarah J Maas

51. "Our private tastes in books showed a hint of our secret selves." -from The Walls Around Us by Nova Ren Suma

If you'd like even more inspiring words beyond these YA book quotes, check out this round-up of book quotes for every month of the year, excellent lines from Anne of Green Gables, and wisdom from Judy Blume.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
YA Book Quotes For Every Mood, Situation, and Experience

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There are some quotes from YA books we're all familiar with. There are the short YA book quotes which become iconic with specific books or cultural moments-think "Okay? Okay," from John Green's The Fault In Our Stars or "May the odds be ever in your favor" from Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games or even "Stay Gold, Ponyboy" from S.E.

# data[].attributes.body
High interest books. Serve as good "gateway" books for students who do not like to read.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For English teachers, picking a favorite book is almost impossible! But we asked them to do exactly that during our January #NCTEchat, New Year/New Ideas. During the chat, we asked educators to share one text (poem, book, novel) that they would recommend every teacher (or student) read in 2018. As you might expect, we received HUNDREDS of wonderful recommendations!

Get ready to add to your To Be Read pile, because over the next few weeks we'll be sharing all of the recommendations we received. This week we're sharing recommended poetry and verse books, as well as poems, just in time for #NationalPoetryMonth.

Be sure to check out the other blog posts in this series so far, professional development, children's books, and YA and adult fiction recommendations.

If we missed one of your favorites, be sure to let us know on Twitter! All recommendations were pulled from January's #NCTEchat archive, which you can find here.
Book descriptions are taken from the Goodreads website.
Poetry Books

Electric Arches by Eve L. Ewing

Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Blending stark realism with the fantastical, Ewing takes us from the streets of Chicago to an alien arrival in an unspecified future, deftly navigating boundaries of space, time, and reality with delight and flexibility.

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities by Chen Chen

In this ferocious and tender debut, Chen Chen investigates inherited forms of love and family-the strained relationship between a mother and son, the cost of necessary goodbyes-all from Asian American, immigrant, and queer perspectives.

How to Prove a Theory by Nicole Tong

In this brave, elegiac debut, Nicole Tong relies on empirical evidence to construct meaning in the wake of a series of losses that include a childhood lost to trauma, a best friend lost following childbirth, a brother-in-law, a father, and a generation of children in the poet's hometown after a water contamination event.

Equilibrium by Tiana Clark

by Donika Kelly

Across this remarkable first book are encounters with animals, legendary beasts, and mythological monsters-half human and half something else.

Calling a Wolf a Wolf by Kaveh Akbar

Poems confront craving, control, the constant battle of alcoholism and sobriety, and the questioning of the self and its instincts within the context of this never-ending fight.

Reliquaria by R. A. Villanueva

In his prize-winning poetry collection Reliquaria, R. A. Villanueva embraces liminal spaces in considering an ever-evolving Filipino American identity. Languages and cultures collide; mythologies and faiths echo and resound.

Barbie Chang by Victoria Chang

Barbie's cultural artifice is unmasked by Victoria Chang's imagination, lifting the struggle of Asian American experience to mythic levels.

Rocket Fantastic: Poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Like nothing before it, Rocket Fantastic reinvents the landscape and language of the body in interconnected poems that entwine a fabular past with an iridescent future by blurring, with disarming vulnerability, the real and the imaginary.

Don't Call Us Dead: Poems by Danez Smith

Don't Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America-"Dear White America"-where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.

Citizen Illegal by José Olivarez [will be available September 4, 2018]

In this stunning debut, poet José Olivarez explores the stories, contradictions, joys, and sorrows that embody life in the spaces between Mexico and America. He paints vivid portraits of good kids, bad kids, families clinging to hope, life after the steel mills, gentrifying barrios, and everything in between.

by Nayyirah Waheed

salt. is a journey through warmth and sharpness. This collection of poetry explores the realities of multiple identities, language, diasporic life & pain, the self, community, healing, celebration, and love.

Counting Descent by Clint Smith

Smith explores the cognitive dissonance that results from belonging to a community that unapologetically celebrates Black humanity while living in a world that often renders Blackness a caricature of fear.

One Last Word: Wisdom from the Harlem Renaissance by Nikki Grimes

In this collection of poetry, Nikki Grimes looks afresh at the poets of the Harlem Renaissance-including voices like Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and many more writers of importance and resonance from this era-by combining their work with her own original poetry.

milk and honey by Rupi Kaur

milk and honey is a collection of poetry and prose about survival. It is about the experience of violence, abuse, love, loss, and femininity.

Verse Books

Enchanted Air: Two Culture, Two Wings: A Memoir by Margarita Engle, illustrated by Edel Rodriguez

Margarita is a girl from two worlds. Her heart lies in Cuba, her mother's tropical island country, a place so lush with vibrant life that it seems like a fairy tale kingdom. But most of the time she lives in Los Angeles, lonely in the noisy city and dreaming of the summers when she can take a plane through the enchanted air to her beloved island.

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights Movement.

by Kwame Alexander

Blade never asked for a life of the rich and famous. In fact, he'd give anything not to be the son of Rutherford Morrison, a washed-up rock star and drug addict with delusions of a comeback. Or to no longer be part of a family known most for lost potential, failure, and tragedy.

Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds

Revenge. That's where Will's now heading, with that gun shoved in the back waistband of his jeans, the gun that was his brother's gun. He gets on the elevator, seventh floor, stoked. He knows who he's after. Or does he?

by Elizabeth Acevedo

A young girl in Harlem discovers slam poetry as a way to understand her mother's religion and her own relationship to the world.

The Crossover by Kwame Alexander

Josh and Jordan must come to grips with growing up on and off the court to realize breaking the rules comes at a terrible price, as their story's heart-stopping climax proves a game changer for the entire family.

Locomotion by Jacqueline Woodson

When Lonnie Collins Motion "Locomotion" was seven years old, his life changed forever. Now he's eleven, and his life is about to change again. His teacher, Ms. Marcus, is showing him ways to put his jumbled feelings on paper.
Poems
"To be great, be whole;" by Fernando Pessoa

" Paper People " by Harry Baker

"Refugees" by Brian Bilston

"Spelling Father" by Marshall Davis-Jones

"Legal Alien" by Pat Mora

"The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus

"Good Bones" by Maggie Smith

"If-" by Rudyard Kipling

" There is a Lake Here " by Clint Smith

"Relax" by Ellen Bass

"I, Too" by Langston Hughes
Halsey's poem from the Women's March
"Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert

"Take a Knee" by Kwame Alexander

"Three Uses of Chopsticks" by Juliet S. Kono

"The Little Boy" by Helen Buckley

"Sometimes" by Mary Oliver

"Playground Elegy" by Clint Smith
Poets
Edgar Allan Poe

Naomi Shihab Nye

Looking for even more poetry books to add to your collection?

Be sure to check out NCTE's books about poetry and other resources that can help you teach poetry during April and throughout the year. Some recent poetry book favorites have included:

Living Voices: Multicultural Poetry in the Middle School Classroom by Jaime Wood

Jaime Wood offers middle school English language arts teachers material for teaching poetry by Nikki Giovanni, Li-Young Lee, and Pat Mora; the text includes graphic organizers and other resources.

tudying Poetry: Activities, Resources, and Texts by Brian Moon

Studying Poetry uses text-based activities to help students approach poetry-not in the conventional Romantic way as a mystical, heightened mode of expression, but as a form of "discourse" that can be vitally relevant to their daily lives.

You might also want to check out the 2018 Notable Poetry Books selected by the NCTE Award for Excellence in Children's Poetry Committee.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
2018 Book Recommendations: Poetry - NCTE

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For English teachers, picking a favorite book is almost impossible! But we asked them to do exactly that during our January #NCTEchat, New Year/New Ideas. During the chat, we asked educators to share one text (poem, book, novel) that they would recommend every teacher (or student) read in 2018.