Mr. Odle's Big Bad Book Blog

Donna Jo Napoli (author of Beast, The Magic Circle, and Stones in Water) was the featured speaker at this year’s Michigan Council of Teachers of English Bright Ideas Conference in Lansing, Michigan.

She began by reading from her book, Ugly, which is a retelling of the Ugly Duckling fairy tale (and which received a starred review in Kirkus), saying that she liked to read aloud, because it calmed her and it calmed her audience. However, there was a point behind her beginning with reading aloud.

Her point was to stress the importance of reading aloud to literacy development. Because we often speak in much simpler structures than we write in, reading aloud exposes children (and teenagers, and adults) to much more complex language structures, to more sophisticated syntactic structures.

Additionally, our reading vocabularies are much larger than our speaking vocabularies, but if kids don’t read, they aren’t exposed to that larger world of words. Our jobs, as parents and educators, is to read to our kids, and help them make those words theirs. If we hear a word, we are likely to use it in our own writing.

In short, literacy is enhanced by both oral and aural work. If we really want to enhance our kids’ literacy, we need to read to them. This doesn’t end when they become teenagers, either. It’s possible to share aloud what we are reading in newspapers and magazines around the breakfast table.You don’t need to be didactic about this, because most people like being read to.

To underline the point, Napoli related the story of a Michigan high school principal who found a new way to handle the issue of chronic tardiness. No matter what the faculty tried, it seems that kids were consistently five minutes late. Finally, the principal told the faculty to select their favorite book, and when the bell rang to begin reading aloud. They were to stop after five minutes. This was to be their procedure from now on. When the bell rang, the reading began.

You can imagine the result. These kids were now getting six different stories read to them every single day. If they were late, they missed out. Because the teachers were reading from books they themselves liked, they enjoyed reading them, and the students enjoyed being read to.

The end result? Tardies dropped to practically nil.

Now that’s the power of reading aloud, in action.

Respecting Their Humanity: Teaching Contemporary Literature from the Modern Middle East

(Led by Dr. Mustafa Mirzeler, Dr. Allen Webb, and Megan Emerson, all of Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan.)

This fascinating discussion of emphasize the need to both teach about the modern Middle East in our literature classes, and to contextualize Middle Eastern culture–to bring it into the classroom–as we teach.

Dr. Webb began with a clip from the movie Reel Bad Arabs from the Media Education Foundation , which shows how Middle Eastern peoples have been depicted in American popular culture during the last sixty to seventy years. This movie was an eye-opener for me. I make it a point to keep an open mind regarding people of different backgrounds, and generally consider myself to be fairly aware of how other cultures and societies are portrayed in the United States, but it was amazing to have all these little snippets gathered into one experience.

We teach too little multicultural literature in our classrooms. This is largely because, as teachers, we haven’t been taught how to approach multicultural literature. It’s not enough just to find a book which is about a particular culture. We need to know about that culture ourselves (yes, we need to do some research), and we also need tools for evaluating whether or not this is authentic depiction of that culture.

One suggestion that Dr. Mirzeler had was to bring images and music from the Middle East to our students, since literature and music are highly interrelated. As an example, he showed us a poem by the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet (1901-1963). We read the English translation, but he was able to read it to us in Turkish, as well as show us a video of it translated into music. He also had a slide show of photos he had taken during his travels in Turkey. Thanks to the internet, we can do these things in our classrooms, too.

The key to remember when teaching multicultural literature is two-fold. First, we need authentic literature, which means we need methods to determine the authenticity of a text. Secondly, we can’t just teach the text in isolation–we need to teach about the culture that it describes, which means we have as much–or more–learning to do as our students.

Perspectives on Grammar Instruction: Teaching Grammar ‘in context’ of Literature and Writing Study

(Led by Christine Dawson of Michigan State University and Kellie Roblin of Grand Rapids Community College.)

Literature Circle Extravaganza: Multiple Ways of Using Literature Circles in the Classroom

(Presented by Michelle Ormond of Springfield Middle School, Michigan.)

Donna Jo Napoli at the MCTE Conference

I wanted to take a better picture of her, but I didn’t want to distract others by using a flash, so they came out blurry. The last one isn’t too bad, but I still have a lot to learn about digital photography.

Filed under: Events