Spring 2018 Course

A COPLAC Digital Distance Learning Course

Category: reading

Week 13: Reading Reflection

April 23, 2018 / / 0 Comments

via GIPHY

We are at the end of this project/course and I am really excited about all the work we have done. The sites look amazing and this class has made me think critically about how censorship works currently and throughout history.

I returned to the text, The Reader Speaks Out: Adolescent Reflections about Controversial Young Adult Literature by Grace Enriquez and thought about how the ideas in this essay intertwined with the case that Karina and I investigated. In the article, Enriquez talks about how there is a lack of young adult voices in the arguments about these texts that are highly debated. She explains how there is a ton of educator and parental arguments, but no one really asks what the students or young adults think about the text. She went to students and asked them about what their definitions of controversy were. What makes a book controversial and what makes a book worth reading? She found that they think a book is worth reading if the plot seems interesting despite the use of profanity, violence, sexual content, and/or discriminatory remarks. She found that students “appreciated the importance of context.” It made a big difference if they had to read the book.

In our case, we were lucky to get in touch with a student who did speak up against the removal of the novels To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Accomack County, VA schools. I think her perspective about the books and whether or not they should be removed really added so much context about what happened in late 2016. She created a petition and joined the protest that was created by Charles Knitter. Because of her voice and the voices of other students through the petition they were able to give their thoughts to the committee that the school board created to decide if the books should be officially removed or not. Even though this started out as an argument made by a parent, the students were the ones that the committee listened to. I think that is a huge step for students voices to be heard when censorship of reading materials pops up in different places.

Students voices need to be included in the discussion about removal of texts from classrooms and libraries. A lot of students like to talk about the controversy in the novel and by doing so in a safe academic environment I think that students can learn a lot about the reasons why something, such as derogatory language, in a controversial scene is used. I think communication and discussion can always help students push past just what are the themes in this text, but also how it can relate to students lives and the community of the school or library.

Enriquez, Grace. “The Reader Speaks Out:
Adolescent Reflections about Controversial Young Adult Literature.” The ALAN Review. Winter, 2006. pp 16-23. Print.

Week 7: Progress Report

March 12, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I can’t believe we are already halfway done with the class! And I have a feeling the rest of the semester is going to go by faster than the first half did.

We have emailed questions to Charles Knitter this week and will hopefully get his response soon. As of last night, I have been in contact with the student who created the petition at the school. She is interested in providing us with a statement on what happened and gave me some further contact information beyond Facebook. We are going to be sending her more information today and requesting a formal interview that we can use in our site. I find it really awesome that we were able to reach people through Facebook and excited to see what information comes of these two interviews.

I called the school last week asking about the materials we would like to see about the parent’s learning resource complaint, but they insisted that I send a written request in. We emailed them, but have yet to get a response. I think I am going to call again today or tomorrow and see if I can talk to the Accomack County School Board member in charge of those types of complaints. We are hoping they will be willing to give us information about the complaint, but I am afraid we probably won’t. From all the information we have gathered so far I think that this was really bad press for the school system. I would love to go bug the school board in person, but unfortunately Accomack is almost four hours away, so it would have to be an entire day trip which my schedule doesn’t provide.

We pretty much have the skeleton for our site completed. This week is the week where we really start adding content to the pages. I am researching Harper Lee and creating the page where users can find out about the author and why she wrote the book. I am interested to see what I find. I know I have just skimmed the surface so far.

Besides emailing people and creating the skeleton for our site, we did not manage to do very much because we were on spring break. It was definitely one of our slower weeks. This week will be really busy with research and content creating.

So because we don’t have any new content yet, here is pictures from my Spring Break in New Orleans. I went and checked out the Carousel Bar and Lounge where a bunch of famous authors who’ve had challenges and complaints about their novels and plays hung out. I hope everyone else also has a great break in the next few weeks!

picture of Carousel bar and lounge
Carousel Bar and Lounge, where Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams used to hang out.

 

picture of art in the French Quarter Streets.
Art in the French Quarter Streets.
picture of bagels
Breakfast at St. Roch Market

Week 4: Update, Progress, and Reflection

February 18, 2018 / / 0 Comments

This past week, Karina and I met with a research librarian, Elizabeth Heitsch, at Simpson Library and talked about how to get in touch with people who was a part of the case from late 2016 in Accomack County. She remembers the case when it happened and how it was a big deal, so she already had an idea of what case we were investigating.

We asked her about her experience with censorship and because she works in an academic library she has not had anything challenged. Of course, their are patron complaints, but they never consider taking anything off the shelves. She pointed out that sometimes they have things like soft pornography because it is being used by a professor for academic research, which I found interesting. Usually there are access restrictions on those kinds of items, but the library will still provide and pay for it if being used for an academic purpose. Because it is an academic setting you can get away with a lot more than you could if it were a secondary high school or middle school. She pointed out that most of the time censorship happens because there are children and young adults under the age of eighteen reading the books that come into question.

After our conversation on her experience with censorship we asked how we should contact the school, because I was concerned we were going to be met with some pushback. This case kind of blew up in our area, and I am afraid they will not want to revisit it. Her main

Map of Virginia, Highlighting Accomack County
Accomack County is in red. Taken from Wikimedia Commons

suggestion for us was to send an email to the school librarian because usually they want to help as much as they are allowed. By emailing we could present ourselves as students and get across everything that we want to because usually over the phone it is difficult to convey why we are asking for this information and we tend to forget everything we wanted to talk about. Following our meeting and class on Wednesday, Karina and I composed a message to the contact page we found on the Accomack County Schools page with the template that Max sent us (thank you Max and Robert!). I haven’t received a reply yet, but hopefully I will before the end of Monday. If we don’t hear anything by then we are going to try to find another way to contact the school library.

Newpaper Clipping Discussing the Accomack County's School Policy regarding learning resource complaints.
Clipping from the Chincoteague Beacon on Dec. 22, 2016 discussing the policy on complaints against learning resources. From Newspapers.com

We are looking into trying to contact the parent who complained about the case and we listened to her complaint in the School Board Meeting we found a recording of on the Accomack County School’s webpage. She makes a strong case for why they shouldn’t include To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the high school curriculum. The really interesting part about this case is we are finding that the school did not follow their own policy on how to handle learning resource complaints. It is a little confusing, but they took the books off the shelves and from the classroom when the complaint was made instead of waiting until they made their final decision. As it was, their final decision was to reinstate the two books and by mid-December they were back on the school’s library shelves. I would love it if we could interview the parent or the student, (with the parent’s permission of course), especially since the school decided against removing the books.

This coming week our focus is contacting more people involved in the case and researching the author a bit more. We started this past Wednesday putting our project site together and we are trying to figure out how exactly we want the layout to be. We are also starting to meet on Wednesdays from 12pm-2pm on campus and working on our project together in person. This way, if we get stuck with any digital technology thing we will have that time to get help and to put our site together. With the in person meetings, I think we can accomplish a lot over the next few weeks.

Week One: Update and Reflection

January 29, 2018 /

The first week of classes is over and I am ready to get to work!

The theme for this class is A Burning Idea and dives into researching the censorship of books. Another UMW student, Karina Schumm, and I are already researching cases in our area and exploring what makes a book “bad.” 

We also have decided to look into the book Maurice, by E.M. Forster and to take a historical approach to the censorship and history of the novel. I am currently trying to read the novel itself and work through what ideas in it make it a book which has been challenged.

The next step we need to take is talking to our school’s research librarian or archivist. We made an appointment for this coming week to meet with Carolyn Parsons, the special collections librarian at UMW. I think with her help, we learn a lot of information about how to look into our topic. We need to find sources about banned books in our community and I think the library and Special Collections is going to be one of our biggest resources this upcoming semester.

Our next class tomorrow, we are discussing an essay by Belinda Louie on Politics in Children’s Literature. After reading this essay today, it sparked conversation about what books kids go for and why they pick it up to read. This essay talks about the people who interact with children’s literature such as the authors, teachers, children, parents, administration, the public, and publishing. Each of these categories have different ideas and personal history that gives them all biases of some kind. The most interesting thing I had not considered before reading this particular essay is that children “choose books that are pleasant” and “reject books with concepts they do not understand” (6). In my personal experience, I find this to be really true. The first book I remember disliking was Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, and it was because I did not like the unpleasant scene where the main character has to see the dead pilot’s body floating in the water where they had crashed. It was in fifth grade and we had to read it as a class. I also remember we had to watch the movie together, which I found to be even more unpleasant.

I have been discussing with my roommates and friends all afternoon what was the first book that made them uncomfortable? And usually it is because of something that was frightening to them, they were stressed, or the book that had a sad ending. Children look for books that are going to make them happiest. They want stories with good endings and do not want to have to deal with uncomfortable ideas. I think this is because, at least for me when I was a kid, reading was a form of escape. I could go on an adventure, solve a mystery, or be a princess, and hide away from the ugliness reality often was.

I also think this is why books are probably challenged in schools, because parents want to protect their children from being uncomfortable. I think there is some validity in age appropriate reading materials, but I also think that in order for children to expand beyond their world viewpoint sometimes they have to be a little uncomfortable exploring an unfamiliar concept or different life view point.

I found this article very interesting. I spent a lot of time reading as a child and when thinking back about the books I read, they were happy ones where I did not worry about being uncomfortable. I took a lot of notes to discuss in class tomorrow, but I wanted to share some of my reflection here. I cannot wait to read more and learn different reasons for censorship.

 

Louie, Belinda. “Politics in Children’s Literature: Colliding Forces to Shape Young Minds.” Ed. Susan S. Lehr. Shattering the Looking Glass: Challenge, Risk, and Controversy in Children’s Literature. Norwood, Mass: Christopher-Gordon, 2008. Print.

 

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