In the voice of a preacher, with the energy and verve of an inspired teacher, Pat Scales has forged a weapon. It's a weapon of peace in the war of ideas. In it, she distills decades of engaging students and their parents with a multitude of ideas and cultures and situations in the pages of good literature for young people. Each of the books she has chosen has been challenged or censored in some way. These are all powerful books, and Pat chooses ten to focus on. She calls her approach strategies, and for each of the ten titles she offers an introduction, a series of discussion questions, activities, and related recommendations in fiction and nonfiction. She's grouped them under sections that children will recognize: bullies and outcasts; racism and bigotry; secrets and imaginations; and other times and cultures.
The ten books range from Judy Blume's Blubber to Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia to the Colliers' My Brother Sam Is Dead. Pat is not shy about indicating, for each, what the nature of the challenge was. In her discussion questions and activities, she urges students to examine why the books were challenged, to work through the questions, and to respond thoughtfully.
She also includes a strategy for studying the First Amendment itself and one for reading Judy Blume's Places I Never Meant to Be, Blume's collection of original stories from writers whose work has been censored. Blume herself writes a lively and affectionate Foreword to Pat's book.
What's truly exciting about Pat's work is that she uses literature to open conversations rather than close or cut them off. That means the territory is uncharted, but therein also lies the power of the journey. Her discussion questions and activities grow out of, and beyond, the books. She sends students to URLs, to other fiction and nonfiction print sources, to writing their own responses to events in the stories, to finding poems or creating collages. She opens up each discussion to a variety of kinds of reaction, and urges middle schoolers to respond fully.
Because all of the related titles and further sources are annotated, librarians, teachers, parents, and students will find a gold mine of reading to explore. Pat's program "Communicate through Literature" was used in Greenville, South Carolina, for twenty years. Some of these strategies appeared in different form in Book Links magazine.
Interview questions come to Pat Scales from Word Is Out editor GraceAnne A. DeCandido and from the students at SJSU library school.
Why do you think people fear some books so much? And how do you release and overcome that fear?
PS:I think that people who fear books fear ideas, especially ideas that are different from their own. It's a trickle-down effect. Once a book has been labeled controversial, people take notice. Most often the people who question the appropriateness of a book haven't even read the book. Also, I think parents fear the unknown. They don't know the books their children are reading. When someone red-flags certain books, boom! they don't want their kids to read them. That is why I advocate developing literature programs for parents. Open and honest discussions eliminate fear. No one is hiding anything. It's all in the open to be discussed.
Adolescence is fraught for all of us. Some people prefer to forget the "intensity of the adolescent experience," as Rachel Vail writes (p.17). How do these books help young people come to terms with their own selves? And with their awareness of the selfhood of others?
PS: Adolescents want the comfort of knowing that others are thinking and feeling the way they do. Young adult books offer them that comfort. The novels that speak to young adults don't have to mirror the readers' situation entirely, but they must express adolescent emotions. For example, My Brother Sam Is Dead is historical fiction. It represents a different time and place. But it still speaks to the adolescent experience. It deals with family conflict, a desire for independence, sibling relationships, and betrayal. The emotions expressed through the conflicts are the exact emotions that young adults experience today. The situation is simply different. Characters in a novel may become an adolescent's best friend, allowing them to think through their own life with the help of a fictional character. I think these books may also help adults remember their own adolescent experience and therefore understand their children better. Many adults tend to forget their adolescence and dismiss it as a painful time. Books help them to get back in touch with that period in their lives and offer them a tool for discussing such experiences with their children.
Perhaps the hardest task in growing up is to place yourself fully in the shoes of another. How does literature for young people aid in that task?
PS: Young adults can be extremely self-centered—often unaware of the world around them. Books allow them the opportunity to experience other cultures and other worlds. Many censors want to block children and young adults from reading about other cultures because they feel threatened by societal practices different from their own. Taking a journey to other worlds and other cultures through books can narrow the societal gap. For example, reading Julie of the Wolves helps young adults understand that while Julie's cultural practices are different, her emotional being is much like theirs. Students may learn about the Civil Rights Movement in social studies, but they experience the horror, the fear, and the devastation of this terrible time with the Watson family in The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963. Textbooks omit emotions. Novels don't. Knowing the facts is important, but making an emotional connection is the only way to truly walk in the shoes of others.
"Thinkers are less likely to become censors." One of the most empowering elements of this book was to be exposed to the notion of doing book groups with parents and guardians. What prompted such an inspiration?
PS: I came to a middle school after working with elementary-age students. I noticed that parents tended to bow out of their children's reading when they reached the middle grade years. I also realized that communication between parent and child is put to a great test during the adolescent years. I had fond memories of sharing books with my father, so I started the parent program with the idea that if parents read the same books that their children were reading they could open lines of communication through the use of literature. My goal was to get them talking. What better way than through books? What I quickly found out was that when parents read the books in their entirety, and when they were granted the opportunity to discuss them, they were less likely to challenge the ideas in the books. We read books that were being challenged all over the nation, and the parents were discussing them with their young teens. For example, they discovered through their discussions that Judy Blume's Deenie isn't about masturbation, as the news media had indicated. They did not see the encounter between Julie and Daniel in Julie of the Wolves as rape, but censors all over the nation did, and still do. The element that is so often missing in a child's reading experience is the opportunity to share the experience. The parent program granted students and their parents this opportunity.
The First Amendment protects all kinds of speech. How do we handle our own negative responses to material we personally find hateful?
PS:The role of the professional librarian or school media specialist is to purchase books and materials to meet the needs of the patrons we serve. It doesn't mean we have to like every book that we put in the library. We must, at all times, remain objective, and we should pledge ourselves to listening and respecting the views of students, regardless of our personal views. I personally hate any form of prejudice, but I think that books provide the tool for helping students to see and understand the horrors in our society that have been created because of prejudice and bigotry. Students shouldn't be denied the opportunity to read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry or The Watson's go to Birmingham—1963 because I abhor the idea of racial prejudice. I should lead them to these books so they will have a full understanding of the courage of the Logan and Watson families, and the thousands of families like them, who were so brutally victimized because of their race. If students aren't allowed to see, then they can't grow. And if librarians omit something from the library's collection because of their own personal views, then that is censorship.
What course of action would you recommend when a student indicates clear discomfort with a particular book or topic?
PS: I would offer another choice. Not every book if for every child, but there is a book for every child. And the librarian is the key to finding that book. If children are granted the freedom to reject what they aren't ready for, then they will move on to another choice on their own. Children mature at different rates. This is especially true at middle school, and we must be ready to guide them according to their level of maturity. I also think that teachers must be sensitive to a particular child's needs. For example, if a child has just experienced the death of a family member or a friend and is having a difficult time dealing with it, I probably wouldn't select a novel dealing with death like Bridge to Terabithia to use in class at that time. I would, however, use it a few weeks later. Reader guidance is an art, and it takes teamwork between the librarian and the teacher to successfully guide students in making reading choices, especially students who are troubled. I think sensitivity is the key word here.
Several of the books you discuss were written in the 1970s and 1980s, and their longevity points to the fact that they somehow speak to young readers. Given that so many challenged books reflect the reality of teenagers' lives, why do you feel that people want to ban them?
PS:The people who are banning books are often people who don't read the books. They aren't interested in what children think; they are only interested in telling children what to think. History tells us that mind control is the basis for all types of censorship. That's why I think that we have an obligation to encourage children and teenagers to state their views and to support their views using examples from the books they read. Censors give a lot of power to a book. They feel that books reinforce the "evil" or "bad" parts of teenagers' lives. A good book doesn't tell a reader what to think. It raises issues and points out things that a reader should think about. Censors don't know this, and don't want to believe it.
On the Web
These sites were researched and annotated by SJSU students and edited by GraceAnne A. DeCandido
The Censor: Motive and Tactics
From ALA's Intellectual Freedom Manual
Judy Blume's home page, with her thoughts on censorship and background comments on all of her books.
BookSpot's feature on banned books briefly outlines the issue of censorship and gives a number of links to resources on banned books, including book lists, information on Banned Books Week, and Web sites of those both for and against banning books.
GraceAnne A. DeCandido, MLS, spent ten years in libraries and twelve in library publishing before setting up her own firm, Blue Roses Editorial & Web Consulting, in New York.
Susan Fitzgerald has a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Victoria, B.C., Canada, and is currently working on an MLIS at San José State University. She is a freelance editor and the mother of two young children.
Caroline Hailey Gurkweitz is a student in San José State University's School of Library & Information Science and a Reference Librarian at Fullerton Public Library, Fullerton, California.
Karen Praeger is the mother of five children, including two teenagers. She works at Citrus College Library, where she is in charge of Interlibrary Loan and also does reference work. She is taking classes toward the MLIS degree through San José State University in the Fullerton program. Her interests include reading, education, and children's literature.
Becca Todd is the Library Media Teacher at Manzanita Elementary School in Oakland. She is enthusiastically pursuing her MLIS at San José State University, and though her children sometimes groan at her workload, they wind up smiling when they see how excited she is.
