Like every teacher, my summer reading stack, which really is an overflowing shelf at this point, is varied. I have the adult fiction that has been patiently waiting since spring break, the children's books I'm previewing for next year, and professional development books. One of the books in that last category is Reading the Rainbow by Caitlin L. Ryan & Jill M. Hermann-Wilmarth.
The book recommendations alone were worth reading this book, and I appreciate the narrative style that, appropriately for my context, felt particularly focussed on experiences in upper elementary classrooms. For teachers looking to convince peers that there is room to highlight LGBTQ characters and issues in the ELA classroom, this book builds your case. One of the most powerful ideas I found in this book was the idea of "queering" traditional trade books. I'm fortunate to teach in a school and district with emphatic support for the LGBTQ community. Sadly, I know many teachers don't have that support and are restricted or discouraged from bringing books that represent Queer identities into their classrooms. This concept takes that challenge head-on.
In their book, Ryan and Wilmarth use the example of Jacqueline Woodson's The Other Side, a popular picture book for the upper elementary classroom (I
use it in our Historical Fiction unit). In the example, students are encouraged to question what "rules" the two main characters in the story are expected to conform to and live by. While the obvious answer is segregation, the primary topic of the book, the objective is to draw students further. In two case studies, the reader is shown how students, when asked, come up with a variety of other sets of norms, including gender, that the children are operating under in the story. This discussion provides and entry-point for students in the classroom to critique categories and norms in their own environments.
This approach doesn't just have value in classrooms where LGBTQ representation is limited. As the authors illustrate in the book, it is also important to lead students to question categories within the GLBTQ community. Even in schools that purport to support queer students, queer families, and queer members of the community, it is easy for students to develop expectations or fall to stereotypes of what that looks like. By taking a similar approach, asking "what are the rules and expectations that could be questioned here," we can encourage students to question and critique categories and labels in literature and in their lives.
Taking inspiration from this book, I'd offer following questions for read-aloud texts to use all texts as doors into a more open society:
What social norms or rules do the characters face?
Which rules do they push against?
How else do norms impact people in every day life?
What problems do norms create in the book and in life?
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