YAL Blog Post #2

When ‘Teaching Tolerance’ through literature in the classroom, there are many effective strategies which allow students to “discover the relevance of their reading within a larger context.” (www.tolerance.org) One such strategy is “thinking notes” – or text annotations that allow students to indicate agreement, objection, or confusion in relation to the text. Personally, I can see this strategy being very effective in the English Language Arts classroom, especially when teaching lessons on a novel such as All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. When reading All American Boys, it is difficult not to wonder, decide, and weigh-in on the events unfolding on the pages. After previewing “thinking notes” to the students during a small lesson, they will be able to create their own while reading the novel. What I would love to be able to do, is create classroom discussions where students can express their own “thinking notes” and construct similar ideas, or defend a position towards a particular textual event. As a teacher, I believe inserting classroom discussions concerning students “thinking notes” at critical points of interest within the text would allow students to see different perspectives, as well as identify main themes within the book. All American Boys creates dialogue for themes such as race relations, police brutality, and stereotyping; writing creates a greater sense of connection, between our thoughts and our actions. For students, writing down their thoughts on these themes, while they are reading, could be the catalyst for deeper discussion between peers in class, ultimately unlocking higher levels of understanding and empathy towards the subject matter. Ward, Day-Wiff, and Young touch on the importance of teachers in the classroom in this regard – “Educators must address tough topics and encourage their students to explore issues that don’t have easy answers.” (Civil Rights and Social Justice 137) Social justice issues are rarely answered easily, quickly, or quietly; all the more reason to introduce, and listen to the responses of the next generation, within a safe environment – the classroom.