Dr. Amy Moran and Kate Okeson
Happy Gay Pride Month, NJEA Family! It’s the last month of the school year, and we’re thinking about activities and strategies to make these final weeks meaningful. We’re planning ways to infuse LGBTQIA+ affirmation into the culture and content of our classrooms and get re-energized for a successful September.
Summer is a time when most people plan their lives around a mix of activities: summer jobs, time with family, travel, hobbies, DIY home projects, and time away from the classroom to focus on our own physical, mental, and emotional health. And for many of us, the best way to escape it all is to pick up a good book, bringing with it new ideas and ways of looking at the world as we turn the pages or tap away at the screen of our e-readers.
But books have always caused scandals. In the 1950s, 1984 and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn It was banned in various schools, but in subsequent decades it became required reading in schools. Lord of the Ring and To Kill a Mockingbirdfollowed by The Grapes of Wrath and Color Purple In the 1980s, we read a lot of these books and used them as tools to teach critical literacy, an important skill that helps young people grapple with ideas that don’t necessarily align with their own.
Critical literacy It focuses on core principles of critical thinking.
1. Overturning accepted ideas.
2. Consider multiple perspectives.
3. Focus on socio-political issues.
4. Take action and promote social justice.
Book challenges that aim to ban, remove, or limit the circulation of books are an attempt at power-shaming, limiting exposure to ideas and people that exist in marginalized spaces, questioning power structures, and challenging the status quo.
Book bans currently sweeping across the US are focused on books that explicitly address some of the most pressing social justice issues of our time: race, sexual orientation, and gender identity and expression. These book bans seek to erase LGBTQIA+ people, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) people, and others whose lives and experiences differ from those represented in previously published books.
this is Opposition This is an infringement of American freedom because it seeks to restrict free thought, a long-cherished feature of the American experience. Notably, a Washington Post investigation in late 2023 revealed that just 11 people were responsible for 60% of library problems in the 2021-22 school year.
For this reason, I encourage you to spend your summer vacation reading banned books. At Rainbow Connection, we understand that books are uniquely powerful cultural artifacts, and books that are questioned or banned usually serve a crucial function: they offer insights into lesser-known parts of the world we are coming to understand, and help us situate ourselves within it.
By reading banned books, we can gain insight into the authentic experiences others seek to silence and learn about the hypocrisy and manipulation of those who preach American freedom, whose true motive is to give others less freedom than we ourselves enjoy. Moreover, we can learn from Rudin Sims Bishop by using literature to mirror our own experiences, as a window into other ways of life, or as a door to connect with those whose lives are different from our own.
Dr. Amy Moran and Kate Okeson (both she/her) are out queer educators, leaders, and activists working to create affirming and inclusive education for all students and colleagues. Moran has taught middle school for 29 years and served as a high school GSA advisor for 16 years. Okeson has been an art educator for 26 years, a GSA advisor for 14 years, local association president, and co-founder/program director of Make it Better for Youth.
Whether banned or not, broaden your reading horizons to include unfamiliar authors and experiences within popular genres.
Kate is reading Survivor’s guilt Author: Robin Giggle (from New Jersey!). “I love legal thrillers, and this series is great because it portrays LGBTQIA+ people and protagonists in a realistic and positive way.”
Amy is reading Gender Queer: A Memoir The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Maia Kobave, The Cemetery of Untold Stories by Julia Alvarez, and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Ross Gay.
#Read as if your life depends on it
