Laura Hudock and Betsy Lazo

A COURSE OF SELF-DISCOVERY, JOY, AND MENTORSHIP:

Inventorying Texts in a Middle-Grade English Curriculum

LAURA HUDOCK AND BETSY LAZO

National news coverage about the seismic wave of recent book challenges and bans in public schools and libraries has quickened in recent years (Natanson, 2022). Though shocking infographics quantify the magnitude and scope of curricular materials being removed from libraries and classrooms (“Access”, 2022; Friedman & Johnson, 2022), a viral TikTok video sharing the lived experience of one elementary educator in Tennessee has helped many to envisage the adverse effects of legislation that abrogates students’ right to read and erodes of teacher autonomy.

In a three-minute recording, third-grade teacher Sydney Rawls (2022) details the process of cataloging every title in her curated classroom library, a required task to permit her students to access these books. She explains how her school librarian will compare Rawls’ list of titles to those that have been deemed to be “appropriate for the age and maturity levels of the students who may access the materials” and “suitable for, and consistent with, the educational mission of the school” by the school board under Tennessee’s newly enacted “Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022” (TN Code § 46-6-744 (2022). If a title is not on the pre-approved list, according to Rawls (2022), it must undergo further review. As Rawls questions the identity of these reviewers external to her school, that is, their professional expertise as educators, she makes no mention of being able to share her expert rationale for a book’s inclusion in her classroom library, and how it connects to learning objectives. Yet, she is expected to purge every book that has been preemptively designated as inappropriate and/ or unsuitable for her elementary-aged students. Eventually, her revised list of “approved” book titles will be posted online to allow for students’ parents or guardians to “chime in” with their added challenges. Unsurprisingly, Rawls’ classroom library collects dust. She laments: “The kids want to read books. They’re asking me, can I go get a book and read? And they’re so excited. And I have to say, ‘No, you can’t!’” (Rawls, 2022).

Until this tedious review process concludes, she indicates that her third-grade readers are prohibited from self-selecting books from her classroom library. Rawls’ frustration is apparent.

Though Rawls may have intended to merely emphasize in this TikTok the practical burdens of this legislation in deterring her students from self-selected, independent reading

while adding to her professional responsibilities, she also implicates broader concerns. First, lawmakers’ political agenda denies the professional expertise of educators like Sydney Rawls and their firsthand knowledge of individual readers–their social identities, cultural backgrounds, learning needs, interests, etc. Second, numerous position statements such as The StudentsRight to Read (2018) by the 25,000-member strong National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) intended to advocate for students’ choice of reading materials are ignored. And third, the prevailing metaphorical insights of windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors that advocate for the inclusion of multicultural books in classrooms are disregarded (Bishop, 1990a; 1990b). By emphasizing two subjective criteria, appropriateness and suitability, this approval process perpetuates dominant social structures and invites challenges that are entrenched in intolerance – an unwillingness to recognize and embrace the cultural and linguistic diversity of today’s P-12 students and of the nation at-large. Rawls (2022) students’ access to stories and histories told by BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ authors and/or that feature affirming portrayals of oftmarginalized populations will likely become restricted.

In September 2022, elementary education teacher candidates seeking initial licensure who are enrolled in Laura’s literacy methods course examined this TikTok video with a critical eye towards positioning, context, and their affective responses. They contemplated the sine qua non of their emerging pedagogical content knowledge, public perceptions about teachers’ professionalism, exercise of teacher autonomy in selecting texts, and ways to advocate for their future students’ intellectual freedoms. Above all, they wondered about the inverse of Rawls’ experience–what happens when a teacher interrogates an existing English language arts and literacy curriculum to create critical spaces for students to read diverse and inclusive children’s literature?

Designing the Inventory Process

The recent experience of this article’s co-author, Betsy, a seventh-grade English teacher, school-based literacy leader, and post-master’s certificate graduate student pursuing her specialist licensure in reading, addresses the preservice teacher’s pondering. In a 1-on-1 online directed study of children’s literature, Laura engaged Betsy in a critical inventory of the diverse titles that anchor her school’s seventh-grade English curriculum. Figure 1 describes the assignment as stated in the course syllabus and that emerged from our synchronous negotiations.

FIGURE 1 Description of Course Assignment

CRITICAL INVENTORY OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

STEP 1. Generate an organized list of all texts assigned to students to read for the grade level(s) that you currently teach. This list should be comprehensive enough to cover the duration of the school year or include at least 30 titles. Then, create a chart noting each text’s title, author, publication date, genre, format, featured content, and any additional information that you deem important. Use assigned readings (Crisp et al, 2016; Henderson et al, 2020; Koss & Paciga, 2022) to inform your consideration of diversity markers evidenced in each text.

STEP 2. Analyze the data collected on your chart. What do you notice? Look for patterns, potential gaps, or problems within each text and across the entire text set. For example, think about the authenticity and accuracy of intersectional identities of real people or constructed characters? Reflect on possible gaps or areas for improvement that you identify. How might these be addressed? What additional information do you need to know/do to address them? Type up your findings and initial thoughts.

STEP 3. Revisit your chart and initial findings. Reflect on any new insights gleaned from new course content and discussions with regards to diversifying the texts that your students encounter and the ways that they have been expected to respond to them. Consider these guiding questions: (1) How do my new insights confirm and/or refine my initial findings?; and (2) In what ways do these insights affect my plans for curricular and instructional changes?

STEP 4. Based on your reading of Leland’s et al. (2012) Teaching Children’s Literature: It’s Critical!, design six new lessons that invite your students to critically engage in reading in ways that are new to your instructional practice. Your lessons should feature a combination of texts–those that already exist in your curriculum, and those you have proposed for curricular inclusion/adoption either in your classroom or across a grade-level curriculum.

Akin to the role of a literacy coach, Laura designed the course assignment with consideration of an adult learner’s needs, motivations, prior knowledge, and experiences while keeping course’s learning objectives and current children’s literature research in mind (Lassonde & Tucker, 2013). Though well-versed in Massachusetts’ 2017EnglishLanguage Arts &LiteracyFramework (herein Framework), Laura had been unfamiliar with Betsy’s curriculum–its pacing, sequence, and text materials. So, a dialogic approach situated in a social constructivist paradigm positioned Betsy as the curriculum expert while Laura provided guidance (Bakhtin, 1981; Vygotsky, 1978).

Multiple research studies employing critical content analysis informed this course assignment. Short (2017) explains the flexibility of this process, “the researcher uses a specific critical lens as the frame from which to develop the research questions, select texts, analyze

the data, and reflect on findings” (p. 5). Prior to the assignment, Betsy read two research articles exemplifying critical content analysis. Crisp et al. (2016) used this methodological tool to code children’s books on the shelves of preschool classroom libraries for depictions of six categories of cultural identities: (1) U.S. parallel cultures; (2) socioeconomic status and class; (3) dis/abilities, developmental differences, and chronic illnesses; (4) sexual identity; (5) religion; and (6) gender. Henderson’s et al. (2020) inventory of three primary elementary classroom libraries examined protagonists’ identity markers and language use, depictions of family structures, and socially significant topics to the students engaged in these books–homelessness, incarceration, and immigrant/refugee status.

Just as Betsy embarked on her inventory, TheReadingTeacher published an online article detailing the process of closely examining the inclusivity of texts selected for learning spaces, namely P-12 classroom libraries (Koss & Paciga, 2022). Koss and Paciga’s “diversity audit” has a multi-step procedure similar to Laura’s planned assignment. Emphasizing quality texts over quantity, their first step is an interrogation of the unconscious biases and ways curated curricular materials become prioritized and organized based on content, nostalgia, etc. Using Bishop’s (1992) classification system, Koss and Paciga (2022) prioritize culturally specific books.

To Bishop, culturally specific children’s books “illuminate the experience of growing up a member of a particular, non-white cultural group” (1992b, p. 44). Inclusion of the following textual details signifies a high degree of culturally specify: “language styles and patterns, religious beliefs and practices, musical preferences, family configurations and relationships, social mores, and numerous other behaviors, attitudes and values.” (Bishop, 1992b, p. 44)

Bishop defines culturally neutral children’s books as containing “few, if any, specific details” (p. 45), and culturally generic ones ascribe universal experiences across parallel cultural groups, e.g., everybody goes to school, in which racial differences mostly appear in illustrations (Möller, 2016). Books from parallel cultures are usually penned by “outsiders” and are about a specific cultural group, but the literature does not belong to that group (Cai & Bishop, 1994). Coding for parallel cultural groups within the United States, Crisp et al. (2016) included “African Americans, American Indians, Asian/Pacific Americans, Latino/a Americans, Middle Eastern American, and mixed-race Americans” (p. 33). The ability of literacy educators to identify textual and visual depictions that affirm and celebrate sociocultural and linguistic differences as well as expand readers’ worldviews is a strength of our profession, especially when mindful of tokenistic representations. To identify the varied social identities and cultural groups represented in each title to be inventoried, Koss and Paciga (2022) recommend a second step: “Consider categories such as ability (physical, cognitive, social emotional), age, body acceptance, ethnicity/race, family structure, gender, geographic region, mental health, other marginalized populations, own voices, religions, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status.” (p. 4)

Laura approached this assignment with the belief that when literacy educators make critical reading a habit, the outcome is a heightened awareness of these multi-layered and culturally specific markers of diversity in children’s literature.

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s complicates “single stories” on account of the incompleteness that occurs with overly simplistic, reductionist, and sometimes false perceptions (2009). Similarly, Koss and Paciga (2022) forewarn that “counting a singular identity group reduces a character or story to a single story, rather than honoring complex intersections of identity” (p. 4). Laura anticipated Betsy’s inventory process to involve a close looking of printed text and visual images for authentic and complete representations of character(s), their voices, perspectives, and agentic actions, the setting(s), theme(s), and the real or imagined narrative event(s) vis-à-vis the replication of stereotypes and privileges. The third step of Koss and Paciga’s (2022) “diversity audit” involves a critical reflection on the findings, including consideration of the cultural groups among a school’s surrounding communities and of society at-large. Their fourth and final step is the development of an action plan to address observable gaps in curricular materials.

Applying Critical and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies

Critical literacy underlies this inventory process. Numerous literacy researchers have studied critical pedagogies in various contexts (Shannon & Labbo, 2002; Shor, 1999). Synthesizing 30-years of theoretical and practice-oriented definitions of critical literacy, Lewison et al. (2002) identified “four dimensions: (1) disrupting the commonplace, (2) interrogating multiple viewpoints, (3) focusing on sociopolitical issues, and (4) taking action and promoting social justice” (p. 382). To contravene the passive transmission of reproduced knowledge in curricular texts is to do more than resist the normative, dominant ways of viewing and structuring the world (Lewison et al., 2002; Luke, 2013). To Freire and Macedo (1987) “reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world” (p. 25). Texts are socially constructed, never ideologically neutral (McCallum & Stephens, 2011), thus, they are charged with the potential to become mirrors and windows to readers. An awareness of how a text or curricular text set positions readers emerges from an interrogation of the underlying assumptions about its design, production, and meaning-making processes (Leland et al., 2018; Vasquez et al., 2019). These embedded perspectives affect the meaning-making process. Critical literacy galvanizes readers who are capable of repositioning themselves and becoming agents of change (p. 12). Likewise, Laura positions reading as a social act; any curricular revisions need to anticipate critical conversations that students might engage in as they, in turn, interrogate multiple perspectives and examine sociopolitical issues of power within, through, and beyond a text (Beach et al., 2009; Harste et al., 2000; Lewison et al., 2002).

Critical literacy is linked to culturally relevant pedagogy. A legacy of Ladson-Billings’

An inquiry stance affords

work on culturally relevant pedagogy is an asset- or practitioners the space strengths-based approach that frames students as to envision curricular “subjects in the instructional process, not mere objects” possibilities within an (2014, p. 76; 1994; 1995). Culturally relevant pedagogy emphasizes the experiences and values of students’ existing political and home-community culture and “teaches to and through the personal landscape strengths of ethnically diverse students” (Gay, 2000, p. (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 29). Above all, culturally relevant pedagogy aims to meet 2009). the academic and social needs of diverse learners. LadsonBillings (1994) explains the development of sociopolitical consciousness in realizing this practice. “Culturally relevant teaching is about questioning (and preparing students to question) the structural inequality, the racism, and the injustice that exists in society” (p. 140). A re-phrasing of this practice does more than amplify the descriptiveness of relevance to students; it underscores the teacher-student relationship as the transformative agent. Paris (2012) proposes that a culturally sustaining pedagogy more precisely reflects teachers’ support of students “in sustaining the cultural and linguistic competence of their communities while simultaneously offering access to dominant cultural competence” (p. 95). This approach values and extends the cultural and linguistic resources of consistently marginalized students and their families and communities as the driving force of the curriculum. Paris (2012) asserts, “culturally sustaining pedagogy seeks to perpetuate and foster—to sustain—linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of the democratic project of schooling” (p. 25). A plurality of students’ social identities, discourses, and interests are appreciated and centered in the curriculum. If necessary, culturally sustaining teachers may even subvert the formal curriculum to incorporate noncanonical texts of which students become situated as the knowledgeable experts (Woodard et al., 2017). Ultimately, culturally sustaining pedagogy is an enactment of hope, a reimagining of what teaching and learning might be, but not yet are.

Engaging in Narrative Inquiry

Narrative inquiry has been employed to deepen understanding of Betsy’s experience of inventorying her curriculum. An inquiry stance affords practitioners the space to envision curricular possibilities within an existing political and personal landscape (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009). Situating Betsy as the primary participant, this approach relies on her sharing a series of “lived stories” focused on her prior curriculum planning experiences, process of inventorying the curriculum, and her design and enactment of culturally sustaining curricular changes. Clandinin and Connelly (2000) explain narrative inquiry as a methodology: “a way of understanding experience. It is a collaboration between researchers and participants, over time, in a place or series of places, and in social interaction with milieus. . . . Simply stated . . . narrative inquiry is stories lived and told.” (p. 20)

Betsy’s “lived stories” emerged from a space established by trust. Laura shifted her interactions with Betsy from that of course instructor to “co-learner through non-evaluative conversation” (Hollingsworth et al., 2009, p. 64). Though Laura was an integral participant in the inventory process during weekly Zoom-based conversations and occasional typed feedback that posed open-ended questions, she did not involve herself autobiographically in the narrative writing process. She suggested edits for clarity, a reorganization of paragraphs, and added transitions for ease of readability (Montero & Washington, 2021). Betsy had ownership of the translation of relational knowledge into narrative form. Hollingsworth et al. (2009) describe the concept of knowing as a relationship “involv[ing] both the instantiation (or generation of thought) and the reflection on what is currently known in social and political settings” (p. 67). With minimal revisions, Betsy’s subsequent narrative preserves her candid incorporation of experiential understandings gleaned from her inquiry stance into everyday language.

The power of this inquiry resides in Betsy’s self-narrating – her reflective insights about learning possibilities when middle-school students engage in critical readings of purposefully selected, diverse children’s literature. Her writings retell and relive this transformative process, her commitment to critical literacy and culturally sustaining pedagogy, and her embodiment of continuous questioning to evolve her practice. These “lived stories” relay three elements common to narrative inquiry spaces–(1) temporality, (2) sociality, and (3) place (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006). Directing attention to temporality throughout the narrative aims to contextualize her past, present, and future lived experiences. Beginning with sociality, Betsy shares her personal conditions, her salient social identities, and hopes for this narrative inquiry. Next, she recounts her curricular planning histories to shed light on how her past experiences with curriculum design and implementation influence her motivations to engage in this reflective work. Circling back to sociality, she then explores the social conditions of Laura’s mentoring and her current school curriculum that’ve factored into her plans to teach children’s literature. Her unique classroom is central to the concept of place. Lastly, she describes the inventory process and subsequent teaching and learning that unfold.

Betsy’s Narrative

I am a thirty-something, first-generation Salvadoran American who grew up in New York and Florida. I first received my B.A. in English and Textual Studies and then my M.S. in grades 7-12 English Education from Syracuse University. Presently, I am a middle-school literacy specialist in a suburb within the greater Boston metropolitan area. I am nearing completion of graduate-level coursework to obtain my professional reading specialist licensure. I write this narrative to share my inventory experience that had begun as a course assignment.

Revisiting Past Curricular Planning Experiences

I launched my teaching career in 2007 at a racially diverse public exam school

for grades 7-12 in the Boston metropolitan area. Enrollment was based on students’ performance on the Independent School Entrance Exam (ISEE) and their school choice application. From year to year, my class sizes ranged from 25 to 31 eighth graders. Although investments had been made to maintain facilities, our school was notably under-resourced. I had outdated curricular materials in poor condition. Still, I felt privileged to have my own four walls, my own collection of middle- grade books, and complete autonomy over the curriculum. Though I powered through my first year with optimism and gratitude, I had been ill-prepared for the loneliness that came with developing an 8th-grade English curriculum while simultaneously teaching it. On my first professional development day, I was handed a grade-level English curriculum binder. It consisted of lists of books, of idioms, of literary terms, and of grade-level standards. I kept looking at the binder trying to find “the curriculum,” but it did not exist. It had not been unpacked. The only caveat was that I had to coordinate the instructional sequences with other grade-level teachers so we could take turns reading from our limited sets of books. That year, I taught a smattering of everything I loved from graduate school–fairytale explorations, i-search papers, the composition process, Socratic seminars, and texts by David Sedaris.

My reliance on a commercial reading program’s resources had been my attempt to reign in the curricular open-endedness. It was analogous to having a moderately stocked kitchen with a copy of the JoyofCooking (Rombauer, 1931). I had a place to experiment and a guide to keep me grounded. With each passing year, I tried something new when I got bored, or when the stagnant curriculum needed a jolt of excitement. Once I had focused on journalism, and we published a middle-school yearbook with editorials ranging from fashion pieces to academic experiences. Once I had students blog about their everyday lives, and we shared our stories with another school in “pen pal” fashion. Once I wrote a Donors Choose grant to stock my room with art supplies so responses to literature incorporated visual art.

During this phase of my career, I had been surrounded by teacher confidantes who would support me, listen to me, and share their thoughts about my most pressing instructional dilemmas. Yet, I desperately needed guidance and support with regards to designing and implementing curriculum. At bi-monthly English Department meetings, we listed book titles and authors besides statewide standards. Even so, we lacked any protocol or evaluative process to systematically review and refine the effectiveness of our curriculum. At the end of each school year, I would reflect and make revisions on my own. The curriculum-in-use became haphazard, unstable, and constantly in flux.

As the years had passed by, we sporadically revisited the curriculum. We aligned the existing texts to the new EnglishLanguageArts andLiteracyFramework(Framework; MA DESE, 2017) . We swapped books with other grades. Or we just culled out books that no one wanted to teach anymore. Frequent pleas to allocate money to purchase new titles became the norm at departmental meetings. I absolutely knew that my curriculum had flaws but remained

diligent to make fixes when the occasion arose. I would make spontaneous or in the moment curricular modifications with mental notes for more formal changes the following year. This had been enough to eke by as I awaited a better version of the curriculum. But those adjustments never added up to a comprehensive review. Each year was more of the same. I patched up gaps with a few band aids here and there. Only now do I admit that I had been reacting to a poorly designed curriculum by adjusting my behavior accordingly, rather than proactively engaging in an effective protocol to improve the design of the curriculum and then testing its effectiveness. I had wondered when a close look at the curriculum would happen, “When are they going to update this?” I never fully understood that “they” was actually me. And if I wanted to be an agent of change, I could not do this alone. I needed the support of a knowledgeable mentor.

Nearly a decade later, I started to feel the world changing around me and within me. With the new Framework, I became more pragmatic and less adventurous with my lesson planning. There were noticeable gaps in the taught curriculum. For example, although my students dabbled in creative writing, we never truly explored the role of the narrator’s perspective in storytelling, or how to create multiple perspectives within the same story. By the 2018-2019 school year, I had drastically revised my curriculum to better align to the Framework. I developed units that focused on the MCAS 2.0 writing tasks: informational writing, argumentative writing, and narrative writing. At the heart of each unit was a mentor text set. Students closely examined authors’ craft and purpose while composing their own writings. I selected mentor texts based on their similarity to the readings found in the previous year’s MCAS 2.0. Diverse titles were not necessarily on my radar. Rather, I incorporated only those authors names in Appendix B of Massachusetts’ Framework (e.g., Lois Lowry, John Steinbeck, Madeline L’Engle, Bruce Coville, Gary Paulsen, Gary Soto, Linda Sue Park, S.E. Hinton, Louis Sacher, Suzanne Collins, and Laurie Halse Anderson). Copies of their books were readily available, and I had familiarity with them. In due course, my students’ test scores improved dramatically, and I felt that I had done my professional best to improve student achievement. Although I managed to recalibrate my taught curriculum, my creativity, the heart and soul of my curriculum, had disappeared. When the pandemic happened, the curriculum unraveled as we shifted to online learning. Eventually, I decided that in order to grow my instructional practice, I would need to change my environment. In August 2021, I started my current position at a new district and school.

Finding a Thought-Partner

“Sometimes, when two souls find each other in the darkness, the darkness goes away.” -Dan Gemeinhart, TheMidnight Children (2022)

For the summer of 2022, I planned to enroll in two graduate-level courses, workshops in children’s literature and writing. Unbeknownst to me, both courses would connect me to a long-awaited curricular thought-partner, Laura. This pairing happened at a time when I was

feeling most reluctant to evaluate my year-long curriculum, hone my pedagogical content knowledge, and reflect on my current literacy practice –the month ofJuly. Laura had tasked me with completing an inventory of the children’s literature that I had just taught in the 20212022 school year. This sounded completely logical; however, my seasonal teacher behavior had always reserved July for a complete mental escape from my reality of teaching. My motto had been “in July we rest, in August we plan.” Undoubtedly, my curriculum needed a push, and I was presented with an opportunity to refine my art of teaching through a 1-on-1 mentorship with a professor whom I respected and trusted. Plus, this work would count toward my graduate studies. It felt like a win-win, and if it meant giving up my summer veg out, so be it. I wanted to grow in my professional practice.

Unfortunately, inventorying does not induce any excitement in me. Many educators may revel in satisfaction when “all of our ducks are in a row.” The thought of rounding up metaphorical ducks when the sun is shining, the pool is beckoning, and all the summer pleasures are at my fingertips seemed completely daunting. To me, conducting an inventory lives somewhere in the realm of perfection, and I am only a perfectionist when I am completely stressed out. Inventorying is a strategy enlisted in an emergency. Tight on money? Let’s take an inventory of the budget. Frustrated from wasting food in the fridge? Inventory before the next grocery trip. Moving? Traveling? Starting something new? Inventory, inventory, inventory. In that process, I ask, what do we have versus what do we need? An inventory is a logical and useful tool, but I have only turned to it in moments of desperation.

So, here I was at the end of my first year in my new school district and instead of relaxing, I ended up going on this intense journey with Laura - inventorying and analyzing each text within my 7th-grade curriculum. At first, it seemed impossible but also potentially transformative. I recognized that my planning had become too binary–either I implemented a free-range English curriculum guided by the spirit of the Framework, or I implemented a rigid curriculum that stuck to the letter of the Framework. What Laura offered me was an opportunity for me to begin the reflective process to shift away from an “either/or” mindset to a “both/and” one. My curriculum could be both a reflection of my autonomous freedom and be nestled within the Frameworkand district/school expectations. I accepted her challenge and prepared myself for the work that this would require, both mentally and emotionally. I knew that if both my head and my heart were not fully on board with this task, it would all have been for naught. And so we began.

Recognizing Teacher Autonomy

Inventorying an entire year’s worth of grade-level texts might appear to be a straightforward process, I felt as though I was in an unusual position to be a critical evaluator of this curriculum simply because I had not written it. I was new to the school and grade-level team. I felt like an expatriate living abroad, and now I was asked to evaluate their constitution. Like our U.S. Constitution, my seventh-grade English curriculum is a living, breathing document.

It expands and contracts. It constantly mutates. It has the potential to become unwieldy when there are too many variables to consider. It may also go stale if educators neglect to breathe life into it. Similar to cultural practices, a curriculum can also fade away from memory if it only exists within the hearts and minds of the people enacting it. The rationale and history of its development disappears when its originating educators depart.

Continuing with this analogy, a curriculum is not simply a constitution but representative of an entire governmental system. It reflects shared values, the democratic purposes of education, and the potential of all learners to achieve. Most importantly, there exists freedom. At my current school, I have the autonomy to make curricular decisions about how to support my students’ in meeting the stated learning outcomes, that is, so long as I stay within the bounds of the Framework and my school’s stated mission. For this course assignment, I was intent to review the curriculum in its entirety by revisiting every title that I had taught in the previous year. Thankfully, my current colleagues similarly recognize that this curriculum evolves over time as new children’s literature is published, knowledge of teaching practices becomes refined, and students’ academic/social needs and interests are identified. I belong to a grade-level team that collectively takes pride in a curriculum deemed inclusive on account of its unifying year-long theme that explores diverse social identities and cultural perspectives. Straddling this balance between non negotiables in the Framework and my teacher autonomy, I had forged ahead.

Inventorying Curricular Texts

In The LifeChangingMagic ofTidyingUp, Marie Kondo (2014) discusses clutter. She proposes that if we put systems in place to declutter, it will transform our experience in the home and in our lives. When decluttering the items in your wardrobe, Kondo suggests that you empty out your closet completely, not one item left behind, and dump it all on the floor and bed. Psychologically, this allows you to fully process exactly how much stuff you have accumulated over the years. At first, this may seem counterintuitive. Rather than tidying up a space, a visible mess materializes. But the process of creating the so-called heap is transformative. Kondo recommends taking each individual item from the heap, holding it up, and asking, “Does this item spark joy within me?” The inventory process prompted me to “Marie Kondo” my existing curriculum, to spend time with each text, and ask myself “What exactly does this text do within the existing framework of my curriculum?” Some texts do spark joy within me. Others do not. Unlike my wardrobe, this curriculum does not solely belong to me but to my seventh graders.

I started this process with a chronological listing of titles experienced in the past year, followed by a subjective categorizing and description of featured content. The texts we had read with absolute passion in the past year were the easiest to inventory. For example, while reading “The Scholarship Jacket” by Marta Salinas (1993), my students hotly debated

the integrity of Martha’s principal and teachers. That memorable teaching moment will hopefully live with me for the rest of my life, for each of my special education students had entered my classroom that year with a negative mindset about their reading ability. That learning experience was magical. Not only did they use the text to foster such a mature conversation on morality, each student spoke and wrote at length on the many levels on how Martha had been wronged. When Martha’s heart broke, so had theirs.

Reflection on The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton (1951) was quite the opposite. It was brutal. Given each of my students’ Individualized Education Program (IEP) for language-based disabilities – their adversities with reading fluency, expanding vocabulary knowledge, and comprehension – this text posed a considerable challenge. Students often read sentence-by-sentence to check for understanding. I had recalled a lesson in which we came across this sentence describing Ponyboy’s world: “Mickey Mouse was a dark-gold buckskin, sassy and ornery, not much more than a colt. He’d come when Soda called him. He wouldn’t come for anyone else. That horse loved Soda. (Hinton, 1951, p. 39).”

Students had become lost in S. E. Hinton’s colloquial writing. To promote their comprehension, I had to fully stop the lesson; draw out visuals; and explain the meaning, context, and time period. By the end of this messy, drawn out process, my students were completely unimpressed with this tedious observation of Soda’s character. I had witnessed firsthand that this novel didn’t spark any joy in these student-readers.

Roald Dahl’s (1960) “The Landlady” was a text I had never previously taught. In my opinion, the titular character’s predatory behavior was questionable. See my synopsis of featured content in Figure 2. Like The Outsiders, this short story needed a contemporary replacement. In contrast Roll ofThunder, HearMyCry (Taylor, 1976) remained at the heart of my inventory. Though it had taken six weeks for students to read, the text is beautifully written, just challenging enough to students, yet accessible in their meaning-making. I wanted to keep this text but I knew the curriculum unit needed more meaningful text pairings to further contextualize this historical fiction.

After this initial inventory process, I realized my curriculum had been traditional, unadventurous, and unoriginal. I see in the curricular collection of stories, poems, and texts

I started this process with a chronological listing of titles experienced in the past year, followed by a subjective categorizing and description of featured content. The texts we had read with absolute passion in the past year were the easiest to inventory.

decisions that erred on the side of cautious inclusion. Diverse authors had been limited to those highly regarded and/or long-established as part of twentieth-century literary canon, including Mildred Taylor, Langston Hughes, and Jacqueline Woodson. Also, poetry selections lacked continuity. They had been read independently of other texts rather than as a way to understand a plurality of voices centered around a common theme. Overall, the inventorying process of holding up each text to the light was at times monotonous but also cathartic.

TABLE 1 Excerpt from Betsy’s Inventory

TITLE (AUTHOR)

DATE OF PUBLICATION

GENRE & TEXT TYPE FEATURED CONTENT

“The Landlady” (Roald Dahl) 1959 Short Story; British Literature; Horror Upper middle class, White, British characters and author; Billy is a young, able-bodied, good looking, well-dressed man who seeks lodgings at a bed and breakfast owned by a White, elderly woman who taxidermies animals and, horrifyingly, young men in their “prime.”. Stylistically, Dahl creates suspense through awkward interactions with mysterious people. The protagonist is a kind, curious young man who gives a stranger the benefit of the doubt.

Revising Curricular Texts

In place of The Outsiders, I wanted to find a highly engaging text that carried more culturally sustaining content–whose characters and plot authentically portray and uphold the customs, beliefs, and language of a specific cultural group that has been previously silenced in popular children’s literature and middle grades English curriculum. My reading of Nigerian-American Tomi Adeyemi’s (2018) debut young adult fantasy, Children ofBlood and Bone, had been a powerful experience. So, I wanted to provide students with an opportunity to join Zelie as she traverses the mythical, West African-inspired continent of Orïsha with her companions. Their reading would examine the hero’s journey archetype but not be delegated to a White, cisgendered male hero. Adeyemi’s gift as a storyteller is her construction of suspenseful moments and elaborate, fast-paced action scenes. Her craft would appeal to my students’ enjoyment of plot-driven texts. In addition, her alternating points of view question characters’ understanding of truth as framed by their divergent upbringings. In numerous publicity interviews, Adeyemi

explains, “It’s an allegory for the modern Black experience.” Her politically-driven theme explores race, social justice, and gender. In our discussions, Laura shared the title of a picture book, Sulwe, by Lupita Nyong’o (2019) as a possible pairing with Children ofBlood and Bone. This picture book broaches the topic of colorism and would further contextualize discourse about skin color among the Orïshan characters and oppression. Sulwe is not only in print but is also read by the author on Netflix’s Bookmarks series. Such a read aloud format would be a welcome addition.

To amplify my unit on Roll ofThunder, HearMyCry, I needed to create more depth in our historical study of Black sharecroppers during the Great Depression. Prior to the inventory process, Laura assigned Kwame Alexander’s (2020) award-winning picture book, The Undefeated. His writing and Kadir Nelson’s painterly illustrations had been awe-inspiring. I decided to pair these titles. Instead of solely focusing on the historical context, I revised my lesson plans so as to read Roll ofThunder, HearMyCry through the lens of Alexander’s words that celebrate unsung heroes, namely those of the fictional Logan family. See Appendix 1 for my new lesson plan introducing unsung heroes in Black history. Soon the process of designing lesson plans that promote critical literacy had become joyful. And it had been a long time since I had felt that way. The inventory process afforded solutions to my many curricular quandaries. Instructional possibilities emerged from my pedagogical knowledge and experience alongside Laura’s guiding push. In turn, I rediscovered my creative process, while also honoring the Framework and my school’s expectations. I had achieved balance.

Moving Forward

In September 2022, I taught Kwame Alexander’s “Seventy-Six Dollars and Forty-Nine Cents” as well as “Oranges” and “The Seventh Grade” by Gary Soto. I watched my students light up with discovery as they constructed meaning among the three texts penned by diverse authors. This trio of texts left me wondering about the portrayal of young girls. Are they simply objects desired by love sick boys? Does Alexander write a more empowering love interest in Angel Carter? Or does he simply give her more depth by making his narrator able to read her mind, therefore, giving her consciousness? How does this trio position readers? Successful in their comprehension, what meanings would my students construct had I selected different text(s) but applied the same interpretive process? Those texts I select for a seventh-grade curriculum have the potential to inform a student’s sense of belonging in the classroom and beyond. Providing them with texts that multi-perspectival view of the world may shape students’ social development while fine-tuning their own literate identities. Like the butterfly effect, a trivial flap of wings with consequential effects, had happened. What if I had read “The Seventh Grade” in isolation? What would happen if we focused on simply the character moving through this single plot–his choices, his setting, his relationships? How do I improve their experience? Owing to this inventory process, I read with a critical eye.

In “Why Teach with Children’s Literature” Hade (1999) reminds us that on our journey as readers, we may explore various paths – the positive, the negative, the creative, and the transformative. The curriculum I teach aspires to encompass all four, and I remain in continual search of texts and ways for my students to respond to them. I hope to transform reading “into compassionate, just action” (p. 6). Experiencing this inventory process and now teaching the very literature I inventoried, evaluated, and discovered over the summer months, I think of Laura’s role as my mentor and guide. She provided a framework within which I could not only evaluate the taught curriculum but also rethink my teaching of children’s literature. In my initial reflection submitted online I wrote, “My work in this course and my study of new and relevant children’s literature is pushing me to critically evaluate why it is that we select the texts we do for our children, and how do we frame these texts so that our children are making changes to the broken and fractured parts of our society?” There are parts of this process that cannot help but live within me now.

Concluding Remarks

Rawls’ (2022) TikTok video may be a metaphorical “canary in a coalmine” that forewarns of the consequences when pk-12 students are denied access to diverse books outside of pre-approved curriculum lists. Betsy’s detailed trials and triumphs reveal the encouraging possibilities of what an English language arts and literacy curriculum might be/come . Her narrative lends hope in an literacy landscape marred by book bans and challenges. The inventory process is driven by an inquiry stance anchored in self-reflection and critical literacy, thus, Betsy’s pedagogical practice of curriculum development evolved. She questioned if each text had sparked joy in her and, most importantly, in her seventh-grade readers. Joy might manifest as a motivation to read. Joy might pique readers’ interests. Joy might compel a page turn to find out what happens next. Joy might result in meaningful responses. Joy might heighten empathy. Or joy might give us the courage to reflect, interrogate, or change.

As a “thought-partner,” Laura respected Betsy’s transformative agency, her teacher autonomy, and supported her critical insights and divergent thinking that resisted the status quo of her existing grade-level curriculum (Teo, 2019). Taking deep dives into each title’s content, Betsy evaluated literary elements such as plot, theme, point of view, mood, author’s craft, linguistic style, pacing, textual and inferential evidence of the characters’ (and authors’) social identities, and intended learning outcomes (Young et al., 2019). She explored possible texts that students could read in place of or in addition to existing titles. Her selections have been oriented to contemporary values promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion whilst appreciating our literary heritage as per the Framework. Betsy foregrounded her students’ needs above her own predilections. She wondered how else her students could engage in and respond to chosen texts in critical ways, then re-designed lessons. In her search for “solutions’’ to “curricular quandaries,’’ Betsy constructed experiences for herself and her students to discover the joys of reading diverse and inclusive children’s literature. While the inventory

process offered Betsy an opportunity to take up critical literacy, she has since continued the practice of interrogating and resisting texts that perpetuate gender inequities. When educators like Betsy critically read their own curricular materials by examining relations of power within each text and across the text set in order to re-envision the learning possibilities, they are one step closer to implementing a culturally sustaining pedagogy.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Laura Hudock, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Department of Education at Framingham State University, Framingham, Massachusetts. Dr. Hudock teaches undergraduate courses in elementary literacy methods, child and family studies, and practicum seminar as well as graduate courses in the Language and Literacy Education program. Her research focuses on twenty-first century literacies and children’s literature, namely critical content analysis of and child readers’ multimodal responses to picture books, graphic novels, early readers, and transitional chapter books.

Betsy Lazo is a seventh-grade English teacher, a school-based literacy leader, and a postmaster’s certificate graduate student pursuing her specialist license in reading at Framingham State University. Betsy completed a one-on-one online directed study of children’s literature with Laura during summer 2022. Laura engaged Betsy in a critical inventory of the diverse literature titles that anchor Betsy’s school’s seventh-grade English curriculum. Reflection of this project is shared in this article.