ALAN Workshop-Ginger Monseau
ALAN Workshop-Keynote Address
Ginger Monseau
Ginger Monseau is is interested in the effect of the increased violence in our world on our young people. There is violence every where we turn. School violence, community violence, violence in the home.
How do we help students cope with the violence in their world? How do we help them understand it? We can use Young Adult literature to fulfill a need in students that they may not know they have. We can give them books that reflect their lives; books that serve as an extension to the unfulfilled emotional needs.
Often we give too much attention and focus to the literature and not enough attention to the exploration of student needs. Stories can satisfy the emotional needs of both the teller and the listener/reader.
What are student needs? What do they need to have recognized?
Gives the example of Maureen Daly's Seventeenth Summer (1942) and Judy Blue's Forever (1975). Both books deal with pre-marital sex, with the first book treating it as wish fulfillment, a notion of romance.
Monseau talked about the book Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet out of Idaho by Katz.
The reaction to Columbine was extreme-it engendered too much fear about when or where it could happen again. Not much was done to help lost, tormented students. How *do* we help them? How do we hear them? (Begin to look at the peace issue of EJ) We have a lack of facility with the emotional response linked to juvenile delinquency.
Narrative should be at the heart of our curriculum. (Worriers with Words by Nelson ?) "Our stories will get published one way or another." Students are literally dying to tell their stories, and it should be our job to help them tell their stories.
When we tell our stories, in some ways we are both the speaker and the audience of our stories because we're (our students) are the ones who MUST tell our stories. We need to hear them as much as we need to tell them.
Student concerns are the same today as they were for us. The difference is the access to adult information makes it different. Students are frightened of the same things we were--will we be liked, will we have friends, will we be safe--but they are exposed to the most extreme possible outcomes.
Part of the fear comes from the competitive atmosphere in our schools. Why is there a competitive atmosphere in our schools and not a cooperative one? Why does the "real world" greatly influence school. Why can't school greatly influence the "real world"?
- When students are asking questions, are they practicing critical thinking?
- Are they answering test questions cooperatively (and if they are, is that cheating)?
- Are they creating test questions collaboratively (and if they are, is that cheating)?
Isn't learning our goal for students? And if learning is the goal, and we can allay some student fears by allowing them to work cooperatively rather than competitively, why aren't we doing that?
Students can learn from each other and from the literature we bring into the classroom. Students want to tell their stories and create their own stories.
*We need to teach English so people stop killing themselves*
"Each affects the other, the other affects the next. Stories are all one."-Mitch Albom from The Five People You Meet in Heaven
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Last Updated April 11, 2011
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