Literacy Now

Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out. Susan Kuklin. 2014. Candlewick.

Ages 15+

Summary

In Beyond Magenta, a Stonewall Honor Book,Susan Kuklin offers a “spectrum” of transgender and gender-neutral teens as told through the words and photographic images of six individuals. Whereas the first five stories in the book share experiences of coming out as trans and relationships with family, friends, guardians, and teachers, the concluding chapter, the “lifeline,” tells the story of Luke, who found compassion and acceptance in his community through theater. Luke’s story begins with poetry, the outlet that gives him the security and space to explore his identity outside of society’s constructs. 

The first five chapters of the book articulate the individual stories of five teenagers and young adults and explain what it means to be trans; these stories depict case studies of experiences couched in sometimes brutal reality. Through interviews dispersed with her own comments, Kuklin carefully depicts each young person with authenticity, respect, and care. Beyond Magenta offers the reader, whether familiar with LGBTQ issues, a thought-provoking source to gain understanding of what it means to be transgender and provides special attention to appropriate pronoun usage, gender identification, and the process of transitioning. 

Teachers will want to vet each chapter carefully and consider their students and their community. Some chapters are more graphic than others, but the subject is too important to ignore. For a complete discussion of the topic and education, see the chapter “‘Trans’ Young Adult Literature for Secondary English Classrooms: Authors Speak Out,” in sj miller’s forthcoming Teaching, Affirming, and Recognizing Trans and Gender Creative Youth: A Queer Literacy Framework (Palgrave Macmillan).

Cross-Curricular Connections

English, health, art, social studies, science

Discussion Topics

Identity

How important is gender to your identity? Does your gender inform your actions or do you act independently from your gender identity?  Consider how you have been treated since you were a child. What activities interested you? What were your toys? How do you judge how boys and girls act? Briefly reflect on gender. How do you understand your gender identity? How do others expect you to act because of your gender? Imagine a world in which one element of your identity was changed (can be gender, race, socioeconomic status)—what would be different? How would you be different? How would others regard you?

Words and Images

How do the photographs (or lack thereof) inform the writing on each individual? What do the images add to or take away from the teens’ stories? How would this book be different without visual representations? What happens to you as a reader when you cannot visualize one teen?

Ideas for Classroom Use

Photo Essay

Prewrite: If you were to put a photo essay together to express your identity, what would it look like? What artistic license would you take? What would you include or not include to represent yourself visually? Does the representation change depending on your intended audience?

1. Storyboard your photo essay: Decide what is most important to your essay in illustrating your identity.
2. Create photo essay: Facebook album, tumblr page, photo album
3. After compiling the essay, reflect on the outcome: Did it meet your expectations, do you feel that it accurately represents you, what would you add/delete/change? What limitations of the photo essay did you experience? Did you learn anything about yourself, your identity, the manner in which you express your identity through this project? Discuss the public or private availability of your essay. Were you surprised by the end result? What did you find challenging while working on the essay?

Interview a Partner

Have students compose a list of 10 questions they would like to ask a peer in regarding his or her identity. These questions should be general and applicable to anyone. Pair students and have each conduct an interview with his or her partner. Take field notes to include exact quotes and body language. Each student will then create a short visual essay of his or her partner based on the interview. A good place to start might be in childhood, moving forward to the present time. Use Kuklin’s style as a model for good interviewing techniques.

Diversity Challenge

Assign a diverse aspect to each member of the class. Use index cards with identifying personas: homeless teen living in his car, boy who likes girls only as friends, Latina who just arrived from Mexico, identified lesbian, mother of a trans teen, and so forth. Writing from this point of view might be safer; guide discussion carefully to disavow stereotypes.

Additional Scholarly Resources

Kuklin’s website includes interviews, articles, and reviews for Beyond Magenta.

Clemmons, K.R., Hayn, J.A., & Olvey, H. (in press). “Trans” young adult literature for
secondary English classrooms: Authors speak out. In sj miller (Ed.), Teaching, Affirming, and Recognizing Trans and Gender Creative Youth: A Queer Literacy Framework. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Mason, K. (2008). Creating a Space for YAL with LGBT Content in Our Personal Reading: Creating a Place for LGBT Students in Our Classrooms. The ALAN Review, 35(3). Retrieved from http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/v35n3/mason.html

Additional Literary Resources

Andrews, A. (2014). Some assembly required: The not-so-secret life of a transgender teen. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

Hill, K.R. (2014). Rethinking normal: A memoir in transition. Simon & Schuster Books for Young People.

Katcher, B. (2009). Almost perfect. Delacorte Books for Young Readers.

Peters, J.A. (2006). Luna. Little, Brown and Company.

Wittlinger, E. (2011). Parrotfish. Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

Judith A. Hayn is professor of Secondary Education at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She is a member and past chair of SIGNAL, the Special Interest Group Network on Adolescent Literature of ILA, which focuses on using young adult literature in the classroom. Karina Clemmons is an associate professor of Secondary Education and Laura Langley is a master’s student at University of Arkansas at Little Rock. 

If you give a teacher a workday, it’s likely because she needs the time to analyze current data she’s been given, as well as to do some grading and planning.

Now that she has the time, she’ll probably want to use the time and the data to make new seating charts and plan interventions.

When she’s attempting to download her classroom, department, and grade-level data along with electronic class lists, she’ll realize she needs to update her password to access the lists. The computer will have to send her a confirmation e-mail.

While waiting for the confirmation, she’ll check e-mail (and voicemail, just to be sure) and she’ll respond to a message from a parent, which will require three more e-mails and a phone call.

While she is waiting for a return call, she’ll take a moment to delete some old e-mail, and in doing so she’ll notice an article about an interesting intervention strategy she flagged and had planned to read.

So, being a digital immigrant, she’ll print it out and reach for a highlighter.

When she’s finished reading, she’ll look over her highlighted notes, be inspired, and want to talk to her team about it, so she’ll make more copies and head to another classroom to share.

She’ll start sharing ideas, and her team will get excited as well. They might get carried away and pull out chart paper and markers and start brainstorming. They’ll collaborate and create new learning targets in Google Docs. They may even end up changing their lesson plans for the next week!

When they are done, she’ll probably want to work on updating her classroom webpage, with links to the vocabulary game they just created, to reflect the changes. She’ll need to update that password as well, and wait for confirmation in order to finish.

She’ll remember that she will have to rearrange student cooperative group assignments and then communicate the changes with the classroom paraprofessional, her SpEd team teacher, the EL specialist, and the instructional coach.

After visiting their offices and classrooms, she’ll probably ask you to help her rearrange her classroom. So you’ll push furniture around, and as long as she’s already moving the desks, she’ll take the opportunity to spray, scrub, and disinfect them. She’ll ask you if she can thank you with a cup of coffee, bottled water, or an energy drink. When the coffee break is over, she’ll mention how much work she plans to get done today.
Then she’ll look at the clock, frown, and realize she needs to get busy, which means she’ll need to sit back at her desk.

Sitting at her desk, looking at the stacks of papers, she’ll be reminded of all the grading she needs to get done. While she’s grading, she’ll spend a few moments crafting some parent communication. She’ll call, e-mail, or text each parent in the communication method he or she prefers. Thinking about these differences will remind her of the varied student needs in her classroom. She’ll wonder if she’s challenging and inspiring her students.

She’ll remember the instructional strategy change and the collaboration of her colleagues and hope she’ll see increased student learning. While she’s mulling over these changes and her hopes for her students, her principal will stop by to congratulate her and support her efforts in using new strategies. Of course, the principal would love to see the results!

So….she’ll start brainstorming ways to collect data in order to prove the strategy was effective. And chances are, when she gets new data, she’s going to need another workday to go with it.

Julie Scullen is a former president of the Minnesota Reading Association and Minnesota Secondary Reading Interest Council and is a current member of the International Literacy Association Board of Directors. She taught most of her career in Secondary Reading Intervention classrooms and now serves as Teaching and Learning Specialist for Secondary Reading in Anoka-Hennepin schools in Minnesota, working with teachers of all content areas to foster literacy achievement. She teaches graduate courses at Hamline University in St. Paul in literacy leadership and coaching, as well as reading assessment and evaluation.

If we know nothing else about reading, we know that the way to become good at reading is to read.  A lot. Volume is important. And because reading is learned best through reading, and reading is a voluntary act, it is vital that students are motivated enough to begin to read and engaged enough to keep on reading for a lifetime.  It is not enough just to teach our children how to read, we must teach them to want to read.

Nancy Atwell, Donalyn Miller, John Guthrie, and others know what it takes to “teach” students to want to read. There really is a proven formula which, when practiced with fidelity, consistently produces lifelong readers. I call this four-part formula the ACTS of Reading:

Access:  All students have access to a rich supply of good things to read.

Instead of buying that “silver bullet” commercial reading program, use those funds to prepare for pleasure and voracious reading by stocking classrooms and libraries with beautiful and intriguing books and magazines. Entice students with accessible displays of curated books of high interest at appropriate reading levels. Incite the motivation to read by first and foremost providing a plethora of engaging age-appropriate materials that meet the diverse needs and interests of all our students.

Choice:  All students are allowed to choose what they would like to read.

If the point is for students to enjoy reading enough to want to keep reading, then they must be allowed, even encouraged, to read for pleasure—not just for information, not just closely or critically, but for fun! Allow students individuality and autonomy. Motivation and engagement soar when students are free to read what is of interest to them. Let them forage around the book buffet you’ve provided (Access!) until they find something they really want to read, then give them time to settle in and simply read.

Time: All students are afforded time during the school day to read.

Why is free reading, independent reading, pleasure reading, or whatever we call that magical time spent in “The Reading Zone,” as described by Atwell, not important enough to be prioritized in schools? We can provide a wealth of good things to read and allow students to choose what they want to read, but unless we schedule time in the school day to read we risk losing them to the lure of technology. Once that bell rings, video games and social networking become the default leisure activities and pleasure reading is displaced. U.S. students, on average, spend 7,800 hours a year outside of school and only 900 hours a year in school, according to The Read-Aloud Handbook. We must intervene strongly on our students’ behalf. To hook students on reading, they need substantial, uninterrupted time to read. During school.

Socialize: All students are encouraged to socialize with others about what they are reading.

Students who are avid readers generally come from homes where books are valued and reading is seen as a normal thing to do. But for many kids, talking about books seems unnatural and reading for pleasure is not the norm. Yet when they are allowed autonomy and time to relax and read they become more comfortable. They begin to feel like readers. They are suddenly eager to talk about what they are reading. Socializing with and around books not only builds reader confidence but also creates an inclusive culture of literacy all can enjoy.  Let’s continue to find ways to advertise and talk about what we’re reading, and to make reading cool—too cool for (just) school!

The Knowing–Doing Gap

We know that enacting the ACTS of Reading motivates students to read and to keep reading.

We know what to do, but is there a knowing–doing gap? If so, let’s mind the gap and commit to doing what we know works. Let’s provide all our students’ access to lots of great books, choice in what they read, time to simply read during the school day, and opportunities for socializing around books. Let’s not just build a nation of kids who know how to read, let’s build a nation of kids who choose to read—for a lifetime.

Deborah Hollimon is currently the Reading Program Director at the United States Air Force Academy Preparatory School. She is a longtime ILA member and the 2015 recipient of the Nila Banton Smith Award for translating research and theory into practice in developing content area literacy. Deborah has worked in the field of literacy for over 30 years, first as a speech and language pathologist, then as a secondary English teacher and districtwide literacy coordinator. She holds a doctorate in curriculum and instruction from the Louisiana Education Consortium.

My dream had finally come true! After endless hours of writing and studying, I earned my doctorate degree in Reading and Language. I was ready to settle into a new career as an assistant professor of literacy at a university in fall semester. How would I impart what I learned to the next generation of teachers tactfully? I wondered about this goal as I prepared coursework for five classes for the upcoming semester.

New Possibilities in the Collegiate Classroom

The prospect of putting together a substantial experience for the teacher candidates made me slightly nervous. Sacrificing personal time during the summer to thoroughly read texts and create syllabi and learning activities for students was necessary. In plainly written lesson plans, I developed assignments deliberately that would require students to do more than memorize facts in texts and regurgitate rationales for why the best teaching practices or theories were adopted. A signature assignment was created to encourage students to read current research in the field of education. This assignment would change the way my students and I viewed the integration of research into a literacy methods class.

The Professional Journal Article Defense assignment was created to help teacher candidates defend the use of current research in an intermediate classroom. The teacher candidates are allowed to choose an idea that was published in The Reading Teacher, Teaching Exceptional Children, or the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy to complete the project. The teacher candidate is expected to read the contents of the article, integrate the information into a current lesson that will be taught during a field experience in a public classroom, and obtain three student work samples to describe how the idea helped children learn a new skill or strategy. My intention was to create an assignment that would prepare teacher candidates to convince any parent or administrator why the research-based idea is beneficial to the school curriculum.

Trial and Tribulation

The teacher candidates enrolled in the class were initially horrified by the project’s content. They expressed their fears openly in class and were not afraid to share their disbelief that the project was possible to complete. The teacher candidates were equally unsure about collecting work samples to describe how an idea from a journal can be integrated in a lesson plan to help children learn. I assured them that they engage in the practice more frequently in the program than they realize. Similar tasks are completed when the teacher candidates visit www.teacherspayteachers.com to purchase materials to teach lessons or when they visit www.pinterest.com for ideas to create lively holiday bulletin boards for the class. The task of completing the Professional Journal Article Defense assignment is no different from informal tasks they complete each semester.

However, the assignment requires teacher candidates to seek scholarly resources to borrow ideas and report the results of its integration into instruction. For example, teacher candidates are responsible for providing a written explanation of how each work sample (e.g., written quiz or composition) demonstrates how the children were able to complete the task successfully.

I was pleased when the teacher candidates were able to push aside skeptical thoughts and find outstanding literacy, motivation, or math ideas from the research journals to integrate into class instruction. For example, one teacher candidate found an article that encouraged educators to allow children to define causes and effects of events in expository texts. In order to help children understand the definition of each term, the teacher candidate used the research to provide them the opportunity to reenact several stories in the presence of their peers. The class was encouraged to identify the cause-and-effect component in each scenario. One child demonstrated how an individual who does not get enough sleep (cause) can become very tired (effect).

Although the teacher candidate did not collect samples of this initial task, the idea influenced her to present more scenarios to the students to identify how causes and effects can show that relationships exist between concepts, objects, or humans. The children were later encouraged to independently read sentences and identify the cause and effect in the sentences. For instance, the students were asked to use their knowledge of relationships to identify the cause and effect in the following sentences:

• The blizzard hit the city, so all schools were closed.
• You should brush your teeth often so you don’t get cavities.
• I fell off the bike and scraped my knee.

The teacher candidate was able to collect work samples demonstrating the students’ understanding of causes and effects in written texts. The teacher candidate acknowledged that the content in the journal article motivated her to engage students in active simulations to learn the concepts in the class. As a result, the activity increased student involvement and academic progress of the participants.

The Professional Journal Article Defense assignment not only promotes reading engagement, but also supports an educator’s effort to purposely adapt research ideas from established scholars. More important, teacher candidates are encouraged to think carefully about why their ideas should be included in the curriculum. The study of research should be welcomed in literacy methods classes because it motivates participants to share with others why the idea is beneficial to the school curriculum. We should encourage the next generation of teachers to fully indulge in reading and adoption of contemporary research.

Claudia Gates is an assistant professor at literacy at Minnesota State University Moorhead.

I strongly support the claim that children learn best through play. However, as a reading scientist who studies how beginners learn to read, I feel compelled to clarify a few misconceptions about the forms of literacy instruction appropriate during the early childhood years (birth to age 8). The supposition that teachers should not provide literacy instruction to young children is troubling and dangerous, and suggesting that all children will acquire sufficient literacy skills through play alone is misguided.

These claims stem from a misunderstanding of literacy instruction as didactic, teacher-centered instruction. However, literacy instruction and didactic instruction are not synonymous. Although both involve teacher lesson planning, literacy instruction can assume several forms ranging on a continuum from a play-based approach to a direct, teacher-led approach, whereas didactic instruction is more narrowly defined as teacher-centered with students as passive learners. There is a tremendous amount of nuance along the continuum from play-based to teacher-led literacy learning that should be acknowledged, and it should be obvious that didactic instruction is to be avoided.

Teachers may choose to use a more direct, teacher-led approach to teach literacy skills. In the literacy research field, we call this providing explicit and systematic instruction in research-based approaches, and at a certain age this is exactly what some children need to crack the code, that is, to learn how letters represent sounds and how to use this knowledge to read and spell words. This form of instruction involves active student participation and a variety of highly engaging materials (think kindergartner with a wipey board and magnetic letters or shaving cream!). This is a far cry from the conventional view of didactic instruction where a teacher stands at a blackboard with a pointer, or students are mindlessly drilled with worksheets.

Effective literacy instruction for beginners is necessarily teacher centered because the teacher needs to facilitate and scaffold learning on the basis of her knowledge of the skills students need to acquire. This instruction is anything but passive on the student’s end. This form of instruction can be done in small groups or one-on-one. In fact, for children who haven’t developed specific literacy skills by a certain age, it is malpractice not to teach concepts to them directly and give them repeated practice, in a developmentally appropriate and engaging way. Student-centered, discovery learning has its place, but so does direct and explicit instruction, when done properly.

Teachers may choose to teach literacy skills through a play-based, child-centered/teacher-facilitated, exploration mode. This is obviously the most developmentally appropriate way to teach literacy skills to young children. The misconception here is that students are “just” playing. Instead, it should be clear that they are playing in a language- and print-rich environment with teachers interacting with the students and facilitating in-the-moment learning opportunities. Highly skilled teachers who have a strong understanding of the development of literacy skill acquisition intentionally manipulate the environment and scaffold activities and materials to systematically expose children to early literacy concepts. Skills are strategically embedded into play-based activities, which facilitate learning.
High-quality teachers are smart and savvy facilitators of the environment, and they use their creativity to embed early literacy learning and skills into daily activities. This makes effective play-based literacy instruction difficult to do well, but when done so, it results in powerful learning experiences for children. Simply sending kids off to play will not, on its own, culminate in students’ acquiring literacy skills necessary for future success in reading.

Both forms of instruction on the ends of the continuum, explicit and play-based, require highly skilled teachers who have a strong understanding of the development of literacy skills informed by scientific discoveries, which allows them to systematically scaffold instruction. Both forms of instruction also require the use of highly engaging materials. Furthermore, good teachers know when and how to use both forms of instruction depending on the student and the concept. They assess student learning and adjust their instructional approaches on the basis of who is successfully acquiring the skills through a play-based, student-centered model, and who needs to learn the concept in a more direct and explicit manner.

Reading science research has demonstrated that certain skills are imperative for young children to learn in the very early years of life. Specifically, students with stronger letter knowledge and phonemic awareness at school entry have been shown to make greater progress in learning how to read, and experimental studies have demonstrated that when young children are taught these skills they make more progress in learning to read than children who do not receive systematic and explicit instruction in these skills.

In the early years, these skills can be systematically embedded into play-based, child-centered activities. However, early childhood teachers need to be vigilant for children who haven’t acquired these skills at specific developmental time points. These children then need the instruction provided in an explicit way to ensure that they do not fall behind benchmarks in their literacy skill development.

The danger of equating the concepts of direct and explicit instruction with didactic instruction, and thus assuming that didactic instruction should be avoided, has damning implications for students from lower socioeconomic status communities and English learners who are often deficient in these skills. In essence, by adopting a play-only viewpoint, any form of direct and explicit literacy instruction is avoided, and subsequently, the code is held hostage for our most needy children at critical times in their development.

Katharine Pace Miles is an assistant professor of early childhood education at Brooklyn College in New York.