CMIS Evaluation Fiction Focus

The literacy debate rages, certainly throughout the English-speaking world. Here in Australia, a new title by Monash University’s Associate Professor Ilana Snyder has made front-page news in The Australian newspaper. The Literacy Wars : why teaching children to read and write is a battleground in Australia took up many column inches on the weekend of 2-3 February. A CMIS review will appear in the Resource Bank soon.

In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has launched the National Year of Reading - an initiative designed to put reading high on the national agenda. And that’s reading for everybody, not just people at school.

Now in the US, a school librarian has put his spin on what he feels are the reasons teens are reading less. We are all reading less, he argues. ‘How long is it?’ has replaced ‘Will I like it?’ in school libraries because the information overload tipping point has been reached. These days we all skim in order to survive. We have become a culture of searchers, not readers. It’s a thoughtful piece, well worth reading. But if he is right, does it mean that reading for pleasure will soon be the preserve of those with the leisure time to ‘indulge’? Hooking kids into books is one of the most satisfying aspects of the teacher-student relationship. Making sure that keeps happening is more important than ever.

What determines our choice of film? Yes, we usually read reviews and we follow recommendations of people whose judgement we trust, but often the clincher is the trailer we see when we are already captive in the cinema. The same principle applies to students ‘captive’ in the library or the classroom - when they are selecting something to read we can point them to reviews, they can listen to the thoughts of others, but this visual generation will also appreciate a book trailer, and there are now plenty of great examples out there in Web 2.0 land.

Last year Arizona’s Pima County Public Library ran a competition with its teens to suggest suitable titles. The winners then worked with a professional production team to create short trailers to be voted on by other teens. The shortlist included:

• The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger (an oldie but a goodie, except for Tom Henderson, the protagonist of King Dork)
• Lois Lowry’s The Giver ( sure-fire literature circle winner)
• Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (teen romance novel of the year in many schools)

And simple but really effective examples are on the Blue Valley North Library Media Center (Kansas) site. The witty promos for Dairy Queen and Kiki Strike : Inside the Shadow City demonstrate what can be achieved with few resources. Note the best practice in the citation of sources.

That vast repository of online videos, YouTube, has plenty of examples if you are specific in your search. The 2006 and 2007 US Teen Book Video Award winners are there, including How I Live Now, The Book Thief, The Invention of Hugo Cabret and A Great and Terrible Beauty. These (and other) titles can also be found on the Expanded Books site, although it must be said that a teacher-librarian’s input to the developers on how to search effectively would have made this site more user friendly. Best to search on author or title rather than genre. And if you can’t find Markus Zusak under Z, it’s because he has been indexed as Zusak Markus. It’s a pity, as this site has real possibilities and looks like it will become the official repository for these awards. (And wouldn’t it be great to have an Australian Teen Book Video Award!)

So why not use technology to introduce some of these titles in your classroom or library? Better still, why not collaborate with others at your school and run a book trailer competition of your own. Don’t forget to post the results and tell us all about them. What exciting times we live in.

Justine Larbalestier - Australian author, New York resident - ponders this question on her most recent blog entry, sparking an interesting debate. Justine’s most recent titles are set in New York and Sydney and feature a potent mix of teenagers and magic. But, as Justine says, the whole notion of the ‘teenager’ is a relatively modern construct and YA is a problematic genre in that it is the only one defined by its audience. So what makes a novel YA? Read what Justine has to say and see if you agree. What a great discussion topic for a teacher-librarian or English teacher to initiate with their classes.

The SBS television series, Inside Australia, features four teachers over coming weeks, commencing on Wednesday 6 February at 8pm. Included in the lineup is English teacher and YA author, Michael Parker (13 February) whose first novel Doppelganger was released last year and shortlisted for the Ethel Turner Prize for YA literature in the NSW Premier’s Awards. In the program, Michael talks about the wider reading scheme he has implemented to improve literacy rates among boys. By all accounts, Michael is a truly inspiring teacher. The website he has created for Doppelganger is enough to inspire any reluctant reader to dip into the novel. This sounds like a series worth watching.

A new annual children’s literature award has been announced in the United States. The Horace Mann Upstanders Book Award is sponsored by Antioch University in Los Angeles, and will be awarded to the best fiction book published in North America in 2007/8 for children in years K-6 that ‘best exemplifies the ideals of social action and in turn encourages young readers to become agents of change themselves’. The award will be presented in June.

In Australia, the Psychologists for Peace Children’s Peace Literature Award has a similar remit but with a scope that includes books for teenagers. This biennial award went to Michael Gerard Bauer in 2007 for Don’t Call Me Ishmael.