02/06/2007

Identifying With Books

Schools turn to literature to help address tough topics

By
Record-Eagle staff writer

Record-Eagle/Tyler Sipe
Dawn Farley, the library department chair for Traverse City Area Public Schools, says reality-based fiction has always been a great tool for all readers, including students, to work through an array of social and personal problems.

TRAVERSE CITY — When a student died in a car accident in 2005, Blair Elementary School turned to a book in its fiction collection to help his classmates deal with the loss.

Self-help books aren't new. But more and more, children's authors are using fiction to address tough topics like peer pressure, family stress, drug addiction and death.

"There's always been reality fiction, but in the last five to 10 years it's certainly been more (prevalent), I think because of our society,” said Patricia Parsons, K-6 library media specialist for Traverse City Area Public Schools. ”As a society, we're more ready to discuss these issues and we realize the importance of discussing them and of children being able to vent — and children's authors have picked up on that. They're filling that need.”

Reality-based fiction now is one of the two biggest categories in children's literature, said Lois Orth, a children's specialist for Horizon Books in Traverse City. While readers of popular fiction like "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” series don't necessarily think of it as reality based, "it is something they like to read because they identify with a lot of the situations that the characters in the books are going through,” she said.

That's making it easier for schools to help kids wrestling with problems in their lives, with assistance from library staff.

"If a situation would be happening in a particular child's life that they were made aware of by the child, a teacher, a social worker or a school psychologist, they would step in and through their own knowledge of the book recommend (a title),” Parsons said.

Some area schools even assign books like Laurie Halse Anderson's "Speak,” about a teenage outcast, as summer reading for incoming students, Orth said.

"It gives them a chance to talk about peer pressure,” she added.

Dawn Farley stops short of calling the use of such books in schools bibliotherapy, an expressive therapy that uses books to help people solve problems.

"Librarians are not trained as therapists,” said Farley, Traverse City East Junior High librarian and department chair for the TCAPS school libraries. "We don't recommend books for healing but rather for information and sometimes enlightenment.”

But she said teachers and counselors at the school often ask about books dealing with certain issues, especially the loss of a parent or sibling. And sometimes they don't have to.

"I noticed here that students will come in and ask for books for themselves,” she said.

Interlochen Pathfinder School uses reality fiction to bridge components of its curriculum and to deal with greater "wellness” issues, said Duncan Sprattmoran, a 7th- and 8th-grade language arts and social studies teacher and curriculum coordinator for the school.

Currently 7th-graders studying the American Revolution, tyranny and the formation of the Constitution are reading the 2002 book "Ghost Boy,” which centers around an albino boy who is ostracized in the 1950s, he said.

"It teaches about how appearances can be deceiving, why people are excluded based on appearance and color and personality and what the Constitution can do for us,” he said.

Blair Elementary School uses reality-based fiction to teach life guidelines, or "citizenship for life,” as part of its integrated thematic instruction program, said Mary Kolberg, the school's library media paraprofessional. But the number of books now available on themes like honesty, trustworthiness and respect has boomed in recent years, as shown by her burgeoning bibliography.

Reality fiction changes with the times, as new issues arise and as children face more adult situations at younger ages, said Farley, who also teaches children's literature for Central Michigan University.

"If we look at the early history of children's literature in this country, we would find grammar primers and religious materials for the most part,” she said. "Children's literature has evolved with the culture — and as children have become more sophisticated, so have their reading selections. Students travel more. They watch TV and, of course, use the Internet.

"In fiction for the junior high level, what I see now are books that deal with peer pressure, family, stress and addictive situations,” she said. "Fantasy is also very popular.”

Ideally and historically, literature has illuminated why people act the way they do, and good literature is the best vehicle to talk about emotion, Sprattmoran said. But teachers need to be choosy when selecting titles, he cautioned.

"We have a plethora of children's fiction books, but that doesn't mean they're good," he said. "The challenge of a teacher is to choose books which are both thematically relevant but still are models of literature.”