Reading as Shared Experience

/ Promoting Collaborative Learning Cultures / By

I am in three book clubs. One, I started over 24 years ago with a couple of friends of mine. When I invited my mother-in-law to be a part of it, she invited some of her friends. My friends Lisa, Cathy, Diane, and I were the youngest by quite a bit. Our conversations about the books have been so very rich as a result of our experiences. My other two book clubs are equally awesome, with participants having different life experiences. Although I love to read alone, the experience is made better for me when I share what resonates with others and get their point of view on what I read. The depth of enjoyment and understanding I get from a novel is amplified when I share it.

This does not just apply to works of fiction. I have participated in book clubs around educational books with other educators (in fact, I am in a Voxer book study group via #TwoMenandaBook exploring the themes in The Fire Within book by Mandy Froelich (for which I contributed a chapter). The conversations have been so rich and powerful. Listening or reading others talk about my own book, Social LEADia has been so intriguing to me because of the perspective others bring to it.

In a recent IB Round Table I facilitated, we talked the Theory of Knowledge, which basically emphasizes that knowing is impacted by the knowledge we share and the perspective we bring:

“It is often through encountering differences that we discover how we think and what we believe ourselves and come to see the social context within which knowledge, both our own and others’, is constructed”

(Dombrowski, Rotenberg, Beck, 2013)

Because I believe in the power of a shared experience and dialogue around books, I made sure to use Book Clubs as a format in my English classes. I was truly able to assess whether my students had connected with the themes and characters in the book and they were talking about the novel in a much more authentic way. It is also because of this, that I have always been a teacher-advisor for a Book club in any school in which I have taught.

When I learned about the Global Read Aloud started by Pernille Ripp, many years ago, it was the shared experience of books that drew me in and the idea of expanding the perspectives beyond the homogeneous groups we sometimes (not always) encounter in our classrooms. The ability, in 2019, to connect with others to share opinions about a work of fiction is so easy and so powerful.

When my students and I read the Global Read Aloud book, Refugee this past October, and we looked at the several hashtags created for the book; in particular #RefugeeHS which was created by Sandra Coniglio, something really interesting happened. The online conversations made our own conversations go in a slightly different direction. So too, when one of my students expressed that the book was stereotypical, wondering if there were other genocide stories people knew about, composing a tweet together was enlightening (I blogged about that here) I began to wonder why we didn’t do this more often. Why don’t we read a book, explore its nuances by talking about it in person with our students and then open the conversation up to the world?

In that spirit, my students and I are spearheading a Twitter chat for the Forest of Reading book selections by the Ontario Library Association. The high school program is called White Pine. Basically, a committee selects ten Canadian books and students who read five or more are eligible to vote for their favourite book. It culminates in an awesome Festival of Trees in May. The books for 2019 are:

  • Black Chuck by Regan McDonell
  • Munro vs the Coyote by Darren Groth
  • The Agony of Bun O’Keefe by Heather Smith
  • Prince of Pot by Tanya Lloyd Kyi
  • Chaotic Good by Whitney Gardner
  • A Girl Like That by Tanaz Bhathena
  • The Mosaic by Nina Berkout
  • Catching the Light by Susan Sinnott
  • 36 Questions that changed my mind about you by Vicki Grant
  • Recipe for Hate by Warren Kinsella

You can participate by making connections to what you are reading using the hashtags we have created, creating Book Snaps as you read, or by volunteering to create five (5) questions to ask via Twitter or Instagram. Full details and link to register can be found here.

Not a high school teacher or teacher-librarian in Ontario? There are two other shared reading experiences happening right now.

Annick Rauch and Nycol Didcote have created a project around Growth Mindset books and they are into their second week. Details here.

Karen Caswell is starting a Kindness Read Aloud in February. Check out the details here.

If none of these suit your needs, create your own opportunity!

Search a possible hashtag up and if no one is using it, it is yours! For example, I searched #WhitePineMosaic for the White Pine book called The Mosaic by Nina Berkhout. Even if you connect with one other class to share your reading experiences, it will help students develop empathy and perspective and to see how truly valuable having a PLN can be.

AND if you are choosing a contemporary author, tag them! Sometimes, the author will respond and that makes the experience even better! Check out my list of YA Authors on Twitter here.

My heart is so very full knowing that students are reading and sharing their connections to the text in person, but that they are practicing global competency skills by communicating with students from other communities as well. In 2019 we can and should do this.

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