Skip to main content

YA Fiction Debate Featured on NPR

From NPR, June 6, 2011:

Seeing Teenagers As We Wish They Were: The Debate Over YA Fiction

Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece claiming that fiction at least nominally aimed at readers under 18 — young adult or "YA" fiction, that is — is entirely too dark. Calling out the books about kids who cut themselves or suffer abuse right alongside the books with abundant profanity in them, it laments the fact that young readers will be "surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds."

Unsurprisingly, the commentary has come under intense criticism — it's not in any way a new complaint, and every response to it points that out, along with plenty of other problems.

Read the rest of the article here.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Peek Into My New Building/Office

My classroom in the new School of Education I am so lucky! This week, the fall semester started at The College of William & Mary and the first group of students entered a brand new School of Education ! The picture above is of the classroom in which I am teaching. It is so beautiful. There is so much light and space and everything is new. Including the technology. The picture to the right is the podium from which I can choose to use the computer, document camera, VCR, or television, all at the touch of a button. Let me tell you, it is a wondrous thing, especially when I have had access to none of it in the old building (and when you teach on a campus that is over 300 years old , "old" takes on a new meaning:-). My office, however, is still in need of work. I did get pictures hung on the wall though. Does anyone know from which picturebook I took these pictures? And, I did get most of my picturebooks shelved.  But, as I said, I still have a lot of work to do! O...
5 comments
Read more

Fun and Inspiration

In this post, I'm sharing a few YouTube videos that have been quite inspiring and some that are just fun. Below is a TED presentation by spoken word poet and teacher, Sarah Kay . You MUST watch it and be inspired! I also watched a documentary titled, Louder Than A Bomb , about the spoken word poetry contest held in Chicago Public Schools. It was also extremely inspiring. Below is the trailer : Finally, does everyone but me know about the book, Goodnight iPad , a parody of the original by Margaret Wise Brown? Hilarious! See the YouTube video below...does it not perfectly capture what goes on in the homes of many of our children today? Reminds me of a colleague who told me she texts her children to tell them to come to dinner. The video below it is in stark contrast, titled: The Joy of Books . Enjoy!
Post a Comment
Read more