Posted by Shadow Guide on Nov 12, 2012 in On Events & Presentations , On Travel to Asia | 2 comments
In October, I spent two delightful weeks at Shanghai American School. The school has two campuses, one to the west (Puxi), one to the east (Pudong) of downtown Shanghai, and an international student body of 3200! (I was told that it’s also the largest employer of expats in China.)
I connected with SAS through my sister-in-law’s brother, Jonathan Borden, who is the current high school principal at the Pudong campus, and his wife, Soon-ok, who teaches kindergarten. (We all worked together on Koje Island in Korea in 1975.)
Soon-ok’s class, like the entire student body, comes from all over the world.
Jonathan shared my books with librarian Barbara Boyer (here, with me and staff member Ruby, on the Bund, with some of the world’s tallest buildings behind us), who invited me to SAS.
The extraordinary team of librarians had planned a full schedule of presentations, from pre-K to high school Art, focusing on about a dozen of my titles.
I had fun surprising the Korean-American students by introducing myself in Korean.
There was even time for sharing writing and reading with individual students – so sweet.
Most of my time was spent in the international school community, but I was taken on a few forays into the city, where I ate some fabulous meals – soup dumplings!, Szechuan, Yunnan, Thai, Japanese; explored local markets; met new acquaintances …
and got a glimpse of the extraordinary contrast between people’s lives at different ends of the economic spectrum.
It was amazing to travel to China, retracing a journey my great-grandparents made one hundred and twenty-one years ago. I can’t wait to go back!
My grandfather, H. Norman Sibley, as a boy (center), with his parents and sisters, in China, around 1905.
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Posted by Shadow Guide on Oct 25, 2011 in Author's Korean Connections, On Events & Presentations , On Other Resources for Educators | 2 comments
In our joint school visits, as author Margy Burns Knight talks, I often sketch the face of an imagined child in each session, leaving the school with a group of portraits of diverse children. Several years ago, presenting our book Africa is Not a Country at a Maine school, I was sketching a series of children who could be from African countries. As the collection of portraits grew throughout the day, we asked students, “What do you notice about the pictures? What’s the same about the children? What’s different?”
A second grade boy pointed to the image of a brown-skinned girl wearing a scarf around her head. “She’s so poor,” he remarked in a solemn tone. “And she’s sad, so, so sad.”
In truth, the portrait was of a smiling girl, at least as happy-looking as any of the other drawings. (To add to the intrigue of the comment, the student making it was brown-skinned himself, an African-American child adopted by a white family.) A conversation ensued, in language appropriate to second graders, about “funny ideas” we sometimes have about Africa, and perhaps brown people – such as that everyone is poor and sad.
Has a child in your care ever burst out with a racial comment that puzzled, embarrassed, or distressed you? The more we explore race with children, the more it’s likely to happen. One of the outcomes of getting children to share their observations is that if we’re effective, we’ll get to hear what children are actually thinking about race – and some of their ideas are not what we might wish. Our first response may be the horrified defense, “S/he couldn’t have gotten it from me!” The good news is, you’re probably right.
In our presentation, “Books As Bridges” (see previous post), Krista Aronson, psychologist and Bates college professor of psychology, shared research results that “children rely more on community norms than parental norms.” As an example, she noted that parents new to a community may speak with an accent, but their children will soon sound like their classmates.
So where do children’s ideas about race come from?
Children are keen observers. If they see people segregated in distinctly different types of housing, jobs, classrooms, positions of authority, etc., they absorb this information.
2. The Soup
All day long, all of us, including children, are surrounded by and bombarded with images and information. Children notice, without the skills to deconstruct why, who’s portrayed and how.
3. Silence
When adults respond to questions and comments about race with discomfort and shushing, or never raise the subject at all, children learn that race is something not to be discussed, like something bad or dangerous.
This is why talking about race is so crucial for children’s development. If we don’t engage kids in conversations that give them permission and language to say what’s on their minds, to voice the associations they’re making and the conclusions they’re reaching, all of this conditioning goes unchallenged. When we provide a safe place for children to speak, we get the opportunity to engage with them and offer them the skills to break the silence, to interrogate the Soup, and to challenge socialized roles.
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Posted by Shadow Guide on Sep 15, 2009 in On Events & Presentations , On Korean Books & Culture | 2 comments
This year I once again spent a week of August at a Korean culture camp, Camp Sejong in New Jersey (more about camp in a later blog), as the Creative Writing teacher.
In preparation for camp, I compiled a list of recommended books that camp kids and their families could order. I’ll be presenting it here in five parts over the next few days, from picture books to adult literature.
I chose highly recommended books which were still in print and easily available, limited the entire list to no more than 50 books, and focused on books that weren’t as widely known (other books by Linda Sue Park, for instance, rather than her best-known, Newbery Award-winning
A Single Shard, which is often read in schools). There are a few that I haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading, but all that I included have strong reviews.
I’d love to hear comments and other recommendations.
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