Bringing The Ya Conversation Back Home

By Author: Alex Lee
Total Articles: 365
Comment this article

But there are limits to the usefulness of conversations that occur far from readers' schools and communities. The distance between those conversations and the settings where teachers teach and students learn diminishes their potential to have a palpable effect on local reading lives and curriculum. Readers may need to take action for YA books to get the attention they deserve on the local level. What remote conversations do, however, is prepare readers of YA lit for conversations they might have with fellow readers and stakeholders back home.

These conversations are immensely important. What teachers and students say about YA lit can influence who reads these books, how parents and departmental supervisors think about them, and even which teens get access to them. Discussions of YA lit can influence curriculum decisions, school library collections, and book club choices. In a worst case scenario, what teachers and students say can save books that have been challenged by would be censors. You don't have to be a reviewer for a national journal to have this kind of influence. All you have to be is someone who is knowledgeable ...
... and passionate enough to take a stand in the conversation—or get it started.
Spectators at the biannual meetings of the ALA Best Books for Young Adults committee, which are open to the public, often comment on the intensity of debate over which books are truly the best published for teens each year. In moments of vehement disagreement, members have been known to cry, "Blood on the table!" signaling with this inside joke the lengths to which they will go to defend a book they love (Campbell 275). Passions run high not just because committee members love these books, but also from awareness that what gets said in the conversation about these books matters greatly in the end. The committee's choices will affect the reading decisions of countless teachers, students, and fellow librarians across the country. As librarian Patricia Foster put it in a discussion of the 2008 Printz winner, The White Darkness, "That's what award committees do—consider so many books and surprise us frequently! We probably need to be shaken up a bit now and then . . . gets us thinking in different ways" (ellipses in the original; post on YALSABK listserv, January 15, 2008).

Ordinary conversations about YA lit in teachers' lounges and classrooms can also get us in the world of English teaching thinking in different ways. For those who participate, such conversations are the lifeblood of our reading lives. They bring new books into our awareness; they enrich our understanding of individual titles and the field itself. But we teachers—and our students—don't have to remain listeners in this conversation. There is always room for new voices.