Book Clubs
By: Ben Gallagher
“The intimacy of the smaller groups also acts as a kind of ice breaker, so that students and teacher candidates can begin to build relationships with each other as they discuss their text”
While much of the work of the Addressing Injustices project is organized around a shared text, we often begin our year of research by inviting smaller groups of students and teacher candidates to organize into book clubs.
Offering five or six different novels for students to choose from allows them to select texts and issues that matter to them, and it makes space for a range of different issues of social injustice to enter the vocabulary of the classroom. The intimacy of the smaller groups also acts as a kind of ice breaker, so that students and teacher candidates can begin to build relationships with each other as they discuss their text.
The groups are able to adopt different approaches to the texts they've chosen, giving teacher candidates a chance to try lessons they're curious about, and making more space for students to speak to the teacher candidates about what works or doesn't work for them.
In the year organized around Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451, we used these five books for our Book Clubs: The Hate U Give, Eleanor & Park, I'll Give You The Sun, The Night Wanderer, and Shadowshaper. One of the questions we wanted to address while reading Fahrenheit together as a large group was the legacy and exclusionary nature of literary canons. While Fahrenheit argues for the importance of stories as a means of resistance, the stories held up as valuable by Bradbury are all European in origin, and predominantly written by men. We felt that the books used by the book clubs needed to provide a counterpoint to the traditional literary canon, and so we deliberately chose a set of texts that centred Black, Indigenous and queer authors and characters, and that drew on other literary and linguistic inheritances.
Another reason we chose Fahrenheit as a central text for our research was to address rising authoritarianism, attacks on the media, and the online discourse around “fake news.” The conversations within the book club groups surfaced other vital and difficult issues, however: police brutality and anti-Black racism, domestic abuse, divorce, queer sexuality, grief, gentrification, and Indigenous survivance. Some of those conversations resurfaced in the collective work on Fahrenheit while others remained in the background, but they all enriched the life of the classroom and made space for us to share our own stories with each other.