To engage adolescent African American males in reading, books must reflect their lives, say author Walter Dean Myers, educator Alfred Tatum
Author Walter Dean Myers recalls how he got into reading at school. He was reading comics during class, and the teacher caught him. She tore up his comics, but she replaced them with a stack of books. She promised him that he could keep reading if he didn’t talk in class.
“In selecting these books, she was showing something about what she saw in the young man,” says educator Alfred Tatum, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “Instead of getting on him, she found a way of getting with him.”
For more than 20 years, Myers has been producing award-winning books that have enthralled a wide range of readers, but his work holds special appeal for adolescent African American males. His titles include Fallen Angels (Scholastic, 1988), Monster (HarperCollins, 1999), and The Greatest: Muhammad Ali (Scholastic, 2001); he has earned two Newbery Honors, five Coretta Scott King Awards, and many other accolades. His powerful new novel about the heroics and horror of war, Sunrise Over Fallujah (Scholastic, 2008), is scheduled for publication in May. It is a companion book to Fallen Angels.
Tatum, meanwhile, focuses much of his research on using outstanding books such as these to engage adolescent African American males in reading. “I am particularly concerned that the textual lineages—that is, texts they find meaningful and significant—of African American males are being severed in schools and society because of their underexposure to texts,” he says.
“There are some dangerous misconceptions about the African American male, ” Tatum adds. “Primary among them is that he does not want to be educated. This is simply not true. He oftentimes finds a disconnect between what he wants and what is offered. Therefore, the real challenges are using texts in ways to broker positive relationships with these young men and eradicate these dangerous misperceptions. This is only possible if the texts exist—and they do—and teachers know how to mediate the texts with the young men.”
Myers and Tatum will appear together as Special Featured Speakers on Tuesday afternoon, May 6, during the 2008 IRA Annual Convention in Atlanta. Their appearance is sponsored by Scholastic, Inc.
“My focus will be on rebuilding the textual lineages of African American males that help positively shape their life outcome trajectories and how the writings of Walter Dean Myers have been and continue to be critical, ” Tatum says. For instance, he recalls using Myers’s Handbook for Boys (HarperCollins, 2003) with a troubled boy. The boy said the book made him think before he acted. “Before I started reading, I didn’t think about what I did,” the boy said.
Myers, too, sees many examples of ways his books make young people think. Although he wrote Fallen Angels nearly 20 years ago, young people still write to him telling him that the book has changed their mind about war. “Boys like stories about war,” Myers says, “but because I brought a realistic point of view about war, they began to change their thinking.”
“One of the things that brings young people to books is seeing something they recognize in their own lives, ” says Myers. “If there is nothing in the books they read that reflects their lives, they see reading only as an opportunity to fail. I feel that I have a kinship with many teenagers and young people that I write about, and I try to reflect that in my books.”
We are making some progress in providing literature that is more reflective of cultural diversity, but we still have far to go, Myers adds. He would like to see more young African American authors emerge. “I have only one point of view, ” he says. “There should be lots of books about the African American experience. ”
Tatum says teachers and parents need to find texts that speak to teenage African American males. He identifies five key backdrops that draw readers to books: (1) personal; (2) economic; (3) social, culture, or gender; (4) community; and (5) national.
Tatum adds that the right books can help readers develop a positive psyche, provide modern-day awareness of the real world, and offer a road map in terms of who the young readers are and what they can become. “Texts for African American males have to become enabling, ” he says. “Enabling texts allow the reader to think, be, or do differently as a result of what they read. ”
We need to move beyond “a focus on test scores,” Tatum adds. “That focus is handicapping what is happening with African American males.” Teachers have to move beyond test-driven curriculum.
The focus on No Child Left Behind and closing the achievement gap only draws attention to the vital signs of reading. “We have to begin to recognize the vital signs of readers as well,” Tatum says, “which involves paying attention to out-of-school experiences as well. NCLB is ‘a necessary minimum.’”
“For years we just ignored the results of bad education,” Myers says. “The idea of testing does bring the problem to our attention.” That said, reading needs to be much more.
“The ultimate goal is to score with reading,” Tatum says. “We read for wider purposes than test scores. We put so much effort on reading scores that we fail to score with reading.”
There is little research about African American boys and books, Tatum says, and many of the studies that are done reflect a deficit perspective. “We need qualitative studies that invite the voices of these young people,” he says, as well as quantitative research showing that using certain models of introducing text affects African American males in a variety of communities.
“What we’re really trying to do is find an entry point for any adolescents who are not reading or engaging with texts,” Tatum says. “If we fail to address the literacy needs of these young men, we will have more destabilized communities and a weakening of democracy because of lack of participation of this segment of society.”
There are too many examples of urban communities being destabilized, Tatum says. There are too many young men “searching for dreams in an abyss of poverty.” We need to go beyond skills and strategies, he concludes. We need to empower these young men.
Myers recalls that as he was growing up, he rarely saw books that reflected his life. “I did not understand that I was forming bad images of myself because I did not see myself in books,” he says. “Books transmit values. Schools transmit values.”
Scoring with reading. (October 2007). Reading Today, 25(2), 40.
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