A collection of nine stories the author illustrated relayed to her by adults with developmental disabilities such as adhd and asd. The sad thing aboutA collection of nine stories the author illustrated relayed to her by adults with developmental disabilities such as adhd and asd. The sad thing about the stories is that so few family members or teachers were supportive of these individuals as they grew up. Some 0f this may have to do with perfectionist, mono-cultural Japan where everyone must try has hard as they can to be successfuly at everything they do. Little tolerance for differences.
Most of the authors confess they often blamed themselves for failing to meet standards set by teacher sand parents, but the bullying by peers and teachers and parents was just maddening, devastating. One father with obvious disabilities fails to support his own daughter who exhibits similar traits. Such societal struggle to be to be tolerated, to be understood. So much depression and anxiety in so many as a result and not surprising.
But another thread is the resilience of those who shared their stories. Meds helped many. Some found a single counselor or teacher or family member who supported them and tried to work with them instead of constantly against them. I am reading this with a young person close to me, recently diagnosed, sometimes bullied, much supported and loved in his family but misunderstood and under-appreciated by others over the years. But we are working especially hard to create safety nets for him as he approaches adulthood....more
Jane Addams inspired many children's and YA biographies, in addition to several adult biographies, many of which I have read. She won a Nobel Peace PrJane Addams inspired many children's and YA biographies, in addition to several adult biographies, many of which I have read. She won a Nobel Peace Prize and was once the most famous woman in the U.S., but had kind of faded from view until about fifteen years ago when there has been a surge of work about her that continues to this day. The best work I have read about her is Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy by Louise Knight and a close second is Jane Addams: A Writer's Life by Katherine Joslin, which I read as research for the writing of my book, Jane Addams in the Classroom. Full disclosure: I got to know those two authors, but I had read their books before I sought them out.
The House That Jane Built is one of the best picture book biographies as a kind of introduction to this amazing woman. The house in question is Hull House, a settlement project she founded with several other women in the 1890's on Halsted Street in Chicago, one of the worst neighborhoods in the country at the time, over-filled with immigrants, and social problems no one had yet faced. She didn't actually build the house; it was a house owned by Charles Hull she was given for the purposes of her work in Chicago. Garbage filled the muddy streets; men, women and children worked 16 hour days for very little pay. People were hungry, stacked in tenement houses. She, a wealthy woman whose father was a businessman, state senator, and friend of Lincoln, devoted her life to living with and working with the poor to develop solutions to the many problems they faced. She wrote many books, too, including her memoir Twenty years at Hull House.
The artwork is lovely, the basic information solid and inspiring for young readers. I liked it quite a bit....more
I edited this book and am not pressuring anyone to read it. Just jotting down some thoughts about it for those who are teachers or Addams scholars.
ThiI edited this book and am not pressuring anyone to read it. Just jotting down some thoughts about it for those who are teachers or Addams scholars.
This collection of essays began when my colleague Todd DeStigter came by my office to tell me about a talk he had heard by Jean Bethke Elshtain from the University of Chicago about her biography of jane Addams. He said he bought the book and Elshtain's Jane Addams Reader (a collection of her essays) and invited me to do so as well. We decided to invite others to join us in a Jane Addams book club of sorts. jane Addams, faced with seemingly intractable social and economic problems stemming in part of industrialization and massive immigration to Chicago developed with others a settlement house project called the Hull House modeled on ones she had visited in London where educated and more privileged people might work WITH others to help them solve problems in the Halsted St. community. No charity work, giving stuff to people, but working with them to help them, across classes. And solve they often did, working on the 40 hour work week, against child labor, sanitation, various issues of child care and pubic health, unionization, all of it.
Addams was not a Marxist or anarchist but she listened to and worked with others. She was a pragmatist and may be associated with the development of social work. We have here at my University of Illinois at Chicago The jane Addams School of Social Work, modelled in part on her collaborative, essentially non-ideological approach. She was the author of many books, and was awarded The Nobel Peace Press, among other things.
This collection features a few theoretical essays by university scholars and several essays by teachers on how we can begin to see the usefulness of Addams's for today's classrooms, featuring stories about their own classrooms. The focus seems to me that Addams was a listener, was flexible in her approach, based her approach to learning on experience, on real human needs vs. some abstract notions of what students might need or preset plans based on theories of psychological or educational development. Addams was among other things a storyteller of experience in her writing and speaking, and the authors in this volume follow her example of telling their stories.
Those of us in education who were and are being prepared to teach know the progressive educational philosophy of John Dewey, and it is good to know, but Dewey could not have written what he did without his friendship with Addams and his acquaintance with Hull House work and community. Dewey and James wrote about pragmatism; Addams walked the pragmatist talk and wrote about it more engagingly in her stories. As a woman she was never respected as much by scholars as men like Dewey were, and she is the one we should be reading more. Especially now in this time of standardized testing, drilling and killing the love of learning.
Here's a conversation about the book (one hour long) on National Writing Project Online Radio. Tanya Bakers interviews me, and fellow authors Todd DeStigter, Beth Steffen and Darren Tuggle:
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