BY MARY ANN CAPPIELLO on behalf of The Biography Clearinghouse As we approach the final quarter of 2020, fires rage along the West Coast. Many regions of the United States face drought conditions. Gulf communities are inundated by Hurricane Sally while a string of storms line up in the Atlantic, waiting their turn. The impact of climate change is evident. COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc on our lives, our health. We bear witness to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on minoritized groups, including Black and Latinx communities, Native Americans, and the elderly. Across America, Black Lives Matter protests carry on, demanding that our nation invest in the essential work necessary to achieve a more perfect union through racial justice. In 2020, we remember moments of historic change, commemorating the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment.  The intensity of this moment can’t be denied. It’s demanding. It’s exhausting. Whether you are a teacher, librarian, or university faculty member, you are likely teaching in multiple new formats and modalities, facing daily logistical challenges. Caregivers also face new hurdles in supporting young people’s learning. How do you meet the needs of students and the needs of this moment in history? How do you find hope in literature? Perhaps one way is to turn to the people of the past and the present who are working on the edges of scientific knowledge. Or, to turn to the people of the past and the present who have acted as champions of social justice. Their life stories offer young people models of agency and action, blueprints for change. To that end, The Biography Clearinghouse shares 20 biographies for 2020, a list of recent picturebook and collected biographies to connect with the challenges of the moment. This list is not comprehensive. It is simply a starting place. We hope these recently published biographies of diverse changemakers can become part of your curriculum or part of your read aloud calendar, in-person or over video conferencing software. Biographies About ScientistsBiographies About Champions for Change
If you have any picture book or chapter-length biographies or collected biographies for young people that you would like to recommend, please email us at thebiographyclearinghouse@gmail.com. We’re also interested in hearing more about how you’re using life stories in the classroom this year. Mary Ann Cappiello teaches courses in children’s literature and literacy methods at Lesley University, blogs about teaching with children’s literature at The Classroom Bookshelf, a School Library Journal blog, and is a former chair of NCTE’s Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction K-8. MARK YOUR CALENDARS!
Ongoing EventsNCTE Member Gatherings
A series of member-exclusive online gatherings. Each event "fosters conversation, brings new ideas, and builds relationships with your fellow NCTE members during the isolating time of COVID-19."
Registration and information link. NCTE Learning on Demand Web Seminars
“Learn from leaders in our field from the comfort of your couch. On Demand Web seminar recordings include all audio, video, chat, and discussion from past live events.”
Information link. ALA Online Learning"ALA eLearning--webinars, courses, workshops, e-forums and more--covers library-related fundamentals, advances, trends, and hot topics for all types of libraries. Find the online options that can best keep you and your colleagues and staff current."
Registration and information link. ILA Digital Events
“ILA Digital Events range from high-quality professional development opportunities to engaging discussions on timely topics. These events also give you a chance to become active within the ILA community, provide access to high-quality online resources, and connect with like-minded educators at a time and place that's convenient for you.” Registration and information link. BY LIZ THACKERAY NELSON & MARGARET OSGOOD OPATZ  As former teachers, we are familiar with our students’ common refrain: “What does this book have to do with me?” Helping our students connect to what we teach in meaningful ways increases motivation, engagement, and overall learning (Guthrie & Wigfield, 2000). In this blog post we want to explore how creating and sequencing text sets to foster student background knowledge helps students make meaningful connections and increases reading engagement. The importance of readers’ background knowledge has been acknowledged for decades (Anderson, Reynolds, Schallert, & Goetz, 1977; Cunningham & Stanovich, 1998; Reynolds, Taylor, Steffensen, Shirley, & Anderson, 1982), yet in schools throughout our country readers are placed in texts that are decontextualized and reflect a lived experience very different from their own, making it challenging to construct meaning from the text and ultimately learn from it (Fleming, Catapano, Thompson, & Ruvalcaba Carrillo, 2015). This is particularly true when it comes to the informational content presented in science. To support readers in comprehending and learning from texts, teachers can reshape the curriculum by beginning with students’ lived experiences in mind. Reshaping the curriculum includes the use of high-quality literature sequenced in a way that begins with familiar content and contexts and then moves further from students’ lived experiences to the expected or mainstream curriculum. Learning about Animal Adaptations in an Urban Setting For example, when addressing science standards to teach about how animals adapt to their environment, many units of study focus on exotic animals such as those found in the Amazon Rainforest, the Serengeti, or Australian Outback--using texts such as I See a Kookaburra! (Jenkins & Page, 2005) , Biggest, Strongest, Fastest (Jenkins, 1997), or What Do You Do With a Tail Like This? (Jenkins & Page, 2008). While it certainly isn’t bad to teach about exotic animals and their unique ecosystems, to help students first understand how animals function in their unique habitat, it can be beneficial to begin with animals that are closer to students’ lived experiences. Therefore, before moving to texts that showcase exotic animals, we suggest using texts such as Please, Puppy, Please (Lee & Lee, 2005), Animal Babies in Towns and Cities (Kingfisher, 2005), City Critters: Wildlife in the Urban Jungle (Read, 2012), or Urban Roosts: Where Birds Nest in the City (Bash, 1992). These texts allow you to focus on animals that students who live in urban settings can observe in their own environment. Imagine students reading Urban Roosts: Where Birds Nest in the City (Bash, 1992), a book which illustrates several urban locations where birds live and nest (e.g., in a storefront light, under the awning of a building, on a statue that stands on a street corner, in a stoplight). Then, as students walk outside of their school building (or their homes if they are learning online right now), they start to notice the birds that roost on the building’s exterior doorways, creating firsthand experiences of animals adapting to their environments, and opportunities to talk about scientific content beyond the school texts and science class. When meeting as a class again, students discuss how the birds have adapted to and thrive in the urban environment. By situating school texts in familiar contexts, students are able to build background knowledge before being expected to grasp concepts in faraway, unfamiliar places. Because we live in an urban area, we would sequence our animal adaptation text set like this:  Based on the area where you live, you may want to change the order of the texts. For example, salamanders are very common in some parts of the United States, so teachers in that area may want to move Salamanders by Molly Kolpin closer to the beginning of the text set. Explanation of Text SequenceCreating & Sequencing Your Own Text SetTo create and sequence text sets that begin with students' lived experiences and progress outward, we propose 5 steps:
ReferencesAnderson, R. C., Reynolds, R. E., Schallert, D. L., & Goetz, E. T. (1977). Frameworks for comprehending discourse. American Educational Research Journal, 14(4), 367-381. Cunningham, A. E., & Stanovich, K. E. (1998). What reading does for the mind. American Educator, 22, 8-17. Fleming, J., Catapano, S., Thompson, C. M., & Ruvalcaba Carrillo, S. (2015). More mirrors in the classroom: Using urban children’s literature to increase literacy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Guthrie, J.T., & Wigfield, A. (2000). Engagement and motivation in reading. In M.L. Kamil, P.B. Mosenthal, P.D. Pearson, & R. Barr (Eds.), Handbook of reading research: Volume III (pp. 403-422). New York: Erlbaum. Reynolds, R.E., Taylor, M.A., Steffensen, M.S., Shirey, L.L., & Anderson, R.C. (1982). Cultural schemata and reading comprehension. Reading Research Quarterly, 353-366. Liz Thackeray Nelson is a doctoral student at the University of Utah in Educational Psychology. Her research interests include writing, multiliteracies, and children's literature. She is currently serving as the chair for the CLA Membership Committee. Margaret Osgood Opatz is a doctoral student at the University of Utah in Educational Psychology. Her studies include reading, literacy, and linguistics. She is a past recipient of the CLA Bonnie Campbell Hill National Literacy Leader Award. By Jennifer Graff and Courtney Shimek on behalf of the Biography Clearinghouse As shared in our initial Biography Clearinghouse post, we are committed to showcasing how biographies can help connect youths with each other and the world. Offering curricular possibilities that are easily adaptable to grade level, time, and other contexts and providing “behind-the-scenes” content from biography creators are central components of our commitment.  In the spirit of returning to school and the desire to amplify the historical achievements of Black people in the U.S., we showcase the story of someone committed to justice and equity her entire life. “A child of New York City’s striving class of Blacks in the mid-1800s" (p.5) whose ideals were to “Aim high! Stand tall! Be strong! -- and do!” (p.5); a girl whose mother was “an ace operator for the Underground Railroad” (p.21); and an educator who wrote, “I never forgot that I had to sue for a privilege which any but a colored girl could have without asking” (p.36). Thus, our first featured biography on the Biography Clearinghouse website is Tonya Bolden’s award-winning Maritcha: A Nineteenth-Century American Girl. Bolden felt compelled to write about Maritcha after coming across her memoir at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Bolden’s rich, descriptive language and use of primary and secondary sources illuminate the life and experiences of Maritcha Rémond Lyons and her family in New York City during the latter half of the 19th century. Readers discover what life for Blacks was like in New York City, witness the terror and violence of the Draft Riots in 1863, and experience the fight for education and equal treatment. Bolden’s discussion of her research and writing process in the front and back matter as well as Maritcha’s perseverance, determination, and legacy inspired us to interview Bolden and imagine how we could incorporate this powerful biography into our classrooms. Operating within our Investigate, Explore, and Create model, we designed teaching ideas geared toward literacy and content area learning as well as opportunities for socio-emotional learning and strengthening community connections.
Getting to Know Your Community Leaders
Community networks were central to Maritcha’s story as well as her and her family’s accomplishments. The importance of community networks is still present today. But how often do we have opportunities to delve deeper into the community networks that help us survive, if not thrive?
By investigating biographers’ research and writing processes and connecting people and historical events to our modern lives, we hope to motivate change in how readers engage with biographies, each other, and the larger world. To see more classroom possibilities and helpful resources connected to Marticha: A Nineteenth Century American Girl, visit the Biography Clearinghouse. Additionally, we’d love to hear how the interview and these ideas inspired you. Email us at thebiographyclearinghouse@gmail.com with your connections, creations, questions, or comment below if you’re reading this on Twitter or Facebook. Jennifer M. Graff is an associate professor at the University of Georgia, the current past-president of CLA, and a former committee member of NCTE’s Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children. Courtney Shimek is an assistant professor at West Virginia University and has been a member of CLA since 2015. BY JEANNE GILLIAM FAIN Reflecting on the 2020 NCBLA List, our seven-member committee believes in the influence of each individual book and the power of the books grouped together to offer another layer of meaning. After reviewing over 400 titles with 2019 copyright dates appropriate for readers in K-8th grade, the members of the 2020 Notable Children’s Books in the Language Arts Committee met online to decide upon our final list of 30 titles. We read books multiple times and learned from each other as we carefully considered the craft of each book. In this post, I am going to highlight two picture book biographies from the 2020 NCBLA List: Soldier for Equality: Jose´de la Luz Sáenz and the Great War (2019) and Feed your mind: A story of August Wilson (2019). Tonatiuh, D. (2019). Soldier for Equality: Jose´de la Luz Sáenz and the Great War. New York, NY: Abrams Books for Young Readers, unpaged.
Bryant, J. (2019). Feed your mind: A story of August Wilson. (C. Chapman, Illus.). New York, NY: Abrams Book for Young Readers, unpaged.
Golden Line Strategy & Flip Grid Both picturebooks feature high-quality language and there are many golden lines, lines that really resonate with the reader, within these texts. The golden line strategy involves the reader choosing a specific line from the picture book biography that causes the reader to pause, ponder, reflect, and/or question the text. The line should purposely connect with the reader. Readers can choose the golden line from the text and post responses on Flipgrid. Using flipgrid, the reader can record the reading of the golden line. The teacher can post invitational questions on the flipgrid. Readers can create their own response or answer one of the invitational questions and post on flipgrid. Readers can listen to their peers' golden line responses and post a response back. Invitational Questions:
 Golden Lines & Flip Grid Strategy
Meet the Notables Committee
Jeanne Gilliam Fain is s a professor at Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee and Chair of the 2020 Notables Committee. The Tuesday, August 18th blog post has been removed at the request of its authors.
BY MARY ANN CAPPIELLO & BARB ROSENSTOCK on behalf of The Biography Clearinghouse People are hardwired to connect to other people. From birth, research tells us that babies prefer human faces over all other images. People are also hardwired for story. For tens of thousands of years, we humans created stories and listened to them as if our lives depended on it. Often, they did. Story helps us process the present, connect to the past, envision the future; and reflect on broader cultural issues. Story developed along with language itself. Stories about people’s lives are called biographies. With this post, we’re introducing a new initiative to explore the potential of the powerful genre of biography to connect students with the broader world. The Biography Clearinghouse, endorsed by the Children’s Literature Assembly of the National Council of Teachers of English, developed out of casual conversations about biography’s underused potential. We are an expanding set of educators, authors, students and interested readers working together to use biography to champion diversity, explore history, model agency and support perseverance. Biography Clearinghouse Framework
This fall, we’ll be launching a website to support educators as they explore the ways the craft of biography can connect students—with the past, with the future, and with each other. Our core principles express the belief that biographies are uniquely positioned to accomplish a variety of classroom goals. They can be read for pleasure and academic learning. They can evoke student wonder and prompt questions. They can address real issues in society and help students build empathy and know that they are not alone. Our principles affirm that biographies can support Literacy, Content Area/Disciplinary Literacy and Socio-Emotional Learning. A fuller articulation of the principles can be found at our Biography Clearinghouse Principles document.
The Biography Clearinghouse website will address the process of investigating biographies, crafting biographies, and exploring content areas with biography. Biography creators will share their process, research, and motivations in writing and illustrating these complex works. Since real people advocate, solve, write, read, experiment, and create; we can use real people’s diverse life stories to explore all content areas: history, mathematics, language arts, science, and the arts. Biography gives students a way to see what is really possible in the world. Working with stories of the struggles and triumphs of accomplished people can ignite students’ own activism, agency, and perseverance. You will hear from The Biography Clearinghouse via the CLA blog every three weeks this fall as we add new content such as book titles, author interviews, research artifacts and teaching materials. Additionally, to keep ourselves responsive to the unique challenges our classrooms face this year; we want to hear from you! We want you to join us as part of The Biography Clearinghouse initiative. We invite your help in crafting this new story—to use the connection to others inherent in diverse people’s lives to encourage curiosity, creativity and commitment in your students. Please email thebiographyclearinghouse@gmail.com with your questions, ideas, and classroom dilemmas. Or, comment below if you’re reading this on Twitter or Facebook. We’d love to know how you’ve used real people’s stories in the past, and how you’d like to see them used them in the future. We invite your help in crafting this new story—to use the connection to others inherent in diverse people’s lives to encourage curiosity, creativity and commitment in your students. Barb Rosenstock is the author of many picture book biographies for children. Her books have been awarded Orbis Pictus and Sydney Taylor Honors, among many other awards. Otis and Will Discover the Deep, illustrated by Katherine Roy, won a SCBWI Golden Kite Award, and The Noisy Paint Box, illustrated by Mary Grandpré, was awarded a Caldecott Honor. Mary Ann Cappiello teaches courses in children’s literature and literacy methods at Lesley University, blogs about teaching with children’s literature at The Classroom Bookshelf, a School Library Journal blog, and is a former chair of NCTE’s Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction K-8. Update 9/1/2020: Readers may also be interested in the post: Ideas for Change with Tonya Bolden’s Maritcha: A Nineteenth-Century American Girl by Jennifer Graff and Courtney Shimek (on behalf of the Biography Clearinghouse) BY LAUREN AIMONETTE LIANG & XENIA HADJIOANNOU As the days of August are marching on and the beginning of the 2020-21 school year is approaching, it is becoming increasingly clear that this will be another challenging year for students and educators of all levels. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is still looming large in our daily lives and our plans for working and learning with our students. In the absence of firm solutions for treatment and inoculation from the virus, and in the context of growing numbers of infections across the United States, schools are faced with complex and challenging decisions about how to pursue their mission in safe and academically robust ways. Our hope and intention here at the CLA Blog is to offer resources and support to educators as they plan for what is sure to be an extraordinary year of teaching and learning. We aspire to offer helpful ideas for sharing children’s literature with students through various instructional modes, as well as continue to maintain a focus on amplifying diverse voices, highlighting literary works representing diverse perspectives, and supporting an antiracist social justice agenda. We are grateful to various CLA groups and individual CLA members for volunteering to contribute posts to the CLA Blog over the coming weeks. New posts will be published every Tuesday. We are delighted to announce that in Fall 2020 the blog will feature:
Our thoughts are with you as you expertly handle the many new preparations, alongside frequent and often abrupt changes, to plans for this fall in your classrooms. We value the outstanding work that you do, and hope that you are able to stay safe during this challenging time. Lauren Aimonette Liang is an associate professor at the University of Utah and the current president of CLA. Xenia Hadjioannou is an associate professor at Penn State's Harrisburg campus and the webmaster of the CLA website. BY XENIA HADJIOANNOU & LAUREN AIMONETTE LIANG When the Novel Coronavirus upended our personal and professional lives way back in March, CLA created this biweekly blog “to help and support our members and the greater education community who are using children’s literature in their newly online or remote settings” (3/21/2020 Blogpost by Lauren Liang). Since then, we have been grateful for the generous willingness of CLA leaders and members to contribute timely and informative posts on various topics, ranging from annotated listings of online resources for children’s literature and related content, to curated book-lists, to recommendations for a wide array of literature response engagements. We have also been humbled by the positive responses to the CLA Blog and by its growing readership. Following the school-year cycle, the CLA blog will be going on hiatus for the summer break and will resume operations in early August as a weekly blog. We anticipate that the coming academic year will bear enduring challenges as a result of the continuing uncertainties and concerns precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. We aim to be a helpful resource in responding to these shifting educational contexts. We also hope that the coming academic year will be a pivotal time for honest, critical conversations about racism and the injustices it births and sustains, and for engagements valorizing the lived experience of minoritized communities. As our nation and the world mourns for the death of George Floyd, we stand in solidarity with efforts to expose and counter racism and systems of oppression, and aspire to meaningfully contribute to them. We remain in awe of the dedication, instructional agility, and deep professional knowledge of our teachers and librarians. We look forward to joining together with you in August back in this space. Contributing to the Blog
CLA Members: Interested in writing a post for the CLA blog? Please email Lauren Aimonette Liang. We welcome posts written this summer for fall publication, and are especially interested in posts from CLA members teaching in K-12 classrooms.
In response to the recent events surrounding the death of George Floyd, NCTE's Presidential Team has released a letter taking a stance against racism. Below we, the Children's Literature Assembly of NCTE, provide this important letter in its entirety.
This statement was written by the leaders of the NCTE Presidential Team. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) denounces all forms of racial violence and brutality. We grieve with the family and friends of George Floyd and with all who are suffering during these devastating times. As we seek justice, we stand in solidarity with demonstrations and protests that raise awareness of, and that call for action against, systemic racism in this country. Because we treasure our First Amendment rights, we also denounce the arrest and mistreatment of journalists, especially journalists of Color, who work tirelessly to keep the world informed about what is happening in our various communities. Injustices and acts of brutality are real. In fact, they are revolting. Racist acts keep recurring, and systems of oppression continue to exist, proving the need for systemic and structural change. That change can begin with protests, but ultimately it must happen through action. As educators, we are poised to lead the way through our teaching. NCTE’s vision and long-held commitment is “to apply the power of language and literacy to actively pursue justice and equity for all students and the educators who serve them.” As literacy educators, we are concerned for our students and their families. We pledge to continue our efforts to create equity inside classrooms. We celebrate theGary B., et al. v. Whitmer, et al. settlement: students in Detroit and elsewhere “have a fundamental right to education.” And we applaud the New Mexico Yazzie/Martinez decision “to provide all students with a uniform and sufficient education . . . .” Equity in classrooms for teachers of English and our students is paramount. It is through education that we believe we can make a lasting difference. This includes educating about the right to vote. As Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has advised, “ . . . if you want change in America, go and register to vote. Show up at the polls.” 
We cannot stop there. As literacy educators, our aim is to help students and communities to imagine a better, more humane world and to take the steps to achieve it. As advocated by NCTE’s Statement on Anti-Racism to Support Teaching and Learning, we must be active, both collectively and individually, in “counteracting racism and other forms of bigotry in teaching materials, methods, and programs for the teaching and learning of English and the language arts.”
As the nation’s oldest organization of preK through graduate school literacy educators, NCTE has a rich history of deriving expertise and advocacy from its members’ professional research, practice, and knowledge. We are stronger by looking to one another for wisdom. Some of our NCTE members have already begun to speak on recent events, such as the Early Childhood Education Assembly, which recently released its powerful Call to Action Countering Anti-Blackness in Society & Schools. We are grateful for this work, and we know that other NCTE members are also finding ways to address these issues and to provide resources. NCTE’s publications serve as important resources that can guide our thoughts and actions during this time, and we recommend them to you. The following materials may also be helpful:
Also, we remind members that NCTE continues to offer opportunities such as the online Member Gatherings and author-led talks as ways to ensure that we support, encourage, and uplift each other. Know that we are committed to motivating action, working for educational equity, and standing in solidarity, together. Leah Zuidema, President Alfredo Celedón Luján, President-Elect Valerie Kinloch, Vice President Franki Sibberson, Past President Emily Kirkpatrick, Executive Director Editors' Note
Many organizations, newspapers, book creators, literacy scholars, teachers and bookstores have created compelling antiracist booklists for different age groups, which are widely available on social media and on websites and blogs. We encourage our members and other readers to explore and use these lists with the children in their lives.
Image by Orna Wachman from Pixabay
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