Increase Global Connectedness with Books

Connections. We are, inescapably, connected. To our family, neighbors, community, country, world. To the past and the present. To people who are like us in many ways, and to people who are unlike us in many ways. 

If we ever doubted it, those connections have been highlighted in glowing neon colors in the last 2 years. Virus transmission leaps every natural and man-made boundary, leaving us to trace its waves around the world again and again. Like every returnee to Japan in mid-December, I submitted to a 14-day quarantine after returning from a 10-day visit to my kids and grandkids in the US, and still Omicron infiltrated the borders. Supply chain disruptions affect our daily lives—this morning my daughter told me her church has been waiting since summer for replacement parts for an old heating system.

The manifestations are new, but the reality is not. Martin Luther King, Jr. said it like this in "A Letter from Birmingham Jail," which I often read with 11th grade AP students: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Jesus called it loving your neighbor—we just didn’t know how far-flung those neighbors could be.  

Yet that call is inescapable. The divine call to love our neighbors, to draw on the lessons of the past (both negative—like those who hardened their hearts in Hebrews 3:7-11—and positive—like the great cloud of witnesses in Hebrews 11), and to be part of his mission to bring life out of death, cosmos out of chaos, letting justice roll on like a river (Amos 5:24).

How do we invite students into this overwhelming task? An easy place to start is to do an inventory of the books students read. Who do they meet there, in the characters and the authors? Are they male and female? Are they from a variety of continents and cultures? Are they from the past and the present? Will students find people in whom they recognize themselves, and people who take their hands and lead them into other ways of seeing the world?

Pursuing answers to these questions, I’ve adopted new novels for my combined 6th/7th grade curriculum in the last 2 years:

• Wonder by R.J. Palaccio
• A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park
• Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes
• When My Name Was Keoko by Linda Sue Park

Right now we’re reading the last one—set in Korea during the Japanese occupation. A Japanese teacher said to me, “I’m so glad the students are learning that history. Really understanding what happened is the only way to heal the relationship.”

This is what I have been thinking about this week as my book discussion group talked about chapter 4 of Becoming a Globally Competent Teacher titled “Global Interconnectedness.” I especially noted the chart of books that highlight global interconnectedness (see photo above). They’re all in my classroom library for grades 4-7, excepting the one which is high school level and Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate. I ordered it. It arrived Thursday. As soon as I read it, I'll advertise it to my classes and put it in my classroom library for their independent reading.

What do your students read, and what do they need to read—in the curriculum and optionally—to understand and love the neighbors with whom they are globally connected?