‘What do you want to teach?’
Nathan Davis, a senior at Monument Mountain High School, talks with Arantzazú (Zazu) Galdós-Shapiro on a sunny late summer morning. She teaches eighth grade English Language Arts (ELA) at W.E.B. Du Bois Middle School, where his mother, Gail Bouknight-Davis, also teaches SPED courses for seventh and eighth grade.
What do she and her students read together? Who gets to choose? And how do they talk about the stories they encounter?
Davis has felt frustrated as a student, he says, with some of his own classes — the subjects and conversations can feel sporadic, tightly focused on one or a few areas, without collective thought.
“So when you’re making a lesson plan,” he says, “and you’re thinking ‘why don’t you teach these kids X on this unit?’ … what’s your thought process on how to make it all work?”
As they explore these questions (with Kate Abbott from BTW Berkshires), the conversation opens …
Zazu Galdós-Shapiro:
We read books together as a class still, so that you can teach how to have larger conversations — but a lot of my focus is on helping the kids figure out what kinds of books are appealing for them — what stories work for and challenge them specifically, either individually or in smaller groups.
And we work on just having a diverse range of choices, from genres and characters and time periods — it drives me bananas when people say, “Oh, we still teach Catcher in the Rye” — that’s fine, but there are more interesting, modern, inclusive works that you could be teaching now.
The reason why classics are classics is because we keep teaching them — and you can create new classics by teaching stories that are much more complex and inclusive.
Arantzazu (Zazu) Galdos-Shapiro leans back in the light against her bookshelves, in her classroom for eight grade English at W.E.B. DuBois Middle School in Great Barrington. Press photo courtesy of the artist
Some powerful stories can return every year?
Zazu Galdós-Shapiro:
I’m also teaching some of the things that we always come back to. I inherited like doing a Holocaust unit with eighth graders, and that’s something that I’ve kept going every year, because it’s definitely one of the most interesting areas to students.
(They don’t always come in expectingto feel that way.) They always think, “Oh yeah, we learned a little bit about concentration camps when we were in the sixth grade, and that was all there was.” Every year they say “Whoa, we had no idea how much more there was to it, and how much it links to present day.”
I’m trying to find topics and themes and books that will link to present day, so that (what we’re studying) can feel meaningful and impactful and applicable. So some classics that I still teach are Night by Elie Wiesel and The Diary of Anne Frank. We do Milkweed sometimes (The story of a Romany boy in Warsaw by Jerry Spinelli) — I try to prioritize the ones that are actually written by Jewish authors.
What kinds of contemporary and diverse stories are you bringing to your classes?
Zazu Galdós-Shapiro:
We have also, a few years ago, brought in a new unit on identity and anti-racism. We read a nonfiction text called “This Book is Anti-Racist” and some other books that support that, support teaching true history and that kind of thing, like Stamped by Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds.
And one called Tell Me Who You Are by Priya Vulchi and Winona Guo, which is a compendium of interviews of people talking about their identity and race experiences as Americans, and it’s just a huge diverse range of voices.
How does she think about having a narrative, Nathan asks her, a clear structure, so students can see relevance to their lives in what they are reading …
Zazu Galdós-Shapiro:
So something that I think is really important. The old-school method of teaching is something like: I want to teach you about comma usage, so I’m going to give you this short story, and we’re going to study the commas in the story and then move on to a totally different topic, then to another totally different topic. You jump like that, and there’s no narrative thread.
I am a storyteller. I like a narrative thread, a conversation about why we’re learning what we’re learning and how it all connects.
I am a storyteller. I like a narrative thread, a conversation about why we’re learning what we’re learning and how it all connects.
So for me, the entire year is founded on the idea that we’re learning how to be communicators — which means we need to know how to seek out and listen to communication from others.
We need to know and recognize when that communication is being intentionally censored or blocked or manipulated by propaganda. And we need to know how to speak up and use our own voices, and figure out how to be able to speak to others across different genres and formats, in order to say what we think is important and meaningful.
You have some flexibility, and your students have some flexibility, in what you choose to focus on, it sounds like. How much is set?
Zazu Galdós-Shapiro:
I find a balance in seeing what kids are the most excited by and giving them more of that, and in knowing I need to cover this thing as required by the law …
So we always have an overarching topic, like censorship, propaganda, #OwnVoices, (a hashtag coined by writer Corinne Duyvis … which seems to have drawn conversations (in part about the way the publishing industry then used it) … And then we’ve talked about anti-racism, that kind of work.
A quote from Susan Sontag, 'courage is as contangous as fear,' and images of cntemporary thinkers and leaders rest on Arantzazu (Zazu) Galdos-Shapiro's bookshelves, in her classroom for eight grade English at W.E.B. DuBois Middle School in Great Barrington. Press photo courtesy of the artist
Books and writers
Throughout this conversation, Arantzazú (Zazu) Galdós-Shapiro has spoken warmly of many storytellers and minds at work, including …
Sandra Cisneros — The House on Mango Street
Elie Wiesel — Night
Art Spiegelman — Maus
Jerry Spinelli — Milkweed
Tiffany M. Jewell — This Book is Anti-Racist
Ibram X. Kendi and Jason Reynolds — Stamped
Priya Vulchi and Winona Guo — Tell Me Who You Are
… a compendium of interviews of people talking about their identity and race experiences as Americans
And within that, I’m teaching all of the like things that I need to teach you about reading and writing and speaking and listening and research skills, and things like that.
But the overarching story is definitely how to understand people, and how to get yourself to be understood.
So you can choose different areas to focus on at different times, and for different people, depending on what is most relevant?
Zazu Galdós-Shapiro:
You know I’m very, very lucky to work in a school that gives me a lot of curricular freedom. I would never choose to teach in a school or to take a teaching job that handed me a textbook and told me, ‘on day seven you’re doing this lesson plan. On day eight you’re doing this one.’
Unfortunately that’s the reality for a lot of schools, because they’re taken over by the state, and they just tell people what to do, and teachers are not allowed to use their expertise to be responsive to local student voice and choice.
So for me it’s really important to be able to build in opportunities, where I’ll set an overarching essential question, but … each group can be really different, and depending upon what kind of questions they’re picking up on … then I’ll find the sources that help them with whatever inquiry or direction they’re going in.
Or I’ll give them a choice of five books for book clubs, and then small groups can choose the one that seems to be what they’re most interested in. So you might choose Art Spiegelman’s Maus if you’re interested in really tracking the long-term rise of fascism. You might choose Night if you’re really interested in focusing in on concentration camps and death marches.
It’s all about creating a frame that is flexible enough to be responsive while still being well-articulated and clear, so that it doesn’t just feel like you’re sitting around doing whatever you want — because that never works either. (laughter).
So what kinds things have students been excited about in the last year?
Zazu Galdós-Shapiro:
So last year censorship came up a lot with LGBTQ+ books, and that’s been really interesting. In the last few years we’ve had a really big growing movement from students who want to read literature that highlights LGBTQ+ characters, they are wanting to have access to books that they see on the news are being banned in Florida, and things like that.
So that’s been very very cool, bringing in more. I was able to get a grant for donations, and we were able to build out our own queer library, so that kids had a greater access to that. And it brings me great joy, because it’s the kind of stuff that absolutely would get me fired in a lot of other states, so I’m very pleased about that …
