Building a Read Aloud Practice with Kids in Dark Times

When big events occur that reflect the supremacy systems that are woven into the fiber of the institutions around us (like the recent election), it's important to start or continue with practices that are small enough to commit to but impactful enough to reverberate through us and out into the world in large ways.

One of adrienne maree brown's principles of emergent strategy is "Small is good. Small is all. (The large is a reflection of the small).

Read the principle a few times. Take a few deep breaths as you do. What comes up for you?

I am not one to argue that reading alone is enough. It is not enough at all. Please do not think that purchasing social justice books and sitting them on the shelf is enough. Nor is reading them and setting them down to collect dust. We must always focus on the reading as a learning and reflective experience that leads to greater connection in community and activism.

In my university classes, some of my students sign up to be a "community reading buddy" volunteer. Each student picks one or more reading buddies from their own circle of people. This might include older relatives or younger ones, coworkers, roommates, or friends. Their volunteer work is to establish a 8-10 week justice-focused reading practice with their reading buddy or buddies. What at first seems like a small thing (reading one justice-focused picture book a week and using the storyseed curriculum questions to guide discussion) becomes larger.

Here are a few things we've learned here at Reading Is Resistance through our community reading buddies practice:

1. Having a read aloud practice helps us to hold space for consistent closeness, learning, and conversation. Practice builds our capacity to be in community, to listen to each other, to get curious, and to join movements for change.

2. Reading aloud builds our relationships. We are closer to each other when we read aloud, sharing stories and our own responses to them.

3. We can learn a lot through small books. A picture book might seem short, but a carefully curated list of justice-focused books can be transformational, serving as window, mirror, prisms, and canvases.

4. Picture books can engage readers of all ages. Their beautiful illustrations, care for the reader's emotional life, honesty, and hope provide portals to our hearts in addition to our minds.

We should all tap into our skills and abilities (see Deepa Iyer's work on social justice ecosystem roles) AND we should create or strengthen some basic, daily, weekly, or monthly practices with each other. Why not choose a read aloud practice?

If you need support for your practice, check out a few things that we offer:

• The Monthly Storyseed Magazine and Curriculum Subscription: we choose the books and provide questions to get the conversation started on a monthly justice-related theme

• Pick your own story path and one-at-a-time Storyseed curriculum guides.

Take care, friends,

Zapoura