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Rich dialogic conversations resulted in demonstrations of empathy and newfound critical knowledge about the worldwide refugee crisis.
IN THE SPRING OF 2018, I was finishing my second year as a doctoral student and graduate teaching assistant. As a former elementary teacher, I wanted to help aspiring teachers enter the profession with the skills, empathy, and pedagogical knowledge that had worked well for me in my classroom. With a passion for teaching literacy and literature, I was simultaneously pursuing an additional degree to further develop my expertise in reading.
At this time, a dear friend recommended the novel Refugee by Alan Gratz, which she had recently read aloud to her fifth-grade class. She told me that she and her students had been very moved by sharing this story together and they had had rich classroom discussions about the characters' experiences as refugees. As a white teacher educator seeking to build my repertoire of socially conscious, culturally authentic novels, I eagerly accepted my friend's advice and read the book.
As promised, the stories contained within the novel were incredibly compelling. It rotated among the narratives of the three main characters, each scene ending with such suspense that I had a hard time setting the book down. In other words, I had a strong aesthetic response (Rosenblatt, 2005), or a fusing of "the cognitive and affective elements of consciousness-sensations, images, feelings, ideas-into a personally lived-through poem or story" (p. 98). Gratz did a masterful job of describing his characters and their families in such a way as to make them come alive for the reader. Mahmoud, for example, was shy and tried always to stay "under the radar," and reading about his family's escape when their home was blown apart, and their subsequent journey across several countries and through dangerous waters, gave life to stories I had heard on the news.
Two-and-a-half years prior, in November 2015, my local newspaper published a letter I had written calling for the removal of the mayor of the medium-sized southeastern city I called home after he expressed a desire to close off access to our community to refugees from the same crisis in Syria that caused Mahmoud's fictional family to flee. The mayor gained national attention when he compared his...