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This study examines how Williams-Garcia's protagonist Delphine is a tween character navigating her positioning between child/adult roles and between different cultural models of Blackness.
Teachers think a lot about transitions- proceduralizing them, cutting them down, making them more efficient. Changing from one thing to another takes time and effort, and the time when students are between tasks or rooms or activities can sometimes feel chaotic. This is often the same kind of energy and upheaval reflected in the life transitions of upper elementary and middle grades students as they live between different contexts, developmental stages, and versions of themselves. Even within the larger journey from youth to adulthood, these 9- to 12-year-olds are classified as "tweens," indicating this transition period between childhood and adolescence. This sense of "betweenness" also characterizes the needs of tween readers. As Lesesne (2006) discusses, students at these ages are at a place "between children's books and young adult novels as reading fare; they are between dependence on parents and educators and self-direction in their lives and their learning" (p. 9). It can be difficult to find engaging texts for students in this age group because tweens will often reject books for younger kids while they may not be developmentally ready for young adult novels (Faris, 2009; Lesesne, 2006).
But, of course, tweens are also a diverse group. Or, said another way, not all tweens are "between" the same things. Tweens of color face additional challenges as they learn to navigate life across a range of contexts structured by racism-challenges White children do not have to deal with. Think, for example, of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old killed by police as he played with a toy gun in a park in front of his home in Cleveland. While much attention has been given to the plight of Black boys, many Black girls also find themselves navigating racism, violence, and criminalization, both in schools (Morris, 2016) and out.
These tween years, therefore, become an important time for Black youth to build a racial identity and view of oneself as a Black person. Some developmental theories suggest that during the tween years of preadolescence and early adolescence, Black children's racial development involves a move from their parents' perspectives on race to their own...