On Other Resources for Educators

Teaching Korean Students

Posted by on Jun 24, 2013 in On Events & Presentations , On Korean Books & Culture, On Other Resources for Educators | Comments Off on Teaching Korean Students

My most recent trip to Korea gave me an opportunity I’d never had before: I was invited to present one of my books to two different groups of Korean children – in Korean!

The first group was a class of 6th graders from Daejeon on an overnight retreat near Sejong City, run by the Humanity Recovery Movement Council (Huremo) a nonprofit focusing on personal development through the use of journals – called “love diaries” – to “help children think and plan for themselves and make their dreams come true.”

I talked about my own childhood dream of becoming an artist, and of how growing up in Korea gave me a vision of the common humanity of all people. Then I shared a little of the process of creating my graphic novel, The Legend of Hong Kil Dong: The Robin Hood of Korea, and some tricks for enhancing the elements of story when composing comics, such as zoom-in (character), zoom-out (setting), and using diagonals to convey a sense of movement.

 
The students then drew rough sketches of a scene from the Hong Kil Dong story, emphasizing character, setting or plot.

 

Ten days later I met with a smaller group of children, ages 4-12, at the Seoul office of Huremo, as part of a camera shoot with Arirang TV (more about this in my next post). I told them about my childhood in Korea, and a little about the book. Then we drew dragons together.

 

 

 

What a sweet treat to spend time with such a small group of kids!

 

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Parenting Across Race

Posted by on Apr 5, 2013 in Author's Korean Connections, On Other Resources for Educators, On Transracial Adoption | Comments Off on Parenting Across Race

A new essay I wrote,”Raising Yunhee” on transracial adoption and parenting across race, has just been published at Korean American Story.

 

“Adopting Yunhee was one journey; raising her was another. My own passion for Korea, which became my second homeland and the source of my second culture and second language, made me determined to give Yunhee a sense of her birth legacy. But how does a white American, even one who grew up in Korea, raise a Korean American – on an island in Maine?“

 
Yunhee was the model for Brianna in Brianna, Jamaica and the Dance of Spring

The essay examines how we attempted to give our daughter not just a sense of where she came from, but also encouragement to voice her experience of growing up as an American of color, and the challenge that posed for us as white parents:

“Talking about race gave Yunhee permission and language to unpack her own observations and experiences, and a structure for understanding the nuances of racial identity in America. At various ages and stages, it helped her find her voice to express her grief, her rage, her confusion (at age six, “Why couldn’t somebody in Korea take care of me?”)… It was essential for me not just to convey that all her thoughts and feelings were welcome, but also to become aware enough of the filter of my own white and non-adopted privilege that I could respect Yunhee’s authority in naming realities as she perceived them. I had to work to not inadvertently discount her observations and difficulties just because I wished they weren’t true.”

Korean American Story is building a fine and useful archive of narratives across the spectrum of Korean American identity, a significant contribution to exploring what it means to be American.
Go take a look.

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Exploring a Bicultural Experience

Posted by on Mar 19, 2012 in On Korean Books & Culture, On Other Resources for Educators | 2 comments

One of my favorite blogs, Korean American Story, has just published a piece I was invited to write for them, “Of Longing and Belonging.”

This relatively new blog has already built a thoughtful and insightful collection of essays and fiction on what it means to be Korean and American, including immigrant, U.S.-born, and adoptee perspectives.

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Encounter

Posted by on Mar 12, 2012 in Author's Korean Connections, On Other Resources for Educators | Comments Off on Encounter

Yesterday I spoke on a panel for an SCBWI New England event on using marketing consultants at the Eric Carle Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts. Lovely to make the trip with Kirsten Cappy of Curious City, and writer-illustrator Cathryn Falwell.

During lunch we got to spend a few minutes viewing the exhibit of Kadir Nelson paintings published in the book, We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball. The illustrations are stunning, and the exhibit far more so, because the actual oil paintings are huge.

Entering the gallery, you encounter the life-size figure of catcher and slugger Josh Gibson, who hit 75 home runs in 1931. The painting (also the book’s cover illustration) is hung so that the ball player and museum visitor meet eye to eye. Gibson has a powerful, almost mythical presence, rendered with extraordinary lifelike detail, from gleaming flesh to fraying fabric around the collar. Brushstrokes in the surrounding sky suggest motion, as if the air around the still figure is vibrating.

The paintings are striking in their strength, depth of color, contrast in light and shadow, and stylistic distortions that make them more expressive and memorable than if they were photo-realistic. As a group, they are a vivid and indelible account, bringing the players of the Negro League alive. An added delight is the display of rough thumbnail sketches.

This summer, the paintings will be on display at the Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum in Pittsburgh. Three, including the portrait of Josh Gibson, have been purchased by the Muskegon Museum of Art in Michigan.

The artist is quoted in an exhibition brochure:

“What I found most striking was the story of the Negro League; its overwhelming success despite the daunting odds against it. The spirit of independence, having made something out of nothing at all. Armed with only intellectual and athletic talents, and the sheer will to play the game that they loved so dearly, this group of men assumed control of their destiny. After being pushed out of the game by an overwhelming majority, African-Americans, rather than giving up, formed leagues of their own, successful leagues that lasted almost thirty years.

“Overall, I hope that I have done justice to these somewhat forgotten men and given them the tribute that they deserve. I don’t wish to deify them but rather honor them, portray them as the heroes they were and further solidify their place in history.“

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They Didn’t Get That From Me!

Posted by on Oct 25, 2011 in Author's Korean Connections, On Events & Presentations , On Other Resources for Educators | 2 comments

 

In our joint school visits, as author Margy Burns Knight talks, I often sketch the face of an imagined child in each session, leaving the school with a group of portraits of diverse children. Several years ago, presenting our book Africa is Not a Country at a Maine school, I was sketching a series of children who could be from African countries. As the collection of portraits grew throughout the day, we asked students, “What do you notice about the pictures? What’s the same about the children? What’s different?” 
 
A second grade boy pointed to the image of a brown-skinned girl wearing a scarf around her head. “She’s so poor,” he remarked in a solemn tone. “And she’s sad, so, so sad.” 
In truth, the portrait was of a smiling girl, at least as happy-looking as any of the other drawings. (To add to the intrigue of the comment, the student making it was brown-skinned himself, an African-American child adopted by a white family.) A conversation ensued, in language appropriate to second graders, about “funny ideas” we sometimes have about Africa, and perhaps brown people – such as that everyone is poor and sad.
 
Has a child in your care ever burst out with a racial comment that puzzled, embarrassed, or distressed you? The more we explore race with children, the more it’s likely to happen. One of the outcomes of getting children to share their observations is that if we’re effective, we’ll get to hear what children are actually thinking about race – and some of their ideas are not what we might wish. Our first response may be the horrified defense, “S/he couldn’t have gotten it from me!” The good news is, you’re probably right.
 
In our presentation, “Books As Bridges” (see previous post), Krista Aronson, psychologist and Bates college professor of psychology, shared research results that “children rely more on community norms than parental norms.” As an example, she noted that parents new to a community may speak with an accent, but their children will soon sound like their classmates. 

So where do children’s ideas about race come from?
 

1. Socialized Roles

Children are keen observers. If they see people segregated in distinctly different types of housing, jobs, classrooms, positions of authority, etc., they absorb this information.
 
2. The Soup
All day long, all of us, including children, are surrounded by and bombarded with images and information. Children notice, without the skills to deconstruct why, who’s portrayed and how.
 
3. Silence
When adults respond to questions and comments about race with discomfort and shushing, or never raise the subject at all, children learn that race is something not to be discussed, like something bad or dangerous.

This is why talking about race is so crucial for children’s development. If we don’t engage kids in conversations that give them permission and language to say what’s on their minds, to voice the associations they’re making and the conclusions they’re reaching, all of this conditioning goes unchallenged. When we provide a safe place for children to speak, we get the opportunity to engage with them and offer them the skills to break the silence, to interrogate the Soup, and to challenge socialized roles.

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Race Talk with Young Kids: How to Start

Posted by on Apr 27, 2011 in On Other Resources for Educators, On Race & Culture, On Transracial Adoption | 1 comment

When our Korean-born daughter was four or five, one of her favorite adults was Hyo-Jung, a young Korean-American friend.

At some point during each visit with our daughter, Hyo-Jung would lift a strand of her glossy, straight black hair, then a similar strand of Yunhee’s, and sing, “Same hair!” The game never failed to delight Yunhee and I’m sure helped forge a deep bond with this lovely woman who looked like her, as none of her immediate family members did.

Hyo-Jung was simply pointing out the obvious, in a relaxed, playful, affirming tone. For people who’ve been dealing with race every day of their lives, as many people of color do in the U.S., this might not be a difficult feat; it’s an everyday topic.

But research shows that, by some counts, “75% of white families never or almost never talk about race with their children.” Obviously, if statistics like that cover your experience, breaching the topic may not come out relaxed, playful, and affirming the first few times. But it’s a good standard to reach for.

Here are some first steps for talking about race with very young children:

Start with the assumption that our children DO notice race. Just because they don’t appear to based on what they say doesn’t mean they’re not categorizing. Many studies have documented that children – and even infants as young as four months – detect differences in skin color.

Where in the world did we get the idea that they don’t see it? Children are natural sorters. They see, and we teach them, the “green car, pink pig, yellow flower, red ball, brown shirt …” but all of a sudden when the color is on skin, it’s invisible?

Of course, one of the reasons that children don’t voice their observations is that the adults around them have given them implicit but clear messages that it’s not to be talked about.

Include colors of skin and shapes of features in sorting games, as naturally as referring to the grass, the cat or the ball. Color identification, comparing and contrasting, alike and different (“Same hair!”). That’s all that very young children are seeing. Those categorizations don’t yet come with the charged complexity or value judgments that older people bring to the topic.Tailor the conversation to children’s ages and developmental stages. As with so many other topics, adjust the amount and type of information as children mature, and as needed in response to their questions and comments.

And, picture books are a great way to introduce the topic.

Next up, six titles that can start the conversation.

Further reading:
Here’s a terrific short article, “5 Tips for Talking About Racism with Kids,” including a Q&A with Dr. Beverly Tatum, president of Spelman College and author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations about Race, one of the nation’s foremost authorities on racial identity development and race conversations. (My only quibble is that to accurately reflect the content of the piece, the title should say “Race,” not “Racism.” Talking about racism, though it can overlap, is another topic for another post.)

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