The New YA

The Process of Unlearning

In her preface to the young readers’ edition of Never Caught, Dunbar addresses these dual—and dueling—narratives. “You are about to encounter a story of bravery and heroism that will make you think differently about everything you have learned regarding American history,” she begins.

It’s not an empty promise.

Amanda Vickery, Assistant Professor of Social Studies Education and Race in Education at the University of North Texas, reads the adaptation of Never Caught with pre-service teachers in her social studies methods course. Even at the college level, she says, students “do a lot of unlearning.”

Morales agrees, using the same word—unlearning—to describe the work her high school students do. She says readings from We Are Not Yet Equal started students on a “process of reflecting.” They asked themselves, “What have we been taught about Black history?”

She shares their answer: “‘We’ve been taught that it’s very sad; really sad and bad things happened to them.’” Now, Morales says, students recognize the thinness of that narrative, pointing out, “‘Oh no, it’s not just like Black people were subjects of history. ... They made history, and these are all the ways how.’”

It’s not an accident that trade adaptations spark these re-evaluations for students. Tonya Bolden, co-author of We Are Not Yet Equal, is an award-winning YA novelist and nonfiction writer. Her goal, she says, is “telling the rest of history.” She offers the example of her 2017 YA novel Crossing Ebenezer Creek, which is centered around an understudied 1864 massacre of formerly enslaved people in Georgia.

“I think so often the narrative is bent backs, broken spirits, victim, victim, victim. And what I want to do ... is capture that humanity of enslaved people. Because if everyone was broken down and beaten and had all the love and hope beat out of them, people like me wouldn’t be here.”

The Work Historians Do

While a more complete account of history is clearly one appeal of adaptations, educators point out that they don’t just tell different stories than the textbook does. They also tell stories differently. That may be another reason these books have found a foothold in social studies classrooms: They model the ways historians organize and research their ideas.

Morales says she chose texts to help organize her course around theories of why events unfolded the way they did, rather than simply giving an account of what happened. She offers an example from An Indigenous Peoples’ History: “The concept of settler colonialism is in there. [These books] are grounded in these concepts and give many examples of them.”

She adds, “The concepts are complex, and students can grapple with them.”

According to Joanna Green, a senior editor at Beacon Press who shepherded the adaptation of An Indigenous Peoples’ History, maintaining complexity is a critical part of the task. She explains that there’s no one-size-fits-all adaptation. Each book she edits in the ReVisioning History for Young People series might look different because each adaptation is designed to best communicate the complex ideas of that particular text to younger readers. But there’s one thing they all have in common.

“The value of these books is that they are so informed by academic scholarship,” she says.

Templeton says that’s one thing he enjoyed about teaching Never Caught. Although the book reads more like a biography or novel than a typical history text, students could still see the academic research behind the story.

“The kids picked up very quickly that she used a lot of, ‘and maybe then Ona did this,’ and ... ‘perhaps the chef was making George’s favorite meal that night,’” he explains. “I think there was an authenticity to that, as opposed to a textbook, which is so authoritative.”

Using what Dunbar calls “informed speculation,” Never Caught models historical thinking for young readers. This process of deduction, Dunbar says, is “a large part of any of the work that historians do, especially on enslaved people, on women, on those who did not leave behind the same kind of recorded evidence that appears in archives.”

Seeing that work made visible shaped his students’ approaches to history, Templeton says. “Kids were asking, ‘Well, did X really happen?’ ‘Was that what happened?’ ‘What do we know for sure?’”

Something That Resonates

And it wasn’t just the talkative students asking those questions, he reports. While reading Never Caught, students who were quieter “when we were doing our usual approach to history” became “much more involved.” He says students “saw the courage and risk-taking that [Judge] exhibited. They were definitely fascinated. The idea that Ona was going to be given away as a wedding present, or the fact that George Washington was finding loopholes in the law to keep [the people he enslaved] in bondage, really offended and upset the kids. Giving them an authentic story truly resonated with them.”

Dunbar says that connection is key to helping students understand the past. “Everyone respects the courage and the bravery that’s easily seen through Ona’s story,” she says, “and I think it’s those touchstones that allow any reader, from any walk of life, to connect.”

She explains that, when writing, she wanted the “strong narrative arc” of Judge’s history to serve as the foundation of the text, onto which she could then layer “the smells or the sounds of the streets of Philadelphia in the 1780s” and the “historical facts and details that help the reader put all of the pieces of American history together.”

But unified narratives aren’t the only way that adaptations build connection with young readers. No matter how they’re organized, the attentive writing that’s so common in these texts—and often so lacking in textbooks—can help young people lock into and better understand the history they’re reading.

“That’s basically what I try to do: tell a good story,” Bolden says. “I think that the elements of fiction and poetry have a place in nonfiction.”

They certainly have a place for Morales’ students. “They’re very, very, very interested,” she says. “They comment all the time, ‘Oh I didn’t know this.’ ‘I never learned this before.’ ‘This is so interesting.’ ‘This is so sad.’ ... I think it’s really opening their eyes about U.S. history.”

That’s exactly the response these adaptations are intended to evoke. So it’s unsurprising that, when Bolden describes her work, she sounds almost indistinguishable from the educators she says she serves as “backup” for.

The way we write history matters, she explains, “because we want to not just impart information, but we want to reach and touch our young people’s psyches and souls and spirits ... to write to the whole person.”