Children must find ways to live with courage and hope in an imperfect world. Literacy can be a tool of empowerment for students as they learn and grow in challenging times. This keynote explores our shared opportunities and responsibilities to guide students to learn about themselves and others through literacy.

Why Literature?

Because literature has the power . . .
• to make us more human, to help us see the world from inside the skin of persons very different from ourselves; to live more lives than the one we have; to try on various roles.
• to develop compassion and insight into the behavior of ourselves and others (through characters so real that the reader lives and suffers and rejoices with them).
• to show us the past in a way that helps us understand the present.
• to move us in ways that facts, statistics, and history texts can never do (or rarely do).
• to develop the imagination; to help us entertain ideas we never could have had; to interpret and translate our experiences, to shape our world, and to enlarge our imaginations.
• to take us out of ourselves and return us to ourselves as a changed self; to enlarge our thinking while educating our hearts.

Huck, C. S. (1987). To know the place for the first time. The Best of the Bulletin. Children's Literature Assembly/National Council of Teachers of English, 1, 69-71.

Books to Change the World, One Conversation at a Time
a highly selected book list

Picture Books
At the Crossroads by Rachel Isadora. (1991). New York: Greenwillow.
Baseball Saved Us by Ken Mochizuki. Ill. by Dom Lee. (1993). New York: Lee & Low.
Brave as a Mountain Lion by Ann Herbert Scott. Ill. by Glo Coalson. (1996). New York: Clarion.
The Day Gogo Went to Vote by Elinor Batezat Sisulu. Ill. by Sharon Wilson. (1996). Little, Brown.
Freedom Summer by Deborah Wiles. Ill. by Jerome Lagarrigue. (2001). New York: Atheneum.
If a Bus Could Talk: The Story of Rosa Parks by Faith Ringgold. (1999). New York: Simon & Schuster.
The Gardener by Sarah Stewart. Ill. by David Small. (1997). New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
The Librarian of Basra by Jeanette Winter. (2004). San Diego: Harcourt.
Now One Foot, Now the Other by Tomie DePaola. (1981). New York: Putnam.
The Other Side by Jacqueline Woodson. Ill. by E. B. Lewis. (2001). New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
Passage to Freedom: The Sugihara Story by Ken Mochizuki. Ill. by Dom Lee. (1997). New York: Lee & Low.
Sister Anne’s Hands by Marybeth Lobieki. Ill. by K. Wendy Popp. (1998). New York: Dial.
Sitti’s Secrets by Naomi Shihab Nye. Ill. by Nancy Carpenter. (1994). New York: Four Winds Press.
Through My Eyes by Ruby Bridges. (1999). New York: Scholastic.
The Unbreakable Code by Sara Hoagland. Ill. by Julia Miner. (1996). Flagstaff, AZ: Northland.
What You Know First by Patricia MacLachlan. Ill. by Barry Moser. (1995). New York: HarperCollins.
Wilma Unlimited by Kathleen Krull. Ill. by David Diaz. (1996). San Diego, CA: Harcourt.

Novels: Elementary and Middle School
The Breadwinner by Deborah Ellis. (2000). Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre.
Freak the Mighty by Rodman Philbrick. (1993). New York: Scholastic.
Journey to Jo'burg by Beverly Naidoo. (1985). New York: J. B. Lippincott.
Love That Dog by Sharon Creech. (2000). New York: HarperCollins.
Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli. (1990). New York: HarperCollins.
Mick Harte Was Here by Barbara Park. (1995). New York: Knopf.
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor. (1976). New York: Puffin.
The Watsons Go to Birmingham – 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis. (1995). New York: Delacorte.

Fiction and Nonfiction: Middle School/High School
The Circuit by Francisco Jimenez. (1998). New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Esperanza Rising by Pam Munoz Ryan. (2000). New York: Scholastic.
Habibi by Naomi Shihab Nye. (1997). New York: Simon & Schuster.
Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff. (1993). New York: Henry Holt.
Monster by Walter Dean Myers. (1999). New York: Amistad.
Music from a Place Called Half Moon by Jerrie Oughton. (1995). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind by Suzanne Fisher Staples. (1989). New York: Random House.
Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. (1999). New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux.
Whale Talk by Chris Crutcher. (2001). New York: Greenwillow.

Katherine L. Schlick Noe, Ph.D.
Professor and Director of Literacy
College of Education
Seattle University
901 12th Avenue
P.O. Box 222000
Seattle, WA 98122-1090
email: kschlnoe@litcircles.org
(206) 296-5768