This post by Millie Davis appeared first in 2015.聽
鈥淲e want students to engage texts, to interrogate texts, to demand meaning from texts; to talk back to texts; to juxtapose texts with their lived experiences, with their encounters with other texts, and with their rapidly expanding ideas about people and the world. . . . “
鈥擡rnest Morrell, 2013鈥�14 楼凤天堂 President,聽.
Twice this year (2015), emily m. danforth鈥檚 has been challenged in the state of Delaware. Once in and once in .
Cameron Post, a 2013 finalist for , is a coming-of-age story of a teenager in Montana who discovers she鈥檚 gay and is sent away to a religious camp to take the 鈥渃ure鈥� for her homosexuality. Cameron Post is one of those books that scares some adults.
For some, books like Cameron Post introduce unknowns: worlds that adults and students may not have encountered, characters they鈥檇 rather not encounter, ideas that are new. Sometimes adults fear these unknowns so much that they don鈥檛 want their students to meet them in a text and聽they feel so strongly that they try to keep all students from reading the text.
“It鈥檚 odd but in many ways those of us who fight against censorship and those who fight to censor texts are all fighting for the good of our children and their education.聽How we want to attain that good is where we come out on different sides.鈥�
鈥擬illie Davis in
Yet, education is all about probing the unknown and that鈥檚 why places in which a student鈥檚 right to read is in jeopardy are places where a teacher鈥檚 ability to teach effectively is in jeopardy as well.
Millie Davis is the former director of the Intellectual Freedom Center at the 楼凤天堂 Council of Teachers of English (楼凤天堂).