Facing History and Local Newspaper Partnership Brings Reading to Classrooms and Couches
Consider it a book club on a huge scale.
That’s what the Commercial Appeal daily newspaper is hoping to create with its fall serialization of the New York Times bestselling book, Outcasts United. For six weeks this fall, the Memphis, Tennessee, paper is running an edited and condensed version of the book, which tells the true story of a small-town female soccer coach and her ragtag team of refugee boys. It is set in Clarkston, Georgia, a small community that in the 1990s became a resettlement center for refugees from war zones in Liberia, Congo, Sudan, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Though Outcasts United takes place in Georgia, the realities the book tackles resonate deeply in the city of Memphis, said Bill Bailey, educational services manager for the Commercial Appeal. “Like any other community around the country, we’re having more and more diversification of our population,” he said. The serialization is part of a six-year partnership between the Commercial Appeal and the Memphis office of Facing History and Ourselves.
The Commercial Appeal began running serialized versions of books in its Newspapers in Education section in the early 1970s. At the time, the practice was common in publications across the country. Over the years, as budgets shrank and attention spans waned, newspapers began cutting their serializations. But Bill, who heads up Newspapers in Education and is the driving force behind the biannual serializations, fought to continue the program in Memphis. He saw a dire need to encourage reading. According to a recent survey from the organization Literacy Mid-South, 33 percent of the city’s adults read at or below a third grade level. The study ranked Memphis seventh among the 10 least literate of all U.S. cities.
“There are a lot of people out there who can read but don’t, and that has been part of our focus all along,” Bill said. “If you read together, you kind of get a buzz going.” In 2005, he found an ally in Facing History. After hearing a presentation from Michele Phillips, Facing History’s associate program director in Memphis, on the Holocaust memoir I Promised I Would Tell, Bill had an idea. To date, the serializations Bill ran in the Commercial Appeal were pre-packaged deals created by an outside organization. What if he ran books that he thought would particularly resonate with the Memphis community? And what if Memphis-area teachers created the accompanying educational materials? Facing History, he thought, would make the perfect partner. The organization signed on. I Promised I Would Tell would be their first collaboration.
| "It's incredibly timely. As we see in every community, including Memphis, demographics change, we really have to determine, 'What kind of community will we be?' 'Will we welcome newcomers here?'" - Rachel Shankman, Facing History's senior director in Memphis, on Outcasts United |
To prepare, Bill edited while Facing History enlisted staff and local teachers to design the guides which would accompany the serialized installments. The serialization debuted that fall. Three hundred city classrooms received copies of the paper, which published the installments on a full page, in color, with either photographs, poetry written by the author, historical maps, or an activity. It was a self–contained package of ready-to-use material that teachers could receive free of charge in the classroom. The response was positive, both in schools and in the community. When the Commercial Appeal booked the author, Holocaust survivor Sonia Schreiber Weitz, to speak at a public library in Memphis toward the end of the run, the event was standing room-only.
“We had 400 people attend and had to turn an additional 200 away,” recalled Rachel Shankman, senior director of the Memphis Facing History office. “People came who had to drive 150 to 200 miles to get here. They never would have met a survivor without it. That’s such a gift.”
“I don’t know if that has happened at our library before or since,” Bill said. “We just had to turn them away. It was flooded with people who were thankful for the presentation.” The next day, Sonia, who passed away in June 2010, visited 700 students and teachers at a local middle school.
Since that first collaboration, Facing History and the Commercial Appeal have partnered again four times, on Escape from Slavery by Francis Bok in the spring of 2007, The Freedom Writers Diary by the Freedom Writers and Erin Gruwell in the spring of 2008, Enrique’s Journey by Sonia Nazario in the fall of 2010, and now on Outcasts United. The match is a natural one. “Much of our work aligns with the need to develop good reading and writing skills,” Rachel said. “The serialization [collaboration] is another way to deepen that.” The project is helped by the paper’s circulation: Recent figures show the Commercial Appeal has roughly 127,000 print subscribers on Sundays and 97,000 on Wednesdays (the days the serialization runs); the Newspapers in Education’s digital edition has about 25,000 subscribers on those same days.
Facing History teacher Sara Beth Gregory plans to use the serialization of Outcasts United in her classroom next semester. “It will be an ideal unit for me to teach,” said the White Station Middle School teacher. She is one of the 600 Memphis-area educators signed up to access the serialization this fall. “We are the least homogenous school in the district,” said Sara Beth, who is grateful that a story about immigrants and immigration can find its way into her classroom. “Here, we’ve got everybody. We have a big [English as a Second Language] program, a lot of Hispanics, a girl who’s just been in America from China for three months. We’ve got kids from Yemen, from everywhere. We have a lot of Muslim students. We have Hindu students. It is going to be a very good thing for me to use.”
Last year, Sara Beth used the Escape From Slavery serialization with her eighth grade class. Along with the book, she showed the film “The Lost Boys of Sudan,” and incorporated maps of Africa and old newspaper articles into class discussions. “They were able to put faces to the conflict,” Sara Beth said of her students. And, she said, the serialized format of the reading helped to engage them. “It cuts to the chase more. It gets down to the nitty gritty,” she said. “We did a serialized chapter a day, so there was a beginning, a middle, and an end to the lesson. It does leave you wanting more.”
| "We try to choose something that in one way or another would give hope to the community. There are parts of Memphis that are very poverty-stricken, and have all the problems that go along with that. People hear from someone like Sonia Weitz or Bok, the survivor from Sudan, and realize that they don't have it so badly. They see a speaker who is moving forward in their lives in a way that has a positive effect on other people." - Bill Bailey, educational services manager for the Commercial Appeal |
Still, incorporating the serialization into the classroom can be a challenge. Many teachers find it difficult to incorporate one more thing into schedules already weighed down by Advanced Placement courses and required testing, Bill said. And in 2008, due to budget constraints, the paper stopped its long-standing practice of distributing papers to area classrooms at no charge. Now the content is available online, but accessing it can be a complicating factor for teachers. “I only have three computers in the room, so I print it off and make copies,” Sara Beth said.
The payoff is worth it, according to Bill. “I think presenting it this way has more impact than a book,” he said. “A lot of kids wouldn’t read this material in book form. They like this format. It’s something different. They can do it at home and on the computer.”
Indeed, a 2006 study published by Facing History proves as much. After the serialization of I Promised I Would Tell, the organization surveyed teachers that used the materials in their classrooms. The educators reported that the serialization increased their students’ knowledge of the Holocaust, as well as made their students more aware of racism, antisemitism, and other forms of bigotry in themselves or in others. The majority said that the series inspired classroom discussion, increased vocabulary, and fostered an interest in personal narrative.
“It’s great for young readers who just might not have the drive or the appetite to dive into a 300-page book of nonfiction,” Outcasts United author Warren St. John said during a recent phone call from New York City. Warren speaks at Memphis’ Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library on November 10. The event is free and open to the public.
Though targeted for young readers, the serializations make an impact community-wide. The October meeting of the Women’s Book Club of the city’s Church of the Annunciation hosted a discussion of Outcasts United and brought in the International Women’s Catering Service to serve a meal to members. The service, an outgrowth of the Refugee Empowerment Program offered through the Memphis Leadership Foundation, provided foods from countries like the Congo, Nepal, and Rwanda. The program supervisor and its founder, a Sudanese refugee, spoke at the event.
“It’s an entry point,” Warren said, “a way to confront many of the same issues that the book deals with in a format that’s a little bit easier to access.” Bill agreed. ““I think getting the whole community to focus on an issue, you can have more civil discourse,” he said. “Whether it’s immigration, worldwide slavery, the Holocaust, or refugee resettlement, it just provides a really good forum on civil discourse for more than one generation.”
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Read about and RSVP for Warren St. John’s Nov. 10 appearance in Memphis.
Read Facing History's interview with coach Luma Mufleh.
Interested in Outcasts United and live in the Cleveland area? Luma Mufleh, the coach of the team featured in the book, will speak about Outcasts Unitedand The Fugees to friends and family of Facing History in the city on Dec. 6 presented in partnership with The Allstate Foundation.
The Commercial Appeal will continue to make Outcasts United available for registered teachers through the end of the 2011-12 school year. Register Today!
This article was written by Facing History’s Julia Rappaport. For questions or tips on what Facing History is doing in your community, email her at Julia_Rappaport@facing.org.
