The picture book study for this year’s Global Read Aloud was a pair of indigenous authors and illustrators. The use of language in the books was rich, and gave us ample opportunities to make connections to our own use of multiple communication strategies, as all of my students this year are multimodal AAC communicators. The themes fit beautifully into our social-emotional instruction, as we have been focusing on working together and what it means to be a community.
Then we reached the last book in the book study, “When We Were Alone” by Richard Anderson, illustrated by Julie Flett. The book makes great use of repetitive language that helps make the complex topic of indigenous residential schools more cognitively accessible. I have a student in my classroom who was previously placed at a residential school “far away from home” (as the story says) and who has a trauma history from that placement. I was initially a little apprehensive about reading this story with him. Would he understand it? Would he make the connection? From the first read-through, this student, who usually has difficulty sitting for lessons, sat with rapt attention for this story. His eyes were glued to every page as I read. It was clear the story had his interest.
I did not draw, or ask him to draw, explicit connections to his own residential school experience. What we did was make explicit comparisons between the meaning behind the rules in the story “to make everyone the same” and the rules in our classroom “to be safe” “to get our work done” and “so everyone can participate.” My students’ active participation in these activities reinforced our classroom values more than any explicit teaching could have done.
I will say it explicitly here: My student’s former placement was a residential ABA program. While the stories are different, at far too many programs the strategies and intentions are the same as the story we read. ABA-based strategies, applied to appropriate skills, are not, by themselves, the problem. It’s the values and intentions that drive them that are deeply problematic and lead to student trauma. For teachers looking to broach this controversial topic with their class, this book may be a great place to start.
