One day, I walked into an EC2 classroom where Demonstration Teacher Kelly Peters was reading I Walk with Vanessa aloud to her class. I Walk with Vanessa is a story about a young girl starting at a new school for the first time. Ms. Peters read the first few pages of the story where a character is introduced to the class and encounters a bully during her first day at school.
When Ms. Peters turns to the next page, a new character with long hair and a yellow dress is introduced. She turns to the class and asks, “What should this character’s name be?” A boy raises his hand and responds, “Jack”. Jack (pseudonym) was the name of the student, meaning he named the character after himself. Without missing a beat, Ms. Peters said “great” and continued reading the story with the new character Jack. As she continued to read, another student interrupted in protest of the new name, “Jack is a boy name, That’s a girl.” Several other students echo this sentiment, “can’t be a boy, she has long hair.” Ms. Peters then responded “Some boys have long hair, Jack has long hair.” Another student chimes in, “But the character is wearing a dress!” Ms. Peters responds, “Boys sometimes wear dresses.” Another student agrees, “My boy cousin wears dresses.” Another student adds on, “yeah, my brother wears dresses.” With that, Ms. Peters then proceeded to read I Walk with Vanessa with the new character “Jack”.
Throughout this quarter, I continued my work as a CONNECT intern with Dr. Christine Lee and EC2 Demonstration Teacher Kelly Peters as we investigated the power of wordless books. When I witnessed the moment above, I was struck by how wordless books are a way for kids to communicate their beliefs about the world that they live in. On this day, they created dialogue around their ideas on gender. Ms. Peters was able to foster a space where the students felt comfortable asking questions and pushing back on traditional gender names. It was great to see students have the opportunity to have this open dialogue about gender. I’ve always been interested in the lessons we learn as young people, especially where those lessons come from and how they shape our understanding of the world. When I first started as a CONNECT intern, I observed the potential of how wordless books could open up opportunities to understand and talk about gender. I was hoping to investigate this more, but to my surprise, I found that reading wordless books was an activity that organically let children make sense of gender on their own. As I finish my time as an undergraduate student, I will remember the space that wordless books created for the students, and the power they have in allowing children to bring their own beliefs into storytelling.
Olivia Moxie is a fourth-year Education and Social Transformation major at UCLA. Olivia is inspired by the connections between how play helps aid in student language development, and getting the opportunity to research this firsthand. Olivia plans on pursuing Speech-Language Pathology and utilizing play-based therapy techniques throughout her career.
Questions about this blog post can be directed to Dr. Christine Lee (clee@labschool.ucla.edu).