Xenophobia, Kid Lit, and Liberation
Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego was the first computer game I owned and I spent hours playing it on the Apple II computer I received for Christmas in 1989. The games, I collected them all, had everything eleven-year-old me needed at the time: a challenging educational premise (each game came with a world almanac), mystery, and of course, V.I.L.E. henchmen with silly names I still giggle about today. Thanks to Carmen Sandiego, I’m familiar with state and world capitals, flags, historical facts, and I can locate most of the countries in the world on a map. Carmen Sandiego deepened the love I have for geography today.
When I started teaching, I was alarmed, but not surprised, by how little geography my students knew. Geography was never a focus in my own K-12 schooling and given recent events, I believe this is deliberate. An in-depth knowledge of geography could make Americans more inquisitive, more connected to the world around them, less likely to ostracize people from outside of the US, and less vulnerable to state sponsored propaganda. If geography wasn’t overlooked so often in America’s schools, perhaps we’d have a less xenophobic populace. Many of my students were also vocal about how much they didn’t like to read. So, during our weekly D.E.A.R (Drop Everything And Read) sessions, I’d ask students why they didn’t like to read and which books they’d be interested in reading during our one on one reading conferences. One by one they told me the settings weren’t interesting and they couldn’t relate to the characters or their problems. Their honesty led me to Kid Lit (books written for children and teens).
When I started teaching in the early 2000s, there weren’t many books by diverse authors available in classrooms. So, I set out to write the books I thought the students might want to read (hopefully). I’d always wanted to be a journalist or poet. My students shifted my focus to writing for children. And now that I’m the mother of an infant and a first grader, I’m committed to writing books for children under the age of 8. My son loves stories, math, and maps, but reading doesn’t come easy to him. (His favorite early chapter books are in the Sadiq Series by Siman Nuurali). My current work in progress is an early chapter book that incorporates geography and adventure.
I left the classroom for good in 2020 for a variety of reasons, but I haven’t stopped creating materials of instruction for the classroom. I released the Conjuring Worlds Afrofuturist Textbook for Middle and High School Students
in 2022 and I’ve created lesson plans for Altair Education Consulting and a Soil Science curriculum with Our Space World. I am extremely proud of the students across the country who are standing in solidarity against the genocide in Gaza and I am always looking for new ways to resist injustice through my passions for writing and developing educational materials. Perhaps the key to liberation begins with diverse books, characters, and settings. It's certainly worth a try.