Week 1

[morgan...@gmail.com]

• Please introduce yourself.
  
• Pick at least two of the topics below and respond (please include the number of the discussion topic you are responding to).
  
• Optional - respond to someone else's post.
  

Topics

1. Keep in mind that Barefoot Gen was created when graphic novels were still in their infancy, but having watched that introduction video post some reactions to the video and apply it to the first few pages of the book.
2. There is an issue with memoirs about if they can ever truly be considered non-fiction given the reliance on memory and the issues with bias.  This comes into play heavily with books like this one.  Graphic novels rely heavily on their pictures to paint a story, but pictures are subjective and there's always the possibility that one detail included or left off can completely change the meaning.  While Nakazawa has stated that this is his story, he has also stated that it is "based" on his experiences and facts.  On top of all of that can a book written 30 years after facts observed by a 6/7 year old truly be listed as non-fiction?  What are your thoughts?  Feel free to extend your thoughts even further, can anything not from research be taken as non-fiction in this book?  
3. On page 3 we see the kids basically ignoring an air raid, is this kids being kids or is it showing that the air raids have become a stimulus that no longer garners the same attention? - note there is a quote you might find interesting to look at after you've flushed out your thoughts under Week 2's materials.
4. Gen is excited to watch the planes and only goes inside when he is reminded of a neighbor child who was killed by strafing fire.  Question to ponder - Was the author's excitement that of watching the planes even though they were the enemy or is it the belief that they will get shot down that brings the excitement?  One is perhaps an excitement based upon awe and the unique something common among children and Japanese culture, the other is based upon patriotism/nationalism/super-nationalism and possibly something more dark.  Your thoughts?
5. When you write something using parts of your own life years later how much affect does personal bias, romanticized memory and faded memory affect things?  With this in mind, was the character's father really so outspoken at this point?  Keep in mind Gen isn't even shown as having attention directed at his father when his father speaks out so this is coming entirely from perceptions of his father decades after his father was killed.
6. The wheat in these first pages becomes a source of foreshadowing (and Nakazawa's main theme), if you teach about foreshadowing or themes, how does this compare to other pieces you have used and would you expect your students to catch it without any prompting?
7. Do you have any questions at this point (about the book, historical, other)?

[peba...@gmail.com]

My name is Paul Bach and I teach 9th grade American History and 11 grade American Literature, a change from prior years of 6th grade Social Studies and ELA with a section of 8th grade ELA.  Prior to that, I taught Film History at the community college level, which I loved.

Topic 2-As far as fiction/nonfiction based on memory, I have to say it is a matter of history and "truth" being relative. Whose "truth" is true? Is any memory ever completely true or true to the rememberer? The example I always point to for this is the film Rashomon with its multiple versions of the same events, each being dependent on who the teller of the tale is. Personally, I love competing versions. 

Topic 3-I think thee kids are ignoring the air raid because it has become such a common occurrence to them and has lost any sense of urgency or even danger. Even as they are reminded of the girl being killed on page 5, they still treat it lightly. They have become numb to the stimuli.

As an aside, I'm greatly looking forward to reading this book as I have been aware of it for year and have never gotten around to it.

[morgan...@gmail.com]

Paul

I like your connection to Rashomon (partially because I teach that both at my school and in an NCTA course and partially because I agree with your sentiment).  So here's a question for you.  If you were to teach this in one (or both) of your contents, would you classify it as fiction or non-fiction or would you make the kids decide on that issue?  

A second question for you, this is one I like to pose to my History students, can a translated work really be classified as a primary source?  I included some PDFs you can zoom in on for a Japanese copy of the book and if you look at the Japanese words, they are not necessarily the same as the English version.  

[gla...@gmail.com]

Hello.  My name is Andrew Glasier.  I teach at Shaker Heights High School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland (Go CAVS!).  I teach high school social studies, including classes in Government & Personal Finance.  I also teach a night course, called Asian Studies in which we teach one country for the entire year and then students have the opportunity to travel to that country.  Next year we will teach Japan again and visit our sister school in Nara prefecture.  They will also send students to visit us, most likely in March of 2018.  

I am married and have a 10 year old daughter.  We enjoy the outdoors, reading and watching films.  

Question 2:  Can memoirs truly be considered non-fiction?  As we all know, our memories can fail us on occasion.  Our point of view, our histories and our belief systems all conspire to create memories that are unique to us.  President Trump’s claim of his being the largest inauguration ever is a good example of our views dictating our memories.  

With that said, there is still something to be said for memoirs being based in fact and therefore part of the collective memory of events.  What you believe you recalled about an event is part of the narrative of that event.  We can’t discount the memories of people that were there simply because parts of the memory may be tainted by the author’s beliefs or recall.  The power of the memoir is that the voice is of a person who participated in that event.  It gives the reader a better understanding of what happened.  It may not be perfect, but still engages the reader in that period at that time and space.  

Question 3:  It is hard to say if the kids are less worried.  They run from the wheat fields to fetch the rest of the family, don their safety hoods and then go the shelter.  It’s Gen’s mother who reminds him of the girl being shot from machine gun fire from an American plane three days ago, as she pulls him into the shelter.  It doesn’t seem that they are ignoring the air raid but are still excited by the procedures that they must take on.  It still garners the same attention and for their mother the great fear of losing one her children to the Allied planes.

[morgan...@gmail.com]

Andrew

I think what you say about the value of memoirs is well said.  Your night class sounds like a very exciting program.  I don't know if you've taught the Japanese course before, but if there are any resources I can direct you towards or any questions you might have in relation to that course, I'd be happy to help.    

[jsche...@lexnyc.org]

Hello!  Judy Schechter here from the Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens, NY.  I teach all social studies topics to profoundly deaf high school students drawn from NYC’s five boroughs.  Right now, I’m teaching Global Studies II.  I teach in ASL and English.

Lexington is a small but very diverse school—we have about 268 students, whose families represent 5 continents and about 22 home languages.

My students lack access to communication in the home—most hearing parents of deaf kids don’t sign.  As a result, my students are low readers who struggle with English language literacy.  I look forward to using more graphic novels in my classes.  They serve as a bridge to literacy for my kids, and the kids love them!

I’ve been teaching for 15 years now.  I a prior life, I was an international trade lawyer who specialized in customs law.

As the daughter of a WWII veteran, I feel a strong personal connection to the events of WWII.  Dad served in the Army Air Corps.  His squadron was responsible for aerial reconnaissance/map making in such areas as Mexico, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea.  At the end of the war, he was stationed in Okinawa.

Dad’s twin brother, Colonel Irving “Buck” Schechter, was a Marine who saw battle on (and survived) Roi-Namur, Saipan, Tinian, and Iwo Jima.  As a young Captain, Buck was one of the leaders of the assault on Tinian in July 1944.  Morgan, I’m very curious about your time there!

I’m looking forward to working with you all!

Now, to Gen--

Question 2:  I think it’s tough to view these kind of works as non-fiction due to their subjectivity, bias, loss of memory, age, etc.  However, works like Barefoot Gen give us the emotional tenor of events in a way that more traditional non-fiction texts cannot.  Memoirs have a place side-by-side with these traditional texts in our teaching.  They bring the stories of huge events such as WWII down to the human level and have an immediacy that textbooks do not.

Questions 3 & 4:  I think Gen and his siblings have become inured to the air raid signal.  With respect to Gen’s excitement about watching the planes, I think he enjoyed both the plane spotting and the titillation provided by the idea of risk or harm.  My mom grew up during WWII and she, like other children, either was given or collected cards showing the silhouettes of both enemy and U.S. planes for plane spotting and security purposes.  From what mom told me, the initial feeling of spotting a plane was one of curiosity, not fear.  (Of course, unlike Gen, mom wasn’t getting bombed.)  Mom and her peers saw the plane spotting as a kind of game, and they were competitive about it.  Gen and his siblings may have had similar feelings.  I think Gen’s behavior can also be explained by magical thinking to the effect of, “If it happened to her (the little girl), it won’t happen to me”—like lightning not striking twice.  Plus Gen may have some feelings of schadenfreude—relief and dare I say happiness that the strafing didn’t happen to him.

[morgan...@gmail.com]

Judy

Your family background is fascinating.  What you say about your mom's experiences are things that never would have occurred to me, yet make perfect sense now that you point them out.  I was also excited to see that your uncle "Buck" was on Tinian.  I'm pretty sure his experience was nothing like mine, but I did spend many hours going around looking for .50 cal bullet casings left by American soldiers that are still all over the island.  Not to mention all the time spend exploring the Japanese bunkers, caves and whatnot.  There's even a beach on Tinian today called Coke Beach because of all the old Coke bottles left by American soldiers.  The local history of the island and people is amazing and all the WWII stuff really put living there over the top for a Social Studies teacher.  If you and your husband ever wanted to take a vacation to a beautiful tropical island that isn't full of tourists but offered more than just nature, I'd recommend Tinian.

[step...@brpsk12.org]

Andrew, I am interested in your Japan class.  Is it history based, language, culture?  How do you keep it going for a year?

 I find it very hard to teach one country for a year due to the integration of the histories and events that surround Asian countries.  I had a Japan Club for 16 years, until there were so few students who wanted to participate.  I think it hit a wall.  Perhaps I will try again in a year or so.  

[nahow...@gmail.com]

Hello, My name is Nick Howard. I’m a 6^th grade ELA teacher in Louisville, KY.

Topic 3- I think that the kids ignoring the air raid is showing how the people of Hiroshima have become so used to them, that they now like part of their daily routine.  Also, as they mentioned there is rarely any damage to their neighborhood during these raids, so they believe that it is a pointless precaution. It has, to them, become just another annoyance of living in a country at war.

Topic 6- The symbolism of the wheat and it’s destruction later is a great example of foreshadowing. With my students, we read Shirley Jackson’s “the Lottery” to give examples of foreshadowing. When the children are gathering rocks at the beginning of the story, I always have the students guess at why they are doing this (rock fight, pile building contest, etc.); then at the end the students are usually shocked a the ending. This usually leads to other examples they find in the story later.

[glas...@shaker.org]

The Asian Study class studies all parts of the country; history, society, art (we go to the Cleveland Museum of Art 6 times during the year), culture, really anything we want to do.  We actually taught Japan two years in a row and never duplicated anything.  For Japan, we usually get around 60 students joining the class, by far our biggest draw.  For China we only had 35 at the start of the year.  I think the key is having an exchange program and we have lots of anime loving students.  

[nike.n...@gmail.com]

Hello,  my name is Adenike Natschke. I teach Freshmen and AP Lit at Proviso West High School. 

Questions 2/5: I guess my question is: is there anything as perfect memory? Is it possible to recollect / reflect on an event without a form of bias? Does that bias make the situation less real? I don't know. These were his memories, what he remembered from the war. Art Spiegelman used this format to write his father's story as well and he too faced similar criticism since what he wrote about were not his memories. Does waiting so long to write the story affect it's credibility? Maybe?  Eliezer Wiesel wrote night 20 plus years after he experienced it and he was 13 years old. I don't think a 6/7 will make a reliable narrator. I have an 8 year-old daughter who changes the order of events depending whether you ask her in the morning/afternoon/night. 

I think it'll be impossible to tell the story without personal bias, romanticized memory and faded memory playing a part in the story. What we perceived happened to us as a kid/teenager/young adult...affect the way we internalized everything that happens to us afterwards. So maybe his father was really outspoken because he remembered his mother's feeling of dread everything his father spoke against the government. 

 

[Elizabeth Arias]

My name is Elizabeth Arias, and I am a K12 ESL teacher in NC, where I provide content support for myriad classes and material, and where I generally use history and particularly East Asia to engage my students with the English language and critical thought.  I think my students are more well-read than many of our instructors when it comes to history.

In response to the prompts, it may be more difficult to limit responses for prompt , as I have already finished the book, so I will start with #2.  With regard for the author and his topic of writing, I believe that memories can serve a purpose in a non-fiction arena, as the people reminiscing were present at the events.  While some historians may frown upon the work as too subjective, history has taken a turn toward social and cultural elements, so the experience of the individual as part of a society is now looked at more intently than it had been previously.  There is always some subjectivity in the observations made by people, as all of our background and experiences are wrapped up in our vision of the present.  This does not necessarily take away from its validity.

#3  I believe that the boys ignored the air raid because it has become so common,and Hiroshima had been spared up until that point.  It is, I think, a nod to universal human nature that kids will be kids, and that the limitations placed on them were contrary to their very nature, yet they acquiesced.

[morgan...@gmail.com]

Nick

I liked the connection to "The Lottery."  I think there is ample evidence that the air raids haven't been a source of damage (except for the one neighbor girl).  Throughout the entire book we won't see any damage caused by bombings until Little Boy.  Although as the reader we of course know why Hiroshima was left mostly untouched.  

[morgan...@gmail.com]

Adenike

I like the connection to your daughter and Maus.  Given what you said my follow up question would be will you see this book as a reliable piece of historically accurate fiction or as something else? 

[morgan...@gmail.com]

Elizabeth

I'm glad to hear that you were sucked into the book enough to finish it.  I trust that you'll review each week's selection prior to posting.  I do think you make an interesting point with the shift in focus of where we get our History from.  That today many people seem to prefer the people's history version and give it far more weight than it has received before.  When I taught this book, and some other graphic novels, in my classes one of the questions I gave to my students to answer was how teachers should use these books.  Every single student included the same idea - that they knew about WWII from the American perspective but that these books (including Barefoot Gen) opened their eyes to other perspectives that they had never learned.  

[epi...@apps.homewood.k12.al.us]

My name is Liz Pipkin, I am a behavioral specialist.  I teach Tier III reading and math interventions at a middle school in Homewood, Alabama.  I am using the concept of big ideas to teach reading through history.  I work with ELL students in an afterschool program to increase their study and literacy skills.  I summer on the coast of Georgia and teach during the year in Birmingham. This summer I am taking an Alabama Humanities “Super Teacher Program” that will address the concept of memory using sense of place/time.  These two learning opportunities should prove to be interesting in the places they intersect.  I plan to use graphic novels in my reading class to look at history through text and art.  I am looking forward to this book discussion and where it goes with the different perspective.

• Pick at least two of the topics below and respond (please include the number of the discussion topic you are responding to).

2.     There is an issue with memories if they can ever truly be considered non-fiction given the reliance on memory and the issues with bias.  This comes into play heavily with books like this one.  Graphic novels rely heavily on their pictures to paint a story, but pictures are subjective and there's always the possibility that one detail included or left off can completely change the meaning.  While Nakazawa has stated that this is his story, he has also stated that it is "based" on his experiences and facts.  On top of all of that can a book written 30 years after facts observed by a 6/7 year old truly be listed as non-fiction?  What are your thoughts?  Feel free to extend your thoughts even further, can anything not from research be taken as non-fiction in this book?  

The dismissive attitude of memory has been centered on two leading questions asked of memories: the degree of an author’s truthfulness and the extent of his self-absorption/narcissism.  This concept of narcissism has come up often in implicit bias being bantered around by behavioral economist in recent times.  Perspective taking in history is interesting, especially when it is reflected on in a person’s later years.  Memories of childhood and loved ones can be reduced to “molecular activity in the neurons of the brain” as they are distilled over time.  In the forward of the novel, Art Spiegelman discusses the idea of comics being “a highly charged medium, delivering densely concentrated information in relatively few words and simplified code images.”  In the area of autism, this notion of thinking in story frames has been discussed by Temple Grandin on how she puts information to use. Students reading literature should be aware and learn more about the purposes and functions of memory by the author, as they read the distilled text of this graphic novel.  

 

• Optional - respond to someone else's post.

Response to Paul Bach, “Topic 2-As far as fiction/nonfiction based on memory, I have to say it is a matter of history and "truth" being relative. Whose "truth" is true? Is any memory ever completely true or true to the rememberer? The example I always point to for this is the film Rashomon with its multiple versions of the same events, each being dependent on who the teller of the tale is.”    

Freud termed these “indifferent” memories of early childhood “screen memories. Freud suggested, that the unpleasant memories probably originate from a later, more recent date, and then the mind, as a defense mechanism, projects them back into our past, using, of course, the raw materials of our actual sensory recollections.”  This is an interesting perspective of what was going on with Keiji Nakazwa personally in the seventies that prompted the writing the first book.Paul brings up the idea of truth as being relative to the person who is telling the narrative

 

[aethe...@kapaun.org]

Hi! I'm Angie Etheredge. I teach Honors Freshmen English and Honors Junior English at Kapaun-Mt. Carmel High School in Wichita, KS. Last summer, this book caught my attention and I read it. It changed my perspective on the Japanese citizens' sentiment during the war, and I would love to incorporate it into a unit with the World History teacher, so I am excited to hear what others have to say on the novel.

#2 This question reminded me of the novel that I teach my juniors at the end of the school year: The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. It is one of my favorite books especially since I can teach it along with the AP US History teacher as she covers the 1960's and Vietnam. The students get mad at O'Brien's use of story truth and happening truth. Sometimes they are frustrated when they read half the novel to only find out that it is a FICTION book and will quote "You mean this is not real?" However, other students will defend the book by saying "But the truth still lies in the story! Just because it did not happen to the author does not mean that it never happened to someone in the war. Sometimes a fiction story can give us more truth--this book gives us a face to all the facts we learned in APUSH"  I agree with others that a memoir is the reality of the writer. If the mother were telling this story, the reality would have been shaped by her perceptions and thoughts. Gen is a child during these historical events and are non-fiction stories in the eyes of what Gen saw/did/hear. Aren't we doing the same thing when we ask our parents--"What was life like when you were a kid in 1961?" Even that story is based on the perceptions of the individual.  

#6 As an English teacher, foreshadowing is a staple in literature. For teaching this book, I would be direct in talking about the wheat and would have the students track it throughout the story.  I do the same with Grapes of Wrath as it opens with a whole chapter about a turtle. First the students and I joke about it--I empathize with them on the excitement of reading about a turtle crossing a road, but then I have them pick apart the image and Steinbeck's use of the natural world to explain things in the human world. Why a turtle? I ask. What is special about a turtle? I get descriptions about it taking its house with him and that it is slow, etc. Then I ask--well then how is this turtle fitting for the Joads? Then the students start piecing it together--all of the family's belongings--their house--is slowing plodding away towards California--overcoming all the roadside obstacles just like the turtle did in the chapter.

[Lori Stubben]

Lori Stubben here- 6-8 history focus, but mostly 8th grade class teacher in a Waldorf (arts) charter school in rural Northern California. I'm planning a 5 week WWII unit for 8th grade with a big living history field trip to an aircraft carrier, Rosie the Riveter museum, Japanese internment exhibit, and overnight on a submarine. I am planning on using Maus, Yoko's diary, The Girl With the White Flag and Barefoot Gen during that block. I lived-in Japan for 3 years and basically love all things Japanese.  I'm also working on creating curriculum for 20th century world history from graphic novels 3 week unit for the end of my 8th grade year. (any suggestions appreciated)

I garden, direct children's theater, am married to a wood fire potter, have a horse obsessed 12 year old, wood working 15 year old and too many animals.

2 & 5. I'm keenly interested in Nakazawa's father and his resistance to the war effort and how that is related to memory. Reading in the intro and interviews with the author his dad was in a modern theater troupe and jailed for 1 1/2 years because of that.  It says he performed Western plays. 

I've read a handful of children novels and memoirs about Hiroshima this year and Barefoot Gen is the only one to have any anti-war sentiment before the bombing.  I know of only a few Japanese pacifists as the culture, Shintoism, government propaganda, schools, everything was nationalistically pro-war. I am so curious as to how outspoken Nakazawa's father really was as the author was only 6 years old when all this happened. A historian would need concrete evidence to put this in a book, but a manga memoir of an event at age 6, written down almost 30 years after the fact brings everything into question. Is it a way to protect the memory of  beloved father by making him out to be so powerfully anti-war and anti-nationalism?  

I have never been through a serious traumatic event- and an atomic bomb killing one's family with almost total environmental devastation for decades to come is incomparable, but I cannot remember much in detail from anything at that young of an age or even from my teens, but I could certainly make it up based on things I know and feel now. So it is not a primary source, its a memoir after the fact.  

I am planning on having my students conduct oral history interviews with seniors this year and am so curious about memory and how it changes over time and how to approach this without being hurtful.

[dkok...@gccschools.com]

My name is Donna Kokojan and I have taught the majority of my 33 years teaching special education.  Two years ago, I switched to teaching English as a New Language at Charlestown Middle School and Charlestown High School.  I have one son and am going through Empty Nest Syndrome.  

 

Topics:

1.   This is my first Japanese graphic novel.  The video made points about this kind of genre that I had never realized. The wheat clearly shows that  one of the running themes is going to be about trials and tribulations.  The father wants his sons to know that it is not easy to decide to do what is right and that life’s trials will trample them down, but if they remain true to themselves and strong they will grow up to be productive members of society.  The over dramatization of emotions at first appears to be somewhat “abusive”, but the video helped me to see that this style of  violence  can represent other emotions also, like love.  

3. I think the author is showing kids being kids and providing us a glance at how most people think.  Frequently, kids don’t think they are going to be someone that gets hurt.  Kids want to believe that they are safe.  The Japanese military was perceived as being powerful and so I believe this gave the kids a false sense of safety.  I also believe the author is foreshadowing what is going to happen.  People get desensitized to the images they see day in and day out, so no one realized what could happen if a powerful bomb was dropped on them, so the kids could represent all the people of Hiroshima and their unpreparedness of the atomic bomb.

[bac...@pps.k12.mi.us]

Hi Liz,

It looks like your message cut off. I'm curious to hear what your thoughts were on memory.

Paul

[bac...@pps.k12.mi.us]

Morgan,

Sorry for the late response. School still in and we just field tripped to Canada, so...

As far as the fiction/nonfiction classification, I wouldn't label it for students. I'd get into exactly what I posted on and ask them to think about memories of times they were with other students and have them either discuss or write about it and do a compare/contrast. This way they can discover how slippery this really is!

Perhaps "based on a primary source" may be a better way to tackle translation. What bias or preference does the translator bring to word choice, etc.? No translation is word for word. Think of how deep a discussion could be if you had an exchange student in the room.

[semba...@gmail.com]

Hello - my name is Laura Semba.  I teach Japanese at Carroll High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  This is my 18th year of teaching.  I've also taught English in the past but now I just teach Japanese.  I have been to Japan 7 times (3 with students).  I will go again this summer in July for 2 weeks with students.  I did some of my MA work in Hiroshima.  It's quite a powerful and emotional experience to visit the Atomic Bomb Dome and the Peace Museum.  I was also able to attend the commemoration events in August of 2003.  My father is 3rd generation Japanese, but I grew up as an Indiana girl.  I started learning Japanese in college at Indiana University.  My father and my grandparents + extended family were interned during the war and my great uncle fought with the 442nd Regiment.  My other great uncle was a pathologist and was sent to Nagasaki after the bombing to study the effects of the bomb.

This is my first experience reading a graphic novel, although I've read a bit of Hayao Miyazaki's manga version of "Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind". 

Question 1:  I found the experience of reading a graphic novel to be quite a different way to process a story compared to reading a regular novel/book.  It was somehow more difficult for me to keep track of some of the characters, especially Gen and Shinji at first.  I really had to slow down and examine the pictures, which is something mentioned in the video.  You can miss important details if you're more focused on the text than the images.

Question 6: I believe it's important to ask students to try to pick out anything that might be the author using foreshadowing as we progress through the text.  This year we read Dickens' "Tale of Two Cities" for our English Academic Competition.  We discussed the importance of the scene where the peasants rush to drink from a barrel of spilled wine, even drinking it directly from puddles on the road.  Their faces were stained red from the wine which represents blood and one peasant actually writes "BLOOD" with the wine on a wall.  This was a foreshadowing of the ruthlessness of the French Revolution and also a vivid depiction of the sheer desperation of the peasants.  

The wheat in "Barefoot Gen" is a powerful symbol of hope, but it's also a tenuous hope, because so many things can go wrong before it's finally harvested.  However, there is also the theme of persistence against all odds, due to the wheat being able to finally grow, even after being trampled repeatedly.  I'm assuming we see that kind of persistence from Gen, even after facing the tremendous cruelty and stupidity of his neighbors, teachers, etc. plus the tremendous crushing cruelty of the bomb and its aftermath.

[epi...@apps.homewood.k12.al.us]

Liz posting
This is indeed an interesting group to discuss this novel with. The backgrounds of each participant brings a different view to the discussion. My father also served in the Army, so I have been a military brat and a military teacher. Laura S. you bring a perspective to the group. If I may ask were your grandparents interned on the East Coast in New Jetsey?

[topher...@gmail.com]

Hi everyone. I have really enjoyed reading all your posts and am afraid I may not have too much new to add. I teach English and Creative Writing to 10th and 11th graders at SEED PCS in Washington, DC. I don't read a lot of graphic novels but really appreciate the good ones I do read. I feel like graphic novels have the privileged position of using the key elements of more traditional ELA texts: novels (words) and film (images). There is so much potential there, and it is so exciting and challenging to read a graphic novel that is hitting on both cylinders. 

When I teach novels, I almost always challenge my students to examine the beginning closely as a way to look for theme. As Professor McLaughlin points out, Barefoot Gen sets up a number of themes from the very beginning. Indeed, wheat does some heavy lifting in the first few pages of the novel. The very fits panel, in fact, sets up the theme of survival despite consistent struggle. The wheat becomes a metaphor for the kids themselves (among other things), and the father reinforces this meaning explicitly on the second to last panel on the first page when he tells the boys he wants them to "grow up just like this wheat grows." The boys echo this message in the conversation with the typical response: We know. This same glib attitude surfaces later when the boys carelessly leave the air raid shelter while planes zoom overhead. 

The wheat also foreshadows the hunger that is present throughout the beginning of the book. Kids are preoccupied with their hunger (which interestingly to me at least parallels the American novel Black Boy which was written about the same time frame) because they have so little to eat. A whole bowl of rice is the dream for these kids, and they are actually jealous of their brother who is leaving the family for evacuation camp because they (mistakenly) assume that there is plentiful food in the country. In this way, the symbol of wheat leads to plot development. Presumably Akira's removal from the family will be important later in the novel. 

There is more to say about wheat, but I wanted to make one comment about the nature of memory and memoir. I was struck by the candor with which Nakazawa recounted his family's experience on the day the bomb was dropped. It is strikingly matter-of-fact, and this dissonance is arresting. I am struggling to make sense of the casual violence that is woven through the narrative (the video and some of the posters have already spoken about this as well), but it makes sense in light of the treatment of such devastating violence. Maybe one way to make sense (or even cope with) the scope of violence that was thrust upon Nakazawa and his family is to take the drama out of it and treat it as facts to report. If the atomic bomb is treated this way, then, it wouldn't necessarily make sense to treat "smaller" violence differently. Maybe the author is inured to what we might think of as more lurid violence because of a psychological shift that happened on that day that he describes in the preface. 

As a narrative device, de-dramatizing events is not a new strategy. There are key differences, but I see parallels to American slave narratives (Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, etc.) which employ a similar technique. This is also done in war narratives as a means to diffuse the politics of the reader (pro- or anti-war) by putting facts out there and letting the reader judge for him or herself. I am looking forward to seeing where this goes and am inclined to give the author the benefit of the doubt so far. 

[crenn...@gmail.com]

My name is Colin Rennert-May. I teach high school English at the University of Chicago Laboratory School. I don't think I have ever taught a graphic novel for a class, but I've read a number of them on my own. I will be teaching Persepolis in the fall, so this might give me some ideas. I have taught film, both in subject-specific film courses and in regular English classes. I have taught a few Japanese texts, most recently Rashomon. 

 

6. The images of the wheat at the beginning offer interesting opportunities for students to notice details, and depending on the level of students and where they are in the year, they might well notice a lot without much prompting. I think a class might notice the details of these early frames. Students learn to pay attention to details that don't advance the plot or narrative and consider why they might be important. I've sometimes taught Of Mice and Men with 9^th-graders, and there are a lot of descriptions of nature in the first scene that suggest important things about the future (mountains flaming like candles, the sounds of ranch dogs barking as coyotes). And it's important for students to relate those images to the characters as well. Here, Nakazawa makes the connection quite specific for us: the father wants his children to grow up like the wheat: does that mean that they will need to be trampled first or that they need to bear fruit in the end?

Here are some of the things I might want them to notice. The first box shows us wheat that is being trampled by anonymous feet. The close-up of the feet is from a higher angle. The wheat is black against the white. The second box depicts wheat stalks that are growing taller with distant clouds in the background. But the box, drawn from a low angle, is canted or tilted. The third box depicts a close up of a couple of heads of wheat. One head is framed by a white circle. Otherwise, the background is black. There is no writing in this last frame, only the image. It seems a little strange that a box featuring the fruit of the wheat should be encircled by so much black. The white circle might be the sun, but if it is the sun, it is a sun that is firmly surrounded by darkness. It's almost a negative of a Japanese flag, a red sun on a white background.

 

 

 

2. The category of "non-fiction" is always problematic. Clearly, many "fictional" works draw heavily on the specific (and sometimes researched) details of real people and places. And many "non-fictional" works contain argument, speculation, bias, and errors. If an author calls a book a memoir, she is making a claim that it is based on her memories. No one imagines that the dialogue in a memoir comes from recordings; it is reconstructed from one's memories. If a writer starts to invent details, then she should call work fiction. The distinction between the two might have more to do with intent than with accuracy.

The prompt mentioned a question about the validity of using a translation as a primary source. It might also be worth thinking about what it means to use a graphic text as a primary source. As a graphic novel, Barefoot Gen does present itself as a kind of fiction. It doesn't pretend that it contains a documentary reality of the world. The same story told with photographs, say, might be asserting a different level of truth for itself. Gen uses the conventions of cartoons. Even in the early pages, we are presenting with characters that are not drawn realistically. For instance, when the father strikes the children on the opening page, it's not realistic.

Of course, just because cartoons aren't "realistic" doesn't mean that a cartoonist couldn't create work that is documentary or valuable as a source. I saw Joe Sacco talk about his work a few years ago. For those who aren't familiar, Sacco has done a lot of work as a documentary cartoonist, especially in Bosnia and Palestine. He also made a very neat cartoon panorama of the 1^st day of the Battle of the Somme. For most of his work, he interviews people and takes photographs and transforms those records into cartoons, and he has clearly thought a lot about what a cartoonist might bring to documentary that a filmmaker or writer might not. He draws himself in a particularly caricatured way, but when he is drawing a crucial scene based on his reportage, he does employ a more photographic style of drawing.

Nakazawa doesn't necessarily use realism in the same way, but some of the panels seem more detailed and realistic. If I were having students to consider the text as a source, I would want them to consider that. 

[mdz...@gmail.com]

Introduction

I’m Mike Dzanko, and am a 6^th-grade Social Studies teacher at The de Paul. Before de Paul, I was an English professor. I’ve taken a fair few Teaching about Asia courses because I tremendously enjoy both the learning for its own sake and because I am genuinely interested in hearing what other teachers have to say. If I know anything, it’s that there’s so much more I can learn about both the culture, the period, and the teaching of it.

Question 2.

 

In her essay, ‘On Keeping a Notebook’, Joan Didion writes that ‘[t]he point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking.’ What matters to her, instead, is that she manages to capture what it felt like to be her at a given time. The fallibility of memory, and its stubborn persistence, are well-worn tropes, to be sure. That said, I believe that it is difficult to discuss memoirs without them both. Whether a reader considers the writer (someone remembering a childhood trauma), the form (a graphic novel), or the reader’s possible (mis)interpretations of those memories, I believe that simple labels like ‘memoir’ are rather beside the point. Instead, a book such as Barefoot Gen should be seen as representing very distinctive point of view. After all, who am I to doubt Nakazawa’s memories, to say nothing of his feelings of those memories?

 

Question 6. 

I fear that Art Spiegelman rather gave the game away in his excellent introduction, but I would like to think that my students would pick up on the elemental nature that’s to be found in much Japanese literature. I enjoyed the neat bookmarking of the wheat imagery with the sun bearing down on the characters as page eight drew to a close. And while I’m not so certain that my students would catch that particular connection, I think that Nakagawa is fairly plain in his intent from the start. (It reminded me a little of the beginning of the most recent War of the Worlds film, where the metaphors of a splinter and nature healing itself were used to great effect later in the film.) Perhaps both example are a little heavy-handed, but the images of the sun can be said to be wrought with even more meaning – and open to even more intriguing interpretations. 

[morgan...@gmail.com]

Liz

I agree that knowing the author's purpose and memories is important when looking at almost any piece, but especially a memoir or autobiography.  If they know that an author is anti-something or pro-something it can dramatically change a reading for students.  I would be curious to know how you approach this in your ELL classes?

As for the Rashomon post, one fun thing about Akutagawa's works is that Rashomon for sure, and I believe In a Grove (the multiple perspective piece), has been turned into graphic novels in many different languages (unfortunately I have not found an English one yet, but I believe you can easily find Spanish, French and Chinese translations.  The French one is beautifully illustrated, but I have not had the pleasure to see the Spanish version yet).  

[morgan...@gmail.com]

Angie

I like the comment about how your students react to "The Things They Carried."  I hear students arguing similar things and expressing similar frustrations in Minnesota.  You have to love when students get vested enough into a story that they develop that level of cognitive dissidence.  

I also think you make a good point about oral traditions.  Most of my students come from a heavily oral history background.  Sometimes I find myself talking with students have information that they state is fact but seems rather unrealistic.  For example I have had a young refugee teenager and her sister talking to me about life in the refugee camps and they started telling me about their father fighting in WWII.  Given the man's age it was mathematically impossible for that to be true, but this is something he had told them and it was unshakable truth to the two young ladies.  Other students who were born in the camps tell me about life in the villages with such vivid detail that I can picture it clearly even though those students had never been to their parents' village.    

[morgan...@gmail.com]

Lori

I agree that not having lived through a tramatic event it is hard to know how well a memory can be preserved.  I know that many people (including previous posters and adults I know who have been through events) state that memoirs become cemented.  Certainly the author would have been replaying everything in his mind over and over again for many years after the event, which could have helped preserve memoirs.  But I personally tend to agree more with the idea that this is a "memoir after the fact."  And I think that phrase would be a great way to present this book.  

As for the graphic novels question you posed, I put a google doc link on this website for people to share information about graphic novels they have used.  I've included several Japanese graphic novels.  I have many others I have not had the pleasure of teaching yet that I could recommend for you if you sent me a few more details of what you specifically want.

[Geoffrey Smith]

Hello! This is Geoffrey Smith.  I teach history at St. Andrew’s-Sewanee School, a boarding and day school serving a diverse community of learners atop the Cumberland plateau in south-central Tennessee.  As the successor to three mission-drive schools, SAS values ethnic, religious, and socio-economic diversity.  Half of our students receive need-based financial aid.  Day students are from Franklin County and six surrounding counties, including under-resourced parts of lower Appalachia.  Boarding students are from ten states and a dozen countries, including China, Japan, Spain, Germany, Rwanda.

 

Like other faculty members at a small school, I wear many hats: history teacher, houseparent (for a boys’ dormitory), and soccer coach.  I live on campus.  For 2017-2018, I will be lead teacher for revised, required ninth- and tenth-grade courses in history at SAS.  This fall for the first time, I will use Barefoot Gen in the ninth-grade course for a unit on history, memory, and commemoration.  This course is arranged topically, not chronologically, and it uses examples and resources from Europe and the wider world.  In the tenth-grade course, examples and resources come principally from Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

 

2: When I teach Elie Wiesel’s Night, I ask my ninth-grade students to categorize the work.  What genre or sub-genre is it?  I am hoping that they will say, “memoir” (or something similar), but I often get many other answers, including “fiction.”  In an age of alternative facts, students are easily skeptical.  Although these students are emotionally, ethically, and intellectually challenged by Night (and are not deniers of the Holocaust), they are quick to use some of Wiesel’s literary devices as rationale for questioning other elements of his first-person account of the Shoah.  With Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen, I suspect that something similar will unfold; students will question the reliability of some aspects of this account of the bombing of Hiroshima and its aftermath.  Also, I think that the narrower category of “memoir” is a more useful classification than the broader category of “non-fiction.”   

 

6: Most students will recognize that wheat is significant in some way in Nakazawa’s work, and many students will identify it as a source of foreshadowing.  In Night, for example, students identify Mrs. Schächter’s screams of “fire” early in the work as an element of foreshadowing. 

[morgan...@gmail.com]

Donna

I think you make a good point about the desensitization, in fact one that I don't think I considered.  That plane and scene could be a way for the author to try and desensitize the reader towards the bombings and air raids to increase the effect of the final pages.  I also think you make a good point about needing to take into consideration the belief in the strength and superiority of the Japanese military complex.  Certainly every young child was hearing from people in the neighborhood, at school and from friends (if not also parents) that the Japanese military was far superior and this could definitely effect kids views of US planes.   

[morgan...@gmail.com]

Laura

I am very interested to hear your thoughts as we move deeper into the book.  One thing you mentioned was brought up by some of my students this past year.  In pairs I had students each pick a different Japanese graphic novel.  I had 3 groups pick graphic novels by Shigeru Mizuki.  While his pieces are great, the students frequently pointed out that his Japanese soldier characters often looked very similar and this made things very difficult for them.  With Nakazawa I think it will become easier for you to identify characters as time goes by.  

As for the foreshadowing one question did pop up into my mind as I was reading your post.  The wheat will be referenced a few more times throughout the book and the author does point out that this was an intentional device.  But I wonder if this book was written today or in America, would the wheat have played a more dominant part in the story?  If it was written today would the wheat be in the background of more frames, would it have been referenced more, would it have taken on a role as a character like the house of Usher or the Rashomon temple?  If it had would it have weakened or strengthened the story?  I'm not sure that these can be answered, but I think they could lead to some interesting discussions.  

[morgan...@gmail.com]

Topher

I think you do bring up some good points.  I am not familiar with the book you mention - Black Boy.  After reading a few summaries of this book online I think I'll try to put that onto my personal summer reading list.  A thought did occur based on your comment of putting facts out there for the reader to attach feeling/bias to.  I think it is very common for people to remember the good more than the bad, the pleasure more than the pain.  I once had a professor joke that if this weren't the case she never would have had more than one child.  We certainly see the author include a lot of good times into this story, in fact they appear throughout the whole thing and even at the end in the midst of the atomic bomb's carnage there is something good.  But by including the negative as well, stuff that he may not want to include or might be tough (a sort of survivor's guilt to say anything bad about those who didn't survive?) must have been very intentional and required a fair bit more planning.  Certainly you bring up a reason for including it, but I think this could lead to a great classroom discussion and writing prompts.  In fact I think I might put this idea into my classes next year.

[morgan...@gmail.com]

Colin

I really like the film analysis you did of the wheat frames.  I think this is something that a lot of us without a film background might not take as strong a notice of.  When you were talking about the artistic style of Sacco I was reminded of a Japanese artist who made many graphic novels - Shigeru Mizuki.  He is known for photographic like art for his scenes but cartoonish character depictions.  In fact in his Showa series he draws himself in two ways (as the protagonist who often resembles a potato of some sort and as the omniscient narrator, the latter being called "Rat Man" because of his appearance).  If you are familiar with Mizuki I would be interested in hearing your thoughts about how he compares with Sacco.  

I would also agree that Nakazawa doesn't attempt the photographic style.  Although I think you'll see him go more towards realism later on in Barefoot Gen.  So then the question becomes if he went with this particular style, why?  Nakazawa was a skilled and accomplished graphic story teller with his own established style before Barefoot Gen.  Recently some colleagues and I were talking about Hitchcock and Psycho.  We were talking about the camera angles and Hitchcock's film style as well as all the Birds connections.  Certainly Hitchcock was very deliberate with how he painted each picture.  So I'll be curious to hear what you think about Nakazawa as we move forward.

[morgan...@gmail.com]

Mike

I think you have some valid points.  Who are we to question the author's memories is an interesting question.  Of course isn't questioning the author exactly what we want our students to do?  Question word choice, question character actions...  In Social Studies we often have the glorious option of ignoring some things and focusing just on the sense memory like you mention.  I know when I've been the Social Studies teacher in the cross-curricular lesson I've often done just that for the sake of my standards and curriculum focus.  But when I've been the English teacher I very much want the kids to question everything the author says (when I've felt a little mischievous I've even been known to plant some tough questions into my classes for them to bring up to the Social Studies teacher just to mess with them).  That said I think we do owe the author some things.  One of those things would be to give him a certain leeway and expertise.  After all he was alive then and experiencing these things, we weren't.  I often envision a scale with the two ends being fact and fiction.  When I read a memoir like this I imagine a hash mark that moves between the two poles.  At times I've tried to explain this to my students, it's been met with varying degrees of understanding.  

[Elizabeth Arias]

Yes, I will certainly review the sections each week as we go through the course!  Because it has been my experience that students acquire language better in inclusive and relevant classrooms, I always give multiple perspectives on everything I teach so that my students can understand that there are always voices that are not valued in every event everywhere.

[morgan...@gmail.com]

Geoffrey 

That is a very interesting school you are part of.  I do agree that memoir shouldn't be classified as non-fiction, but that it can't always be considered pure non-fiction either.  Because of this I find that some students struggle with memoirs.  

Your mentioning of foreshadowing of fire in Night stood out to me.  You said your students catch this and you expect them to likewise with the wheat.  despite their varied backgrounds, I assume your students come with at least a basic prior knowledge that aids in identifying the foreshadowing in Night.  Likewise I assume that they'll come in with a basic knowledge that Hiroshima had an atomic bomb dropped on it during WWII.  Do you think your students would pick up on these foreshadowings if they had no prior knowledge?  For example if you didn't allow them any previewing of the book and had them just start with the first panel and read for say 20 minutes before doing an free-form open sharing in small groups -  How many of them do you think would naturally bring up the wheat in their small group discussions?  I think most of my students would focus on other things than the foreshadowing but would CLAIM afterwards that they were aware of it but simply didn't discuss it.  

[seak...@gmail.com]

My name is Sabrina Anfossi Kareem, and I live & work in Chicago, Illinois. I teach 12th grade English in the Pilsen neighborhood on Chicago's south side. The course changes a bit from year to year but is basically always a writing course. Even though we focus primarily on writing skills, I still incorporate reading quite often as we read in order to respond in writing. About 4 years ago, I attended the week long summer PD on teaching East Asian Lit in high school, and since then I've enjoyed online courses and my own research to continue to add to what I learned in that course. I'm changing up my curriculum once again, and hoping to find some new ways to use graphic novels in the classroom next year. The students I will have range in skill levels from beginning readers to students who are just a point or two away from qualifying for dual credit college English. We have a class set of the graphic novel Persepolis and also American Born Chinese at school which I have taught before and hope to bring together, along with Barefoot Gen, to do some type of literature circle style unit near the beginning of the year.I would love to find a Latino, African, or African American voice, preferably female, to round out the options for novels in this unit if you have any suggestions. Almost all of my students are Spanish/English bilingual, and as I get to know them, I will be learning about their English proficiency as well as their relationship with literacy in general. I think graphic novels are a great way to enter into a new course with new students and allow everyone to engage no matter what their skill level is with English, reading, or writing. 

1. After watching the video and then re-reading chapter 1, I instantly realized that I was reading quickly and skipping the visual messages. The story is so action packed right from the beginning, and as an avid reader, I fly through the pages before I realize that I haven't looked at the images. I notice I'm drawn to facial expressions most, open mouths vs. closed mouths, to try to double check who is speaking. I also notice that when a page has panels that are more diverse in shape and size, I tend to slow down and look more closely at those panels that are a different shape or size than the rest. The sound effects like the air raid siren and the ROAR of the planes also slowed me down. I think it could be interesting to have my students analyze the author's design and layout choices to see where he intends our focus to be and when he wants us to slow down or speed up. We often talk about authors' purpose in terms of a theme or message, but we rarely talk about the author's intention in terms of how they want us to receive the story, and this is something that graphic novelists so obviously have to consider. I'm not sure exactly how I will phrase or frame the prompt, but I think I'd like to have them think about the effect the author and illustrator's  choices has on the reader. I'd also like to plan in activities that make them slow down and notice the images somehow.

2.I guess that by having the label non-fiction, some expect 100% fact. I think the idea of anything being 100% non-fiction, without elements of fiction, is a bit of a farce. Anyone in academia is familiar with the conversation about the subjective nature of textbooks and teaching in general, especially in the way we teach history, so why would memoirs be any different? I think it's naive for a reader to think that any story is able to reduced to an undeniable fact. Our own memories are subjective, the way we retell them is colored by our own relationship to that moment... I know some people get upset by the notion that an author might call something non-fiction and then embellish or create new or imagined ideas around a central fact or experience, but I like to think of the distinction as "entirely fiction" and "less than entirely fiction". After all, even Harry Potter or Star Wars was influenced by "real life" in terms of characters, conflicts, etc. I'm a bit of constructivist, and I don't subscribe to the idea that there is one standard meaning at the heart of any author's story. I think story, like any other form of art, is meant to be consumed and experienced and that makes it an exercise in redefining meaning once it leaves the author's mind and enter's the reader's.

 

I am drawn to your statement that pictures are subjective, and I think this is an excellent focus question. It makes me think of how as readers, we begin by looking at picture books, with the aim of creating stories in our own minds out of those pictures- a very subjective act. As we grow and our reading skills mature, we so often lose the pictures and perhaps as a result we also lose the expectation that our subjective reading of the story is an expected (allowable?) response. I think storytelling is subjective. Oral storytellers no doubt expand in an area that an audience seems interested in, and as a reader, I often pause and imagine a part of a story that is particularly interesting to me. This is where the genre of fan-fiction erupts from, and so it can't be denied as a natural function of storytelling. Now memoir aims to be a retelling of memories, and if anyone believes that memories are 100% fact, then I suppose they expect this of non-fiction too. I don't buy that theory myself.

[seak...@gmail.com]

Hi Colin. My name is Sabrina Anfossi Kareem, and I also teach in Chicago. In the Pilsen neighborhood at Instituto to be exact. I had never heard of Joe Sacco's work, but what a fantastic connection for this particular question. Even the fact that, as you say, he draws himself in a style that is distinctly a caricature could be considered a lie, or a misrepresentation, making his own images of himself to be not entirely non-fiction! It's a nice, subtle example of the point I was trying to make in my post, that even when we talk about history or ourselves, there's a lens we see everything through that colors our story, making anything and everything subjective in some regards. Personally, it doesn't bother me if a thing called non-fiction turns out to be something more, or less, because I'm reading for a deeper message, and I know as an adult that I read selfishly in this way no matter what the content is. I look for meaning that I can connect with and I interpret it and remember it through that schema. That's how I make sense of the world and everything in it. Some of my students struggle with this subjectivity. "What is the truth though, miss?" They'll ask. I shrug and respond, "Well. We just read the same passage; you tell me what you heard." I can't wait to check out Sacco's work and maybe find a way to bring it in to the classroom with a unit I'm working on for the beginning of the year- some kind of lit circles with a selection of graphic novels to use as a mini unit. I hope to use the unit to set routines, check reading ability, and then do some diagnostic writing in response to so I can figure out where each of my students is at in each skill strand. Looking forward to reading more of your responses in this course. Good luck with your end of year! 

[nicholas....@gmail.com]

Sorry for the late post! 

My name is Nick Ford and I teach 10th grade World History II at The SEED School of Washington, D.C.

Topic three:

What I found most interesting about the topics for this section is the boys seeming to ignore the air raid. While to us, we think sure, kids being kids, but I think it shows something different. The United States had set about a firebombing campaign that burned to the ground much of Japan's urban centers. For an amazing exposition of just how devastating this campaign was you can see this clip from Errol Morris absolutely amazing documentary "The Fog of War" in which he speaks to former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RceLAhPOS9Q

This firebombing campaign is one of the not so well known parts of the war and is one that is very awful to try and unpack, but I think it might show why the kids in the book are so okay with the planes, they were simply just used to seeing them all the time. Children who grow up with the trauma or near violence often use seeming not to care as a coping strategy, that might be what we are seeing. 

Topic 4:

I think the children being excited to see the planes does really show how easily children are open to the ideas they are taught. We see later in the novel the extent to which the nationalistic and militaristic teachings were pushed in the classroom. I think this is the boys wanting to believe what they had been told and buy in to supporting the war effort. But that thought classes with the ideas of their household, and the boys are reminded by their mother of the girl who was recently killed in an air raid. And then after the planes strafe the houses, we see them shivering, as if they have finally realized in that moment, that war is real and not glorious and easy as it has been told to them. 

Thanks, and sorry again for my tardiness.

-Nick

[morgan...@gmail.com]

This is from Maria Blake, she is having some tech problems and emailed her responses to me to post for her.

• Please introduce yourself.

Greetings All—

I am Maria Blake, and this is going to be my 5^th year teaching in Tucson, AZ.   I have taught 6^th grade social studies for two years, and this coming year my teaching will be at the high school level in Sophomore English, where I taught for two years before. My interest in this webinar was sparked by an earlier study of literature about the WWII through webinars provided by the NCTA, and holocaust workshops conducted locally, or nationally. The subject of the WWII has never stopped keeping me curious and willing to explore and deepen my understanding in because it represents, in my view, an important chapter in modern human history that can teach so much to the 21^st century reader and student.  

 

This webinar interests me, also, because it engages with the topic of graphic novels, which tends to be the literature that secondary students like. The more familiar a teacher becomes with the way to read and analyze it, the better s/he can design instruction, where graphic novels take a dynamic part in.   It is my goal to include multicultural literature, and particularly, connect literature to history and graphic novels. History is important, and it can connect across disciplines. James Madison characterizes history as “an inexhaustible fund of entertainment and instruction.” Entertainment will suggest the ability of the mind to creatively piece together snippets from Nakazawa’s memoir in order to recreate the complex reality of WWII seen from a different perspective in a way that gives the reader a sense of ownership and satisfaction. Keiji Nakazawa’s, Barefoot Gen, demonstrates the power of image and of a memoir to fill in gaps, otherwise, eclipsed by the objective listing of facts in history books. Looking forward to learning from y’all.

• Pick at least two of the topics below and respond (please include the number of the discussion topic you are responding to).
• Optional - respond to someone else's post.

 

Topics

1. Keep in mind that Barefoot Gen was created when graphic novels were still in their infancy, but having watched that introduction video post some reactions to the video and apply it to the first few pages of the book.
2. There is an issue with memoirs about if they can ever truly be considered non-fiction given the reliance on memory and the issues with bias.  This comes into play heavily with books like this one.  Graphic novels rely heavily on their pictures to paint a story, but pictures are subjective and there's always the possibility that one detail included or left off can completely change the meaning.  While Nakazawa has stated that this is his story, he has also stated that it is "based" on his experiences and facts.  On top of all of that can a book written 30 years after facts observed by a 6/7-year-old truly be listed as non-fiction?  What are your thoughts?  Feel free to extend your thoughts even further, can anything not from research be taken as non-fiction in this book?  
3. On page 3 we see the kids basically ignoring an air raid, is these kids being kids or is it showing that the air raids have become a stimulus that no longer garners the same attention? - note there is a quote you might find interesting to look at after you've flushed out your thoughts under Week 2's materials.

                  In my view, the way Gen responds to the air raids, more than the other older kids in Barefoot Gen’s family, is a reflection of both his immaturity and innocence, in addition to being a boy exposed to the reality of war on a daily basis to the extent that the air raids, and the procedures they inspire people to follow, have become a daily, thoughtless routine he practices, and often challenges with braggadocio.

            Given the above, the father, mother, and the three older siblings of Barefoot Gen and Sinji are more disciplined and aware of the reality of air raids, because of understanding better what their mother has taught all of them about the potential risk of dying, when avoiding taking sirens for airplane strikes seriously. In this light, we see how at the sound of air planes, and the concomitant emittance of the siren sound indicated with the “WHOOEEEEEE” sound bubbles in the frame of the comic strip, most adults are shown to follow orders for the air-raid warnings seriously, and thus they all exit rapidly the tram, and head towards the closest evacuation center with covered heads and in concentrated groups. Barefoot Gen is the one who challenges the reality of war more, and such an attitude is, most possibly, the result of being an immature child,  having not experienced yet the reality of death in his family to know what it means to die and lose a member of his family, and care thus for his own, or others’ likelihood of dying. With constant reminders, his mother is drilling the moral choice into Barefoot Gen’s mind that leads him to seek cover alongside with his family. An example of how the U.S. was drilling the practice of how to get covered in the event of an atomic bomb, during the cold world war era, is shown in the link below, and it is interesting to see parallels in the way children follow orders and procedures emanating from adults.     (https://youtu.be/IKqXu-5jw60 )

    Finally, I would have imagined Sinji to have acted the same way, since he is younger than Gen, but he must have been chaperoned by his older siblings to obey and follow orders. Gen is at the age that other members in his family can let him more out of their radar, since he is one of the middle children. Sinji is the baby of the family, until the baby is born.

4. Gen is excited to watch the planes and only goes inside when he is reminded of a neighbor child who was killed by strafing fire.  Question to ponder - Was the author's excitement that of watching the planes even though they were the enemy or is it the belief that they will get shot down that brings the excitement?  One is perhaps an excitement based upon awe and the unique something common among children and Japanese culture, the other is based upon patriotism/nationalism/super-nationalism and possibly something darker.  Your thoughts?
5. When you write something using parts of your own life years later how much affect does personal bias, romanticized memory and faded memory affect things?  With this in mind, was the character's father really so outspoken at this point?  Keep in mind Gen isn't even shown as having attention directed at his father when his father speaks out so this is coming entirely from perceptions of his father decades after his father was killed.
6. The wheat in these first pages becomes a source of foreshadowing (and Nakazawa's main theme). if you teach about foreshadowing or themes, how does this compare to other pieces you have used and would you expect your students to catch it without any prompting?

The first thing my students will recognize is that wheat is a vital source of food, the source of many things we produce for our food industry, such as bread, cereal, bagels, biscuits, and pasta. Sinji and Gen talk about using wheat for making noodles. Without wheat, it is easy to surmise, that societies will be missing on one of the most basic sources of energy and life. The farming of wheat is a source of well-being for Barefoot Gen’s family, and when it is trampled upon, it becomes a great source of worry. The incident of the intruders, who sought out to punish Gen’s family for being unpatriotic and aggressively defensive of their own freedom of expression that turned many citizens against them, included the destruction of the wheat field, the source of food and revenue for the family. If as a teacher, I make the connections between wheat as a symbol for something bigger in the story, such as war and peace, students can start to think about the war and how it caused destruction and death, but it did not annihilate hope and the rebirth of life and hope in the people, let alone Gen. In the same way, that is, wheat was trampled upon and destroyed by others, in the same way Hiroshima was trampled upon and destroyed as a center of civilization for a time because of a ruthless military dictatorship in Japan that led to a fierce military response by the U.S. forces to force the end of a cruel war that would otherwise have led to more deaths of U.S military, allies, and of course, Japanese citizens and soldiers. Nonetheless, the foreshadowing comes that, just as in every living thing, plant, animal, or human, that are part of the natural circle of life, which suggests a birth, death, and rebirth sequence, in the same way Hiroshima, “the field of wheat” destroyed metaphorically and temporarily, will be reborn and “sprout” up with new life and new hopes, as those relate to peace and prosperity, national and global unity, and understanding, democracy and political freedom.

When reading literature, students learn that foreshadowing is an element of analysis to help the reader understand better meanings about life and human experiences. I am sure students have encountered the sentiment of foreshadowing, particularly, when watching previews of movies, and when they see there is a tone of scariness in the prelude, then they know this foreshadows the movie will be scary, and they might not want to see it, whereas if the tone is not scary, they would know it is a movie they would like to see, because such a tone will foreshadow the type of movie they would want to watch, such as comedy, or drama.

 

 

[morgan...@gmail.com]

Sabrina

One graphic novel that comes to mind with an African voice is War Brothers.  There's a book and a graphic novel with the same name by the same author (I believe).  It is about child soldiers in Africa.  It's not nearly as graphic as it probably should be or as you might expect.  There's also a Romeo and Juliet by Gareth Hinds where Romeo is of African Descent.  It uses real text from the play.  Those are the two that pop to my mind right now.  Finding graphic novels with African American protagonists is much easier than good ones with female protagonists.  Although more and more seem to be coming out every year.  Also, I just read a short graphic novel by the great Will Eisner called A Family Matter.  It is a very quick read with most of the main characters being women whose grandparents were immigrants.  It is an incredibly dark and cynical look at the modern American family and American motivations.  It's not exactly what you asked for but could be work looking into.

When I was reading your post about fiction/non-fiction I was reminded of something I used to bring up in my classes.  You might recall that Oprah had someone on her show who had written a "non-fiction" book that Oprah endorsed.  (I can't recall all the details right this second, but I figure there's a chance you know what I'm talking about).  Shortly afterwards Oprah found out that he had made up most of the book.  She brought him back onto the show and tore into him on national TV.  I also used to bring up Barnes and Noble book stores with my kids in the same class.  Barnes and Noble put all of Tim O'Brien's book together in the same section.  Some of his books are his own story and state that they are non-fiction and others are historical-fiction.  The purpose of this lesson used to be to talk about how they determine what is fiction and what is not and how they should always question everything (even Oprah and national book stores).  

[morgan...@gmail.com]

Nick

You are right about the fire bombing's destruction.  I put a document on this site that's not terribly flashy but it shows the amount of damage done to many Japanese cities because of the bombings and the fire bombings were, in many ways, far more dangerous and destructive than the explosives.  The airbase in Tinian ran daily bombing runs with fire bombing being the default if weather conditions might be bad.  The fire bombings were considered much easier because it didn't matter if you could identify a target or not.  Just that concept speaks volumes.  There were some attempts near the end of the war to demolish old wooden houses and wooden buildings to try and limit eventual fire bombings by Japanese officials, but whose to say if it did any good.  

[semba...@gmail.com]

Liz - Hi!  Sorry for the delay in answering.  My great-grandfather was a Japanese-American community leader, so he was taken into custody by the FBI and kept away from his family in separate camps until 1945.  (He had done nothing wrong).  The rest of my family was interned at Tule Lake in Northern California.  They lived in Tacoma, WA before the internment and were all American citizens.  Thanks for your question!

[mgbl...@gmail.com]

Hi Laura--

It is interesting to observe how all the participants have something to share that shows connection to history and Asia, or multiculturalism, and that is making discussions so interesting. You also bring up this idea of cultural diversity in your response. Liked the interpretation of the symbolism on the wheat and how you can connect with a diverse perspective to the experience of the  Japanese-Americans because of having visited key places and your first-hand experiences. Our school district emphasizes consistently  a culturally responsive and relevant pedagogy, that is, developing a learning environment where, regardless of the subject matter, teachers emphasize relationships with students, and designing a curriculum that is informed by the students and teachers, respectively. Ben Gen offers us this perspective, and am sure you offer a gem of a perspective to make students more globally conscious and responsive. 

[Geoffrey Smith]

Morgan, I agree that students struggle with memoirs.  One of the reasons that I chose Barefoot Gen for my ninth-grade course this fall is that it will effectively bookend the course in a number of respects.  We will begin the school year with 1945 (in the Pacific, through a memoir), and we will end the school year in 1945 (but in Europe, through a different memoir, Night).  In the past, I have used a novella by a pacifist German soldier to begin the course.  Advanced students also often grapple with the difference between autobiography and memoir.  One similarity between Barefoot Gen and Night is that each work is written with an agenda: each work aspires to prevent the repeat of historical tragedy (whether an atomic bombing or a genocide).  I am looking forward to seeing what connections my students will make.

I do not know how students would pick up on foreshadowing in Night or Barefoot Gen (which is more challenging in this respect) without some prior knowledge of the Holocaust or Hiroshima.  But our students do, in fact, come to us with prior, perhaps general, knowledge of both events.  In the Middle School, the humanities curriculum touches on both events from an American perspective.  In the Upper School, we deliberately return to these (and other selected events), but we now examine them from alternative (i.e., non-American or non-Western) perspectives. 

In addition, I agree with the findings of Sam Weinberg and the Stanford History Education Group, who sees history as a method for understanding the relationships between people and events in the past.  But most people, including our students, absorb lessons about the past from many different settings, including at the kitchen table, in a movie theater, or via the Internet.  Much of what we do as history teachers is (a) to encourage students to identify contested versions of the past and (b) to grapple with their own informed version of the past.