Developmental Reading with @akbar_offishio and Others From Ubuntu Academy

Last night's graduate course discussed postcolonial theory in relation to developmental reading (Thanks, Deborah Appleman) and I knew I wanted to highlight four years of reading opportunities through Ubuntu Academy, CWP-Fairfield's summer literacy institute for refugee and immigrant youth. As I put together the lessons over the weekend, I realized it would be so much more powerful to have Akbar, Omar, and Juma speak for themselves and with graduate students as we worked through lessons they experienced as readers.

We highlighted Rick Shaefer's art work, and I did a one-pager T-Chart to carry through a selected reading from Lost Boy, Lost Girl, Home of the Brave, and War Child. We also tied in analysis of Booked and a poem Kwame Alexander writes about a kid coming to the U.S. for opportunity (which is juxtaposed by Nick, who doesn't want to read the story, watching television).

Graduate courses at Fairfield University are only two hours, and I always miss that third hour on evenings like this. I feel like I only laid a base to the conversation, and that there needed to be another hour for more interaction on the in-school reading experiences of these youth.

After the class, I stopped with the kids to get Chipotle, and Akbar said he was nervous to eat new food (but he wasn't nervous flirting with the employee). They are tiny kids, but they packed away the food: rice, beans, guacamole, spices, chicken, steak burritos. I think I will need 48 hours to digest the food.

Meanwhile the rain continues in Connecticut and I get nervous about water issues, because the ground is saturated from the winter thaw and it is trying to find anywhere to go. The sump pump is working overtime, but so did my last one (and look where that got me). Home ownership is not fun when it swipes at one's savings.

Wow, is it hump-day already?