First up in our Emerge! author spotlight series is Dr. Michelle H. Martin, the Beverly Cleary Endowed Professor for Children and Youth Services at the University of Washington's Information School, and one of the leading voices in children's literature, diversity, and community literacy. A celebrated author, essayist, book critic, and founder of the nonprofit Read-a-Rama, Dr. Martin brings to Emerge! a career-long commitment to ensuring every child sees themselves reflected in the stories they read. We sat down with her to talk about what it takes to build a lifelong reader, and why the books we put in children's hands are never just books:
What are some strategies for student engagement that consistently convert reluctant or struggling readers into avid readers
Self-selected reading. When you're reading what you love, what you're passionate about, what you want to learn about, you're going to be a lot more likely to enjoy it, and readers who enjoy what they're reading tend to read more.
High-interest reading matters too – not just reading you get to select, but reading that represents your passions. I once had a camper who loved sharks, so I found every shark book I could — beautiful pictures, great illustrations, lots of information — because he had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of sharks.
There's also "just right" reading. As readers are building those foundational skills, like recognizing letters and learning to decode, they need texts that are not too hard, not too easy, but that will continually stretch them toward more complex texts. That sweet spot matters.
And then there's connecting what you read to what you do and reading about things that map onto your daily life and activities. We also found that communities of readers make a difference. That shark lover, paired with a child who loved whale sharks? They would feed each other's passions.
Finally, I remember my second-grade teacher, Mrs. Reamer, who read aloud to us every day after recess — a passage from a book she loved. It calmed us down, got us ready for learning, and we would beg for just one more chapter. She had a knack for stopping not at the end of a chapter, but she would create cliffhangers by stopping at the most exciting parts. So the next day, kids came in asking, what's going to happen? Getting kids hooked on stories is one of the most powerful ways to move a struggling reader toward becoming an avid one.
Why is representation important in children's literature? What elements of a student's identity and experience should they see reflected in the texts they read?
My answer to this is relatively simple: they should not have to choose.
We have intersectional identities. I am not just a female. I'm also a South Carolinian, a swimmer, someone who loves to cook and loves to sing. The books children read should, in all their variety, be able to reflect back all of those experiences.
I should be able to read Soul Food Sunday and see a grandparent cooking with their grandchild. I should be able to read Brown Girl Dreaming and see a child who grew up in South Carolina and sees herself as a writer.
When I was a child reading Dick and Jane, very little there reflected my life experience. Children should not have to feel like they can only claim one piece of their background, one slice of who they are. If you take the sum total of everything a child reads throughout a year, they should see lots of reflections of who they are, whether that's linguistic, experiential, or simply their neighborhood.
I think Emerge! has done a great job of giving kids those experiences in all their wonderful variety Kids don’t have to choose.
As someone who studies children's literature, how do rich, diverse texts serve as the engine for all three elements of the Science of Literacy: reading, writing, and comprehension and knowledge building?
I teach students in the Master of Library and Information Science program at the University of Washington, and I can always tell the students in my programs who “ate books,” as I like to say, or are voracious readers. Those students are also typically some of my strongest writers. Reading and writing go together. And not surprisingly, they're often some of my most brilliant talkers, because they've absorbed content, interesting details, rich ideas from their reading, and they're writing about them. The reading brings it in; the writing puts it out.
When students choose high-interest, self-selected texts, they often develop deep knowledge of particular topics or extensive knowledge across many topics. My husband is a voracious reader, of mostly nonfiction and especially history, and he can talk to anybody about anything. When I ask him how he knew some random fact, he says, “Because I read more than the funny papers.”
Reading is taking words in and creating meaning. Writing is using what you know to produce words and meaning. When you are doing both around content that matters to you (content you can actually use) it's so much more meaningful than decoding for the sake of decoding.
And when some of those texts also represent your life, your family, your lived experience, your home language, how much more of an affirmation is that? Reading, writing, and knowledge building really ought to go together to build a strong literacy foundation. The texts that anchor all three should reflect the full range of who our students are.
When you think about the read-alouds in Emerge!, what were the non-negotiables? What needed to be true about the literature selections to ensure every student walked away feeling like a reader?
A few things. First, it had to be genuinely interesting to a wide variety of children. Children's literature without conflict is boring! And most kids are reluctant to keep reading something they find boring.
It also needed to build knowledge in some way, whether that's about a particular animal, a child's disability, a place, or a historical period.
And not every text makes a good read-aloud. I love The Stinky Cheese Man, but it doesn't work as a read-aloud, because so many essential details are in the illustrations, and you need to see them up close. Read-aloud ability was important.
One thing I've really loved about Emerge! is that multilingual learners are not an afterthought. Considerations of their needs are baked into the program. Learners from different backgrounds, different walks of life, different neurodiversities: all of that is considered. Audience was front and center as I was making selections or flagging texts that weren't the right fit.
