Facilitating Youth-Led Book Clubs as Transformative and Inclusive Spaces

Learn how to integrate book clubs into secondary school communities for transformation and inclusion so as to enhance and nurture students’ literacies along with their social and emotional development. Using her extensive experiences with culturally, neurologically, and linguistically diverse students, the author provides a rich resource that demonstrates how book clubs serve as critical places where adolescents can develop as readers while simultaneously working to build authentic relationships with their peers. Polleck offers research and theories grounded in culturally sustaining pedagogies and healing-centered engagements along with practical strategies for book club facilitators—from developing specific student-centered pedagogical approaches to embodying critical and humanizing dispositions.

Book Features:

• Guidance based on the author’s 25 years of experience as a facilitator and researcher of book clubs.
• A focus on encouraging meaningful participation, identity and community building, and social justice.
• An approach that prioritizes collaboration among teachers, social workers, counselors, administrators, parents, and other school personnel.
• Practical strategies that include facilitation suggestions, sample lesson plans, and reflective questioning techniques.
• Engaging narratives that center the voices of students who have participated in book clubs.
• An accompanying website with suggested reading lists, teaching materials, classroom activities, and more.

Jody Polleck is an associate professor and the program coordinator for literacy education at Hunter College, City University of New York. She also continues to work in NYC schools as both a literacy coach and teacher.

“Facilitating Youth-Led Book Clubs as Transformative and Inclusive Spaces is full of gems to support teachers, librarians, literacy coaches, curriculum directors, school leadership, and teacher preparation programs with youth-led book clubs! I am inspired by the foundation that carries this work, specifically centered on youth experience, youth knowledge, and healing-centered approaches. The self-reflection questions and action plans in each chapter help all of us educators move beyond the work of curating book lists. I am thrilled to have a text that I can also use with colleagues to expand our text analysis, note taking, and theories that ground our book club work. Reading about equity audits, book club structures, and mini-lesson reading topics further emphasized that our facilitation exists within systems that must be assessed: those within and outside of our classrooms. Jody Polleck shows us how to bring together what we know about a text with what we learn from youth in ways that honor youth interests and positionalities. My planning and teaching have already improved thanks to the sample book club plans and youth voices across this book.”
—Carla España, assistant professor, Brooklyn College, City University of New York