Open Letter to a Prospective Student of Spiritual Journeys in Young Adult Fiction, Alexander & Bach, 10/12/10
Dear Prospective Student,
We have written these personal reflections both to give you a sense of why this subject is
compelling to us and to briefly demonstrate the kinds of reflection you will explore in this
class. In a separate letter we lay out what you’ll need to do to enroll.
John Alexander’s Reflections
One of my fascinations with young adult literature was born of the time in my life when
I discovered it…as with many things somewhat later than you might expect. As I
emerged from my sojourn in graduate study in English Literature, I found joy in young
adult fiction. At that moment, I was so burned out on literature that I could barely read
it at all. Young adult literature was not only my path back into a resumption of a lifelong love of reading and learning but also a path back into a deeper understanding of
myself, of what is moving and meaningful to me and into effective reflections on
spiritual growth and development. Among the discoveries of that period was the
blessed limitations and challenges that I had tried to jump over.
So perhaps a few words about what I mean by “blessed limitations and challenges”
would be helpful. Reading provides the most useful limitation of slowing me down. This
allows nuance and depth unfolding over time instead of immediate, impulsive, intuitive
leaps to the end of the argument/the resolution of the story. So reading (or watching a
film) plays out in time. And as that time plays out, I continuously reflect on my
reactions to the characters and details of the work, stretch my imagination to what may
be coming, and examine my reactions to all those events and possibilities. Those
reactions tell me a great deal about what is meaningful to me, what my values are, how
they and I am changing, and what may be at work in my unconscious.
This experience of reacting and responding to a story or a character over time is, of
course, reflection. In my experience, most of my major insights into myself and the
world have come through reflection, which is at least as important as direct experience.
In fact, indirect experience of characters through fiction couples with direct experience
and reflection to form a kind of trinity of meaning. This course is important to me
because it gives me a chance to explore this triangle and to offer skills to you that have
been vital to my own spiritual growth.
In addition, my intellectual and academic disciplines of popular culture and folklore
have given me access to deeper understanding of myself and of others. I am excited to
share that with you and to offer you tools and processes for focus, reflection and
exploration that are both effective and that I believe could serve you at least as well as
they’ve served me.
Open Letter to a Prospective Student of Spiritual Journeys in Young Adult Fiction, Alexander & Bach, 10/12/10
Dorothe Bach’s Reflection
We can only see as much of any text as we can see of ourselves, which is why we can reread
a particular book years after an initial reading and marvel at how much more the text
means to us now than then . . . (Julius Lester, author books for children and adults,
child_lit listserv, August 5, 2007)
I was surprised to discover that John and I share a similar path. At the end of my
undergraduate years and then again in graduate school I noticed that being a “critical
reader” was not a choice any more but a mental habit that took over my brain whenever
I opened a book. There is a lot of pleasure in dissecting a text, but I missed the simple
joy of immersing myself in a book and contemplating what it told me about being
human.
Having taught courses on young adult and children’s literature at U.Va. for a number of
years convinced me that John and I are not alone in our desire to connect with our
childhood. 4th year English majors are often drawn to the class with a similar desire to
reconnect to a way of reading that engages their whole being. But this class is not only
for recovering literary scholars at the end of their undergraduate careers. Over the
years, students from different academic backgrounds and with different interests have
benefitted from the class in numerous ways. Science and engineering majors
appreciated looking at Young Adult Fiction through the lens of different scholarly
approaches and walked away with a deeper appreciation of the complexities involved in
things that seem commonplace. Students preparing to become teachers have cherished
this chance to discuss readings academically and personally before thinking about ways
books can be used to teach reading skills. Students from humanities and social sciences
often found that the course helped them see connections between things they learned in
other courses. But these are only general trends that hardly capture the personal
learning experiences of individual students.
In this course, we will study young adult fiction within the frameworks of particular
disciplines such as religious studies, gender studies, history, pedagogy, psychology, and
literary studies. But instead of neglecting our personal reading experiences and
focusing solely on an academic study of these texts, we will investigate the productive
tension between the two and ask questions such as these: How does a text speak to
each of us individually? How does reading for personal growth differ from a scholarly
exploration of texts? How does a scholarly exploration of a text affect the inspirational
value of a private reading experience?
John alluded to the importance of reflection. This class asks you to do a lot of it. We will
help you develop your own voice through writing exercises as well as discussions in
small learning communities. Our hope is that, over the course of the semester, you will
develop a personal vocabulary in which you can express your current spiritual quest
and the relationships between that quest and your academic pursuits.
Warm regards,
John Alexander and Dorothe Bach