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Hello!

I am Dr. Chea Parton

Visiting Assistant Professor at Purdue University

You can find me at:

chea.parton@gmail.com

Twitter: @readingrural

Instagram: @dr_chea_parton

literacyinplace.com

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Ain’t No Hidin’ It:

Teaching Place and Social Class through Rural and Urban YA Fiction

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Think with us a minute…

How would you describe your social class position?

When/Where did you learn to language your class experience?

What YA books have you read that you feel like “see” you and your experiences as a person in that social class?

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Before we get into this presentation, I’d like us to think a minute about how we would describe our social class position, where we learned to be able to language it, and what (if any) books we ever read where we felt seen. You can pause the video if you’d like more time to think about it.

I grew up in a working class family that transitioned into the middle class somewhere about the time I graduated from high school. Throughout college, my parents didn’t help me much and I worked multiple jobs (and took out too much money in loans) to pay my rent, car insurance and for books, etc. But I’d say I’m now pretty firmly middle-class.

I actually think I learned to talk about class, at least in part, through music - through the working class singer-songwriters my dad loved because they told a story recognizable to him and where he felt seen.

Besides canonical works that positioned rural working-classness as pathology - as something to be cured - I don’t think I ever really saw myself in a book until I read Jeff Zentner’s Serpent King. It’s not a perfect book, but it spoke to me in a way no book ever had.

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My working-class experiences as a rural person may overlap with but are still different from the experiences of a working-class person from a major metropolitan area. (Parton, 2022, p. 28)

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In this presentation, I’m gonna talk a little bit about how my approach was shaped by theory, explain a little bit about what I did and what I found through that, and I’ll end with how I would approach using this in my rural secondary English classroom. I hope that’ll be helpful for teacher ed folks too - there’s a lot of overlap there.

First I wanted to give an visual representation of how I’m defining rural, urban, and suburban here. There is really no one definition of rural - the US Census bureau just defines it as “not urban” - so it ends up encompassing a lot of different areas. So, these pictures here are what I think of when I think of rural (e.g., open land, small population); urban (e.g., crowded buildings, high rises); and suburban (lots of housing subdivisions with a little green space and strip malls peppered about)

For this presentation, I’m going to be looking at a rural YA book and an urban YA book. I want to say that I know that seems like a binary, but it really isn’t, and I’ll talk a little bit more about that when we move into the findings.

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Theoretical Framework

Critical place-based lens (Parton, 2022)

Combines the place work of Massey (2005); Agnew (1987); and Cresswell (2010) with the transactional theories of reading of Bishop (1990) and Rosenblatt (1994)

Place is inextricably connected to our identities and the interactions between people and the environment as well as one another shapes who we are. Who we are shapes how we read, so we’re always reading through place whether we acknowledge it or not.

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The Study: Exploratory Critical Content Analysis

Chose two Books

Funny How Things Change (rural)
Make Lemonade (urban)

Read & marked passages where place was prominent and salient
Wrote memos/notes about those passages
Compared/contrasted them through the critical place-based lens

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Funny How Things Change

by Melissa Wyatt

FUNNY HOW THINGS CHANGE takes place in rural West Virginia deep in the Appalachian Mountains. In it, we follow Remy Walker whose family settled in Dwyer more than 160 years ago and have their own mountain and holler named after them. Remy is torn between getting out by following the girl he loves as she goes to college and staying in the place that has always felt like part of him. Through interactions with both insiders and outsiders, Remy grapples with knowing he should want to leave and wanting to be with Lisa but also wanting to stay to be a steward of the land his family’s been on for more than a century.

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Make Lemonade

by Virginia Euwer Wolff

MAKE LEMONADE takes place in lower-class urban neighborhood. The story follows 14-year-old Verna LaVaughn as she looks for a job to help her save for college. After seeing a notice on the school bulletin reading BABYSITTER NEEDED BAD, she goes to check it out where she finds 17-year-old Jolly working at a factory to support her two kids all by herself. LaVaughn takes the job and she and Jolly, Jilly, and Jeremy all form a little family for a while as both girls work together to weather the storms of life and make lemonade from the lemons life hurls at them.

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Similarities

Remy and LaVaughn both come from a single-parent household.
Both are considering going to college.

Remy, Jolly, LaVaughn all have jobs as teenagers that are more than a slush fund.
Remy and LaVaughn have special (though different) connections to their places.

All speak a nonstandard variety of English
There is an understanding that it's up to them (rather than the system) to make lemonade

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Differences

Place
Remy doesn’t feel like he needs college to get out of Dwyer
LaVaughn lives in a high-rise building in public housing and Remy lives in a trailer

Place-based literacies

Remy is used to the switchbacks and turns of the mountains and how to read the weather by feel
LaVaughn knows bus routes and stops, not to go into the laundry alone

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Findings

More similarities than I was expecting to find.
Social class looks different in different kinds of places,
Social class-related experiences of characters across places is important

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Place

Funny How Things Change:

We got one of the lowest crime rates in the country. Only because nobody has anything worth stealing. (p. 78).

How come ducks fly over West Virginia upside down? ‘Cause there’s nothing worth crapping on.” (p. 79)

Make Lemonade

You can’t trust the city to keep the bad elements out,

So the Tenant Council does it. Been doing it

since I was little. They carry their posters sometimes

all the way to the City Council:

“Public Housing Doesn’t Protect Private Citizens.”

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Place

LaVaughn lives in a 64 apartment building in public housing in a city.

Remy lives in a trailer on the side of a mountain. Remy’s dad gardens, selling his crop to local folks. L

He also hand mines their (Walker) mountain to sell and heat their trailer.

While most everything seems to be in working order in LaVaugn’s apartment, keeping the consequences of capitalist systems out of the apartment seem to be the struggle.

However, on Remy’s mountain, his trailer the plumbing is messed up and it doesn’t have a working shower or telephone.

Their living situations are so different, I was surprised at the amount of similarity between them. Each has a special claim or investment in their places.

The mountain Remy lives on and the road that runs up it are named for his family. He still lives where his ancestors settled when they first came to Dwyer and because of that tie, feels like he has a special connection to it and is a steward of it.

For LaVaughn, it’s the site of her dad’s murder. It’s where she still catches his scent every now and again, and she sees her mom invest in it through the Tenant Council.

The one glaring difference has to do with their social class visibility. When LV goes to by shoes for Jeremy, the clerks judge them based on Jeremy’s appearance and not hers necessarily. When she’s on the bus and even in school she never discusses feeling shame because of her social class standing, but Remy talks about it multiple times.

Everyone in Dwyer knows where he lives, that his dad’s been laid off, that he works at the local mechanic’s shop. There’s no hiding from his social class or middle class passing.

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Public Assistance

Funny How Things Change:

that would mean telling her mom why. Not that he was ashamed, but Lisa’s mom was a meddler. A nurse at the Dwyer Free Hospital, she knew too many social workers. One look at the trailer, and she’d have them down on Remy and his dad like hounds on a coon, signing them up for all kinds of programs. It was bad enough dodging the do-gooders at school. His dad and him didn’t need any programs. They were doing okay.” (pp. 33-34)

Make Lemonade

My Mom is smacking her lips around the house

Huffing that she never even saw

The inside of a Welfare office,

Doesn’t even know what bus stop you’d get off (p. 119)

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Public Assistance

Despite the fact that Remy, Jolly, and LaVaughn would probably all benefit from public assistance programs of one sort or another, they are all resistant to them.

For Jolly, it’s the belief that if she goes on Welfare, they’ll take her kids away from her which she maintains happened to people she knew.

But for Remy and LaVaughn’s mom it seems to be a sense of pride – convincing themselves that they don’t need it as a way to distance themselves from folks who they saw as even worse off than they were.

LV notices this in her mom on more than one occasion. She calls it “looking down on someone you’re glad you’re not”p. 36

Measuring themselves and how they’re doing, they spurn public assistance because it distances them from those they’re glad they’re not.

But no matter if they wanted it to or not, it doesn’t make them middle class where, as LV describes it, Mom wears an apron, Dad comes home from work, cookies are always coming out of the oven and everybody has those NO PROBLEM looks on their faces, the worst that could happen, the cat might tip over the water dish.

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College

Funny How Things Change:

[Lisa]’d bought completely into the higher education salvation preached at school. Get up, get out. That was their answer to being poor in West Virginia. Don’t stay in West Virginia. At least don’t stay in the mountains. (p. 5).

[Remy’s dad] “Don’t pick the wrong reason to leave, but don’t pick the wrong reason to stay, either. You gotta find what’s going to make you happy.” (p. 184).

Make Lemonade

Nobody in this building” –

she waves her arm out sideways with the wooden spoon –

“ever went to college, nobody in my family”

and she’s pulling her chin up

and her shoulders and her chest, and she says,

no breath in between,

“somebody got to be the first, right?” And she goes back to the stew. (pp. 9-10)

You’ll make me proud” (p. 11)

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College

For Remy, his girlfriend’s college dreams are what motivates him to think about leaving. While it’s not a lavish life, he has a good one working at a local mechanics and he’s good at what he does. He loves the mountains and feels a deep connection to them and really doesn’t want to leave except he loves Lisa and wants to be with her.

LaVaughn, on the other hand, sees college as the savior Remy mentions Lisa believing it is. She mentions it repeatedly as a way to get out of where she is to have a better life.

This seems to be connected to place (and age too, probably) because Remy’s family settled the mountain and it’s named after him. And the job he has in his small town allows him to help take care of both him and his dad.

But LaVaughn’s only 14, so the only job she can get is working for Jolly which she doesn’t get paid much for. Even so, she sees that job and the money she makes for doing it as specifically for college and says “it’s what will get [her] out of here”.

Remy’s dad’s response to him was more like my grandparents’ response to my dad. They didn’t encourage him to go to college but they didn’t discourage him either. Just wanted him to have a way to provide for himself. LaVaughn’s mom, on the other hand, encourages her to go to college because she sees it as a way out - and something that would make her proud.

Since this was an exploratory analysis, I’d like to add more books to see what else there is to learn about class representation across places.

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What could this look like in a secondary ELA classroom?

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Inquiry Project

Students would then complete a project. Possibilities include:

Writing their own autobiographical/fictional, multivocal examinations of their class position(s).
Reviewing proposing community supports for folks experiencing lower SES.

Introduce the Concept of Class

Use an activity like the one Antonia outlined to introduce students to the concept of class.

Then discuss how place shapes those classed experiences. - Jason Reynolds’s Time 100 talk has some useful explanations in it.

Book Clubs

Run book clubs where some students read a class-salient rural book and others read a class-salient urban book.

Ask students to keep readers notebooks where they take notice at any mention, description, or illustration of class and/or place, jotting their thoughts and reflections in their notebooks.

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Reader’s Notebook: Chart for Collecting

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Suggested Books

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Class-Salient Rural YA	Class-Salient Urban YA
In the Wild Light by Jeff Zentner Sadie by Courtney Summers The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner The Benefits of Being an Octopus by Ann Braden The Smell of Other People’s Houses by Bonnie Sue Hitchcock Winter White and Wicked by Shannon Dittemore	The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas Look Both Ways by Jason Reynolds More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera Piecing Me Together by Renée Watson After the Shot Drops by Randy Ribay Black Girl Unlimited by Echo Brown

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Thank you!

Don’t hesitate to reach out with questions!

You can find me at:

chea.parton@gmail.com

Twitter: @readingrural

Instagram: @dr_chea_parton

literacyinplace.com

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