Guest Post: 'Illegal': Reading For Empathy by Andrew Donkin

Our new graphic novel, ILLEGAL, started life with a desire to make our readers feel empathy for people in a very unusual and terrible situation.

Andrew Donkin

It was about four years ago and my co-writer, Eoin Colfer, and I were following postage stamp-sized reports about the sinking of boats full of would-be migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea. The reports were short, impersonal, and just carried an approximate number of people thought to be missing or dead. It made for grim reading.

We followed the story and dug deeper. When you read a report that says “It’s believed that 217 people died in the sinking” it’s very easy to get lost in the numbers. What do 217 people look like? How many classrooms would they fill? Or how many double decker buses? It’s easy to forget that each one of those 217 is a person just like me and just like you.

These days, everyone has seen the photographs of the so-called “cathedral boats” where every single inch of deck space is packed with a human being desperate to escape their old life or to begin a new one. As I said, it’s easy to get lost in the sheer numbers, and what we wanted to do with ILLEGAL, was to take one person on that dodgy, unseaworthy boat and tell their story. We figured that if we could make our readers feel empathy for one person in the boat, then that would perhaps change the head-numbing statistics into human beings.

ILLEGAL follows the story of two brothers, Ebo and Kwame, as they leave their home and attempt to travel across the Sahara Desert towards the northern coast of Africa where they eventually put their lives in the hands of people traffickers on a boat to Europe.

From the very beginning we knew that we wanted to tell the story of ILLEGAL as a graphic novel rather than a more traditional prose novel. One of the many reasons for this was that we wanted to avoid telling the readers how our characters felt. We wanted to show our readers the situations that Ebo and Kwame find themselves in and invite our readers to imagine how the brothers might be feeling. We wanted to ask our readers to empathise with them and to imagine how they would feel in their place.

My friend and co-writer, Eoin Colfer wrote recently that “travel broadens the mind, but books broaden the heart.” That’s never been truer of a book than the experience of reading ILLEGAL. Nobody would want to undergo the terrible journey that our characters undertake, but by reading the book in the safety of your own home or school or library, a reader can perhaps take away a small piece, perhaps if we’re really lucky, one-millionth of the real life experience.

Giovanni Rigano

Eoin Colfer

In many ways the job of a writer is feeling empathy for a living. How else could writers get inside the head of their many and varied characters to pen their tales? Writing fiction is a strange alchemy of sometimes transposing your own experiences into the head of other characters, but more often putting your characters in situations you’ve never experienced yourself.

For ILLEGAL, Eoin, myself and our artist Giovanni Rigano did more research than for any other book that we have ever published. Although the story is fictional, every single bit of it is true. Every bit of it happened to someone – usually to many people. Meeting and listening to the survivors of such journeys was a moving and humbling experience as we worked on the book.

The last few years have seen several very divisive political events and movements sweep across the west. It seems to me that books and graphic novels with their ability to transport you not just across time and space, but more importantly into the experiences of another human being are more vital than ever.

Guest Post: Changing Personalities by Dr. Gary Haq

In my new children’s book 'My Dad, the Earth Warrior', Hero Trough’s dad has a bump to the head and then wakes claiming to be Terra Firma, son of Mother Earth, sent to protect her.

The notion of a person changing their character and behavioural traits is not new in literature. Miguel de Cervantes’ 'Don Quixote' (1605) is a story of an old nobleman who after reading stories about knights, decides to become a knight-errant and goes off in search of adventures. Robert Louis Stevenson’s 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' (1886) explores the interplay of good and evil in human personalities with two contrasting characters.

From Marvel Comics the journalist Clark Kent, wealthy industrialist Bruce Wayne and science student Peter Parker are the alter egos of Superman, Batman and Spiderman respectively.

When Mr Benn visited a fancy-dress shop and traded in his black bowler hat and suit for a new costume, he then entered a new world appropriate to his costume and a new adventure via a magical door.

In 'My Dad the Earth Warrior', Dad has become boring to Hero - having taken on the task of updating Cuthbert’s encyclopaedia collection. Fed up with an increasingly distant father, Hero yearns for change. Then one day, Dad has this freak accident and wakes up claiming to be an earth warrior.

In his new persona, Dad is strong and charismatic - determined to achieve his goal of gathering a tribe, becoming a chief and protecting Mother Earth. Hero struggles to deal with Dad as an earth warrior and all the ensuing consequences. However, there are times when he actually is intrigued that Dad is different.

I have always liked the idea of changing personality and have enjoyed dressing up in fancy dress. As you, can see from these photos on the left! Changing from Mr Average to someone different provides the opportunity for many wonderful adventures as Hero and his Dad experience in the book.

Gary Haq is an earth warrior whose day job is saving the planet. He is an associate researcher at a prestigious global environmental think tank and a research scientist at a European research centre. He tries his best to be the change he wants to see in the world and hopes to inspire others with his stories. When he’s not involved in his own eco-adventures, he likes to write, read, learn languages and explore new cultures. Gary lives with his wife and young daughter, and spends his time between York, England and Laveno, Italy. My Dad, the Earth Warrior is his debut novel - available now.

www.garyhaqwrites.com
@drgaryhaq
www.facebook.com/garyhaqauthor
www.worldenvironmentday.global

Book Review: 'Illegal' by Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin & Giovanni Rigano

Every now and then a graphic novel appears which pushes itself into the consciousness of the mainstream. Readers unaccustomed to reading pictures and text together suddenly find themselves exercising a muscle that has been resting since their childhood. It would seem though that it takes something pretty special to break this boundary. And 'Illegal' is special.

The death of Alan Kurdi in 2015, and the heart-rending photo of him that shocked the world, brought a crisis to light: those escaping war and poverty were being trafficked in unseaworthy vessels resulting in many lives lost. The media began to report further stories of similar tragedies, but as is the way, these stories soon became old news. But it is still happening. Google 'migrant boat sinks' and you'll see much more recent instances of these horrific events.

Rather than seeking to cash in, as the media did for a while, Eoin Colfer, Andrew Donkin and Giovanni Rigano seek to humanise the stories from the news reports. Human beings respond well to narratives and by telling the story of Ebo and Kwame, two brothers attempting to make it from Africa to Europe, the creators of 'Illegal' succeed in making real two of the nameless, faceless victims of whom we read in our newspapers.

As is the way with graphic novels, readers need to exert some effort into imagining the characters' feelings - with an economy of words comes more work for the reader. However, Rigano's bold illustrations, simultaneously classically-styled yet original and contemporary, do an exceptional job of conveying meaning - a picture really is worth a thousand words when its as carefully drawn as this. The storytelling of the combined text and pictures is accessible even to those who might normal find graphic novels too visually stimulating and busy - the illustrations are clean, detailed yet uncluttered, and colour palettes for each sequence are carefully chosen to evoke a sense of place, atmosphere and mood. Here, engaging with the images is crucial if the reader is to empathise with the plight of the world's humans in flight.

Although the demands of the text are low, the subject matter is emotionally involving making this book a certificate PG. Teachers, librarians and parents should consider how they present this book to their child - it is one that should be framed by good conversation with trusted adults. For anyone desensitised by the news, or for one who has a hard time knowing how to respond to terrible events in the world, this book will provide an alternative way into grappling with the issues.

In 'Illegal' horror and hope sit side by side, necessary bedfellows in a book which portrays the world we live in as it really is. Essential reading.

Guest Post: Reading In My Dad’s Bookshop by Ewa Jozefkowicz

 Many adults have one or two characters in a book that they read as a child - their ultimate hero or heroine - who stays with them through the years. But whenever anybody asks me who mine is, I find it difficult to make a shortlist of ten, let alone to carefully select one or two. I was extremely lucky to grow up surrounded by books meaning that I could browse, peruse and devour them at every available moment.

My dad was a bookseller, and when I was at primary school, I would spend every half term and many a weekend in his bookshops, reading in the children's section. I was so fascinated by books that I would read anything and everything, from Point Horror classics, through Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, all the way to The Moomins. Looking back now on the characters that I loved, there was only one thing that linked them. They could be any gender, background, age or period, but they had to overcome their fears and to be brave. So whether it was Lyra meeting the king of the Gyptians, Charlie stepping into the Chocolate Factory, or Tracy Beaker setting out to find her real mum, they had to be bold in everything they did. It was characters like them who made me believe that anything was possible as long as you put your mind to it.

When I'd thoroughly read my way through the shelves of children's literature, I started on the adult sections - my tastes here also varied dramatically. I loved nature books with all the illustrations of different animal species, but I was also fascinated by travel stories, and even big coffee table books about fashion through the ages.

I was hugely fascinated by books in other languages. There was a foreign literature children’s section in our bookshop, which was really the only part which was out of bounds for me, because I didn’t understand the words. The only other language that I could read in was Polish, and I felt envious of other kids who could read in French, Mandarin, Swedish and so on… I remember always searching for the most interesting looking stories in their English versions.

My dad often had to visit warehouses to put in new orders for books and I was always so excited to be one of the first people who would see the new releases. Some of the warehouse team got to know me, and I was allowed to carefully read a few of the children's books that had just come in (if I promised not to bend the spine or leave any fingerprints). Sometimes, I even got to help out with
suggestions of which titles to order.

My dad passed away when I was sixteen and I still think about him every day. Unsurprisingly, he crops up in my thoughts usually when I've opened a new book. I wonder what he would have thought of this one, I say to myself when I've finished it, and a part of me is sad that we can't discuss what we'd just read. I hope he would have been proud of me writing 'The Mystery of the Colour Thief'. He certainly played a big part in making it happen.


'The Mystery of the Colour Thief' by Ewa Jozefkowicz is available not in hardback, £10.99 from Zephyr

You can follow Ewa on Twitter: @EwaJozefkowicz

Click here to read my review of 'The Mystery of the Colour Thief' 

Book Review: 'The Mystery of the Colour Thief' by Ewa Jozefkowicz

If you're a regular reader of my book reviews then you'll know there is one quality above all others that I look for in children's novels: the potential for it to develop empathy in the reader. This book has that in spades.

Izzy blames herself for what happened to her mum. Since the incident her relationship with her best friend has suffered and despite many well-meaning adults offering support, she is finding life difficult to cope with. And it doesn't help that her recurring nightmare features a shadowy man who begins to steal the colours, one by one, from her life.

But then she meets Toby - a wheelchair-user who has moved in up the road - and he introduces her to Spike, a young swan and the runt of the litter. She and Toby strike up a friendship and in their dedication to saving the starving cygnet, Izzy finds hope and purpose. She also finds inspiration in straight-talking Toby who, through the wisdom gained from his own experiences, helps her to solve the mystery of the colour thief.

Imagery abounds in this wonderful short novel aimed at Key Stage 2 and 3 children. The gradual loss of colour in the mural of her life that her mum painted above her bed is a sensitive metaphor for the creeping onset of depression. The improving wellbeing of Spike causes and provides parallels with Izzy's improving mental health - in both cases the injured party allows others to help them. The feather Izzy gives to her mum as she lies in a coma is a symbol of optimism and freedom -  a freedom which Izzy eventually gains as she discovers she is guilt-free.

In this beautifully-written story debut author Ewa Jozefkowicz deftly explores issues that young children may well come up against in real life. 'The Mystery of the Colour Thief' will bring comfort to those with similar experiences to those portrayed and will help those who haven't to be that little bit more understanding of those who have.

A must for any library, classroom or home bookshelf - books like this position the current generation  to begin to work for a better, kinder future.

Perfect Partners:

'The Fox Girl and the White Gazelle' by Victoria Williamson - another story in which an unlikely duo bond over caring for an injured wild animal
'My Dad's A Birdman' by David Almond - aimed at a younger audience, and a little zanier, this story also explores how a young girl and her dad feel after the loss of her mother
'A Monster Calls' by Patrick Ness - aimed at an older audience, this book also explores the feelings of a young person experiencing the illness and loss of his mother

Look out for a guest post from Ewa Jozefkowicz on how growing up in her father's bookshop inspired her to write 'The Mystery of the Colour Thief' - coming to www.thatboycanteach.co.uk soon!

Why Primary Teachers Need To Know About Metacognition

Sir Kevan Collins introduces the EEF’s latest guidance report on metacognition and self-regulated learning with these words:

‘…with a large body of international evidence telling us that when properly embedded these approaches are powerful levers for boosting learning, it’s clear that we need to spend time looking at how to do this well.’

And if the focus here is on embedding and spending time on metacognitive approaches then there are surely strong implications for primary schools. In order for these learning habits (which research says are highly effective) to be embedded, we who are involved in primary education should be thinking about our role in their early development.

Continue reading here: https://bradford.researchschool.org.uk/2018/05/28/metacognition-in-primary/

The EEF's Metacognition and Self-Regulation guidance report can be downloaded here: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/tools/guidance-reports/metacognition-and-self-regulated-learning/

Guest Post: Who Gets to Tell the Story? Empathy vs Exploitation by Victoria Williamson

In today's guest blog post, and as part of her blog tour, Victoria Williamson, author of 'The Fox Girl and The White Gazelle' (see my review), discusses how stories can help children to understand things from the perspective of others. In her own book the story is told by two characters, each with their own point of view on the same events - this device is a helpful way into exploring how different people see and interpret the same events differently.

In a world of competing twenty-four hour news channels, adverts and infomercials that stretch the definition of truth, scientific data sponsored by self-interested corporations, and ‘fake news’ pedalled on Facebook and Twitter with countless celebrity ‘likes’, how do we separate the fact from the fiction, the objective reality from the subjective opinion?

Learning to sift through all of the available sources and select the most reliable ones is a vital skill for students to learn. One of the best ways to introduce them to this is through fiction. Children’s books are full of unreliable narrators, characters who see the world only from their point of view and get things wrong as a result. Caylin and Reema in The Fox Girl and the White Gazelle are no exception. Seen though Reema’s eyes, Caylin is a mean school bully, a talentless thug and an untrustworthy thief with no redeeming qualities. From Caylin’s point of view, Reema is a foreigner who speaks a strange language and eats weird food, an outsider she couldn’t possibly have anything in common with. At first their own prejudice colours every interaction, to the point where they experience the same events in completely different ways.

In Chapters 16 and 17 Caylin and Reema race each other in gym class, and both come away with a very different opinion of how that race turned out. Reema thinks:

I have won. I have proved to them all that I am the White Gazelle, and I am fast.

Caylin may be faster than me over a short distance, but that is alright, because I am stronger.

I will always outrun her in the end.

While Caylin says:

I totally beat her. If Miss Lindsey hadn’t made us run a stupid marathon instead of a straight race then I would’ve crossed the finish miles ahead of Reema.

It wasn’t a fair contest.

            [...] As long as I know I can outrun Reema, that’s all that matters.

It’s only when the two girls overcome their initial mistrust and start to work together to look after the family of foxes in the back yard of their apartment building that they realise they’re not so very different after all. It’s only by sharing their experiences with each other, and looking at the world from the others’ point of view, that they come to see the whole picture.

When discussing refugee issues in the classroom, the ‘whole picture’ exercise is a very useful one to get students thinking about who is being allowed to tell the story, and whose point of view is being left out entirely. I ask groups to look at a picture that is half covered with paper, and ask them to describe what they think the other hidden half looks like. The most useful picture for this exercise is the Reuters photograph by Jose Palazon showing golfers on an expensive course in Spain on one side, while migrants attempting to make it across the Spain-Morocco border to start a new life in Europe are seen climbing the high fence in the background. When the background is covered and we only see the point of view of the golfers, it looks like a beautiful, tranquil scene on a plush course lined by palm trees. Only when it is seen from the point of view of the migrants perched precariously on top of the fence does the difference in wealth, situation and life chances become clear.

This exercise is a great introduction to further activities looking at newspaper headlines and news stories. Who is telling the story? Is it written from the point of view of a resident of that country or a displaced person seeking a refuge? Is it sympathetic or hostile? Is the story being told with empathy, or is it exploitative, full of click-bait headlines and inflammatory phrases to draw readers in, regardless of the dehumanising effect this has on the people being described?

As teachers we need to ensure that students have access to a wide range of sources in our classes that describe historical and current affairs events from all points of view, not just the mainstream or ‘accepted’ version. As authors, we have a duty to represent a range of different characters and voices in our books, and not always default to writing characters just like us whose life experiences mirror our own. The ability to empathise with others may be something we are all born with, but like most skills, it has to be nurtured and practised. It’s only by seeing the world through the eyes of others that we get to exercise this important skill fully, and reading fiction with a diverse range of characters and voices is one of the best places to begin.