Book Discussion: Guts by Raina Telgemeier

 

Recently, my group and I were assigned to read Guts by Raina Telgemeier. Afterwards we had to lead a book discussion together. Being an adult reading children and other youth literature is really a unique experience. To come together with other adults to do a book discussion on this type of literature holds, surprisingly, a lot of potential for incredible discussion without the need for one person to take the lead. This is exactly the experience I think me and my other group mates had. 

During the discussion we highlighted a handful of the most poignant pages that we found to be both our favorites and also found to be rich with opportunity for incredible conversations and teachable moments with the target audience (children). Below are three of the pages that we discussed:

The highlight of this discussion no doubt lay in the other book recommendations in this genre (graphic novels for children) from my peers. Here is the list:

Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

They Called Us Enemy by Eisinger Scott Becker
Stars are Scattered by Victoria Jamieson
New Kid and Class Act by Jerry Craft
The Heart Stopper series by Alice Oseman
The Lumberjanes series by Shannon Waters
and This One Summer by Mariko Tamaki.

Something I wish we could have done was had a designated space we could share the images to so that we could all be looking at the screen while we were talking about it. Also, though I think we had a nice flow, I do wish there was a little more planning so that we could have stayed on task and had just a handful of points that we centered on.

All in all, however, the book discussion was a success. I was glad to virtually connect with my professor and three classmates. Sometimes, when taking an online course, it is hard to feel truly a part of a community of learners when we've never seen each others faces. This helped to humanize the words behind so many great posts and met its purpose of being a good book discussion amongst peers. I only wish there were more opportunities to be able to do this in other courses throughout the program.