From The Airdrie Echo:
Nick Stabler’s fifth grade class is set to self-publish a book on a Syrian Refugee and him finding his way in Canada.
The 26 young authors all sat down to brainstorm ideas for creating a novel under the leadership of Stabler. The students decided to write about Ammar, a Syrian Refugee whose house in Syria was bombed by terrorists.
Ammar lost his family, and gets into Canada to try and find his family. Along the way, Ammar learns about Canadian Identity, which has been a focus for the fifth grade students in Stabler’s class.
The story of Ammar and learning about Canada and its subcultures relates back to Canada and its sesquicentennial. The class is planning on self-publishing the book and thanks to some volunteers, each student/author will get their own hand bound hard copy of the book.
“We’re starting to learn the basics of what’s going on [in Syria] because it’s very confusing, which groups are fighting who and trying to keep it all straight,” said Stabler. “We’ve tried to keep it age appropriate, so there isn’t a huge amount of focus on the actual events, but rather the boy’s journey coming to Canada. There is lots of humour and funny little Canadian things that happen.”
Stabler has done this sort of exercise with classes in the past, and has students working together to write and edit the novel together.
“It has been a good experience about how to write a book,” said Eva Dooks, a student in Stabler’s class. “I’ve wanted to be an author when I grow up and I wouldn’t have thought I’d be writing a book now. At first I was like ‘Whoa, I never knew this was happening,’ and after I’ve learned about it I’m happy to tell people about what is happening.”
Link to the rest at The Airdrie Echo
Ouch.
Couldn’t they have published it on paper? Or the Kindle?
This is the sort of thing that the cultural appropriation crowd is against, isn’t it? Trying to prevent any broadening of our perspectives?
Oddly, there was a story about this in the same issue of Quill & Quire that had the editorial I mentioned that warned against white writers writing about anyone not like them.
One could level a counter argument that the anti-appropriation crowd are attempting to prevent minority cultures from influencing mainstream culture. Marginalizing their voices.
If this had happened a few decades earlier, African-American musicians wouldn’t have had such a transformative impact and the world would have been the poorer for it.
“to try and find his family”
Wow. The boy is going to take his family to court before he can even find them?
I’ll admit I’m still wiping sleep from my eyes. However, read the article and cannot find a reference about taking anyone to court…
I’m one of those people who insists that we use “try to” in a situation like this.
Thanks, Paula. The common usage irks me too because it’s illogical if read slowly, although it’s better than having every fourth word in a sentence be “like”.