Golden Sower and What Needs to Change

I've been participating in #cleartheair on Twitter for a little more than a year now. It has led to me to know some amazing educators doing amazing things in their classrooms, but more importantly it has showed me what I need to do to be a better educator for every single one of my students. One thing they led me to was the National Antiracist Book Festival, it featured great books that I have read and one of my challenges this summer was to read all of the ones featured, I know that will not happen now. But, one thing I learned from reading some of these texts was to use my privilege to let others, especially people of color, have a voice in the conversation.

This leads me to one of the things I like to do is read YA, even though I am a math teacher and I haven't read in a while, but I am a part of the golden sower reading committee one of the things we do as a group is narrow down all the choices of books librarians, students, parents, and us submit to 10 titles. Students then read these 10 titles and vote for them and one of them wins. The author is normally invited to the state to speak, sign books, but one of the big things is advertisement in the state for all of the libraries for the 10 selected. Normally each library has a collection of golden sowers and the winners.

Here are the 2019-2020 nominees for golden sower.

One thing I want to bring to light is the number of diverse books we are choosing for this list. You can see the 10 nominated going back a decade an a half here. At most we have 2 diverse books per year. Here is a breakdown of Nebraska Public Schools as a whole. Does 2 books suffice?



One thing I want to point to you to, if  haven't heard about this story is Dr. Ferial Pearson, "Deceit Wrapped in Kindness." There was an article published in the Omaha World Herald, but it was pay-walled. Read it. Take your time to fully digest it. I will wait.

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I grew up in Blair, I went to college in Crete, I live in Bennington, taught in Schuyler, taught in Omaha.  I've been all of this state and I have never once felt uncomfortable being anywhere and I know that is my white privilege. That I can walk anywhere being a white cis-gendered male and know I will be safe.  I am not going to judge, but I do have some questions. How are we as a state educating our youth? What books are they reading? Are they reading about people who don't look like them?

This just isn't a Mullen problem, it's a Nebraska problem. I believe there is a direct correlation to the books we choose as a part of the Golden Sower and biases and stereotypes that we perpetuate in our state. I have been less vocal in the past about the books chosen for the Golden Sower. That comes to an end today. It is my duty to put books who look like all of my students in front of them as a part of The Golden Sowers reading committee.

Next year's Golden Sowers are already chosen for 2020-2021 they are not set in stone, but overwhelmingly chosen. My personal goal is to have the 2021-2022 Golden Sower selections to be the most diverse since the beginning of Golden Sower YA in 1993.