Author Study: Using Questions for Self-Reflection

Patricia Polacco has always been one of my favorite authors. Her mother’s family were Jewish immigrants from Russia and Ukraine. Her father’s people were from the County of Limerick in Ireland. Both cultures valued and kept their history alive by storytelling. Her warm family tales spring from her own childhood among an extended immigrant family of grandparents and cousins. At conferences, Patricia Polacco often talks about writing and illustrating and the passing down of family history whose themes resonate with readers of all backgrounds. In fourth and fifth grade, I devoted some time to author study around an author who wrote picture books. Students began by immersing themselves in the books of their chosen author. They could work with a partner or small group or they could work individually. I encouraged collaboration because it builds intellectual stimulation and personal engagement while developing a respectful and interdependent community of learners.  Next, students created a heart map for their author.  Then they chose at least three of the questions from the self-reflection list to answer, but everyone was required to respond to the first question. My following responses are about Patricia Polacco as a model for author study for my graduate class at Arcadia University.

Why did you select this person for your study?

I selected Patricia Polacco because I knew her books targeted the age level and reading abilities of the children I teach at the Upper Moreland Intermediate School.  Her stories are rich in wonderful words, provide beautiful illustrations, and contain multiple life lessons – social signposts to living in our social world. Polacco is appealing as well because of her struggles in school with reading and math. Students can identify with her and be inspired by her success story. The fact that she studied in several universities and obtained two advance degrees including a Ph.D. in art history IS truly inspiring.  Also, students will marvel at her ability to weave incredible stories with words and also to be able to create the pictures that go with those stories.  Furthermore, Polacco is an adult who understands what it is like to grow up with time divided between divorced parents.  Her story is the story of many of our children. Finally, I knew that her multicultural heritage also included a Jewish background because I had already read quite a few of her books including The Keeping Quilt, Mrs. Katz and Tush, The Butterfly, and Chicken Sunday.  I wanted to use her in my Jewish-American study. In closing, I have always admired Patricia Polacco.  I heard her speak at KSRA one year.  Pink and Say is one of my favorite picture books. Her books make me laugh and cry – they are a rollercoaster of emotions for me, and the joy of reading her books to children is that they can see how words move a reader, and they can be moved!

What did you find especially interesting or surprising about him/her?

            I was surprised to find out that Patricia Polacco had only started writing books at the age of 41 (There is still hope for me!).   I loved reading about all her rocking chairs – at least one in every room of her house – and how she rocks every morning to start to get her thoughts to flow freely.  I thought about how I often needed to go for a short walk in between writing spurts with Mentor Texts and how much the walks with the dogs served to energize and refresh me.  Another interesting discovery was the new version of The Keeping Quilt with additional pages to track the history of the family quilt. I found every tie with family and friends to her stories particularly interesting, but not very surprising. Patricia became an incredibly good listener at a very early age – I think to compensate for her reading struggles.  Her family seems to come by storytelling naturally.  Are some people just born storytellers?  If this is true, then Patricia Polacco is one of them!

What was your research process in gathering information?

First of all, I reread many of her books and tracked down her autobiography that is written for children, Firetalking.  That made it very easy. Next, I visited websites such as Carol Hurst and also looked on Barnes & Noble and Amazon for book reviews. I went to www.patriciapolacco.com to search and read through her website, and I found that to be very extensive.  I also watched a video entitled “Dream Keeper”  – wish I had a copy as a CD so I could have shown a clip to the entire class.  I also tried to pull up articles from ERIC through Power Library, but I didn’t really get anything useful there. After I did all of this, I returned to her books to sift through and find ones that connected to my cultural study.  As I examined these books for the second time, I “read” the illustrations.  One the first read, I really only concentrated on the running text.  I then returned to books such as The Allure of Authors by Jenkins and our Living Literature class text to see if there was any new information that I had missed.  I also tried to search on Google, but I didn’t find that very helpful.  For reviews, I searched Book Links, Kirkus, and Publisher’s Weekly.

How did learning about the person influence your response to her/his work?

I was much more aware of the way Polacco built in references to her family traditions and to her multicultural background.  I found many Jewish words like challah, huppa, and kulick in The Keeping Quilt and more in other books.  I was also surprised to find the way she built in clues to the past through her artwork – actually startled to discover the tattoo from the concentration camp on Mr. Kodinski’s arm in Chicken Sunday.  I looked more carefully at the ways she intertwined her cultural background in many of the texts, and how she built in storied about her immediate family – stories about her husband, Enzo, her brother, her father, and about her daughter Denise.

In your opinion, what is the value of an author/illustrator/poet study in classrooms?

I had already answered this question in the paper I submitted, so I repeated my response here. There are many different ways to engage young people with books, but one of the most effective ways to develop readers and writers is through author study.  This study involves listening, reading, writing and talking about books written by the same author.  According to Jenkins (1999), author studies examine the biographical, critical, and aesthetic response to an author’s works. Children often want to find out more about the real lives of an author through the author’s websites, books, autobiographies, biographies, and articles.  The rationale for author study is mainly that it provides an opportunity for students to think about books and develop clear, thoughtful and creative responses. Reading and sharing books by the same author helps students understand the author’s purpose for writing them and deepens their comprehension about elements of story: characters, setting, plot, and theme.  It also helps them develop their skills as writers as they study the craft of a particular author and discover the author’s “fingerprints.” Ultimately, the goal of author study is to create lifelong readers through a love of reading they develop through familiarity with the craft of the author and illustrator.  An author study is perfect for collaboration, too, and gets students talking about books and sharing their insights. In studying an author/illustrator such as Polacco, upper-grade students can look at picture books with new eyes and perceive them on a new level of appreciation.  An author study can help students at many different ability levels and age levels to come to recognize and enjoy the artistic voices and styles of the people who create children’s books.