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Thanks to this wall posting on Facebook, Primary Source has introduced me to another fabulous non-profit organization: Learning Matters. Learning Matters is an American media production company focused on education with the mission to encourage and enrich public dialogue about education, youth and families. They have produced more than 30 documentaries and filed hundreds of reports for PBS NewsHour, one of the USA’s most trusted news programs in television. Learning Matters posts all their documentaries and reports on their website where they can be viewed for free or downloaded as podcasts.

Primary Source flagged Learning Matters’ documentary Empathy 101: A refugee curriculum informs South Bronx students and commented that “it is a powerful example of global education in action”. The synopsis for the documentary reads:

For many high school students, the struggles of others are often distant problems. In urban inner-city schools, where students have tough home situations and little exposure to the outside world, this is particularly the case. But at Banana Kelly High School in the South Bronx, high school teacher Lauren Fardig aims to change that.

Producer John Tulenko went to Banana Kelly — situated in the poorest Congressional district in America — to film a piece on a remarkable curriculum developed by the Morningside Center. These ninth grade students went through several phases of activities related to refugees, discovering important life lessons in the process.

To watch the documentary click here. It is 8 minutes in length and my kids were just as entranced when watching it as I was.  A comment posted to the page by Steve, sums up my thoughts on this fabulous documentary as well:

This is a fine and very important piece. Kudos for Ms. Fardig’s work and for Mr. Tulenko’s reporting. This brief film exposed the fallacy behind the current education reform theory. The work these students did will not show up on any standardized test, but the content mattered deeply, the students learned a great deal, and the skills that they used will be helpful for everything else they do. This is what true education needs to be. It is everything test prep is not: important, inspiring, mindful, challenging, and powerful.

Earlier this year I blogged about Primary Source when they hosted a Global Read of Mitali Perkins‘ book Bamboo People.  On March 2nd Primary Source will be hosting a new Global Read, this time focusing on Christina Diaz Gonzalez‘ YA book The Red Umbrella. The online discussion forum will be followed by a live web-based session with Christina on March 9th from 3:00 – 4:00pm EST.  Anyone interested in global issues is welcome to take part in this free event but must register online here.

The Red Umbrella follows a 14-year-old Cuban girl and her brother sent by their parents to live in the United States during the tumultuous period of 1960s Cuba. Christina says the story was ” loosely based on the experiences of my parents, mother-in-law and many of the other 14,000 children who participated in Operation Pedro Pan.”

Talking about why she wrote the book, Christina says:

“Obviously, this is a personal story and part of my family history. In fact, it’s an important part of American history and yet there wasn’t much written about it, especially from the point of view of the children who experienced it. The book showcases how the U.S. has always been a haven for those seeking refuge from injustice and oppression and how average Americans have stepped up to help those in need, even if they were foreigners in our country. I also wanted to show the pride immigrants (in this case Cubans) have for their homeland, but how, in the end, family is what matters most… home is not a physical place. It’s where you feel you belong, where you are surrounded by people who love and accept you.”

The Red Umbrella has been appearing on many YA book lists since being published in May 2010, including ALA/YALSA’s 2011 Best Fiction for Young Adults. You can read an interview with Christina here, and there is also an amazing book trailer made by Christina’s brother-in-law:

Having just finished reading Bamboo People,  I was excited to see this email in my inbox today from Primary Source, a non-profit organization that promotes history and humanities education by connecting educators to people and cultures throughout the world:

Global Read of Bamboo People by Mitali Perkins

You are invited to join us for a discussion of the young adult novel, Bamboo People, by Mitali Perkins — a compelling coming-of-age story about child soldiers in modern Burma. The online discussion forum will begin tomorrow – Wednesday, January 12th. Then join the author for a live chat on January 19th.

Online discussion forum: January 12th-19th, 2011
Live chat session with the author: Wednesday, January 19, 3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. EST

Register online here (registration is free but participants are responsible for obtaining their own copy of the book). All are welcome – teachers, students, parents, and anyone interested in global issues!

I’m off to register now and hope that some of our PaperTigers readers will join me!

P.S. Don’t forget to take a look at our 1,000th post, with the chance of winning a Spirit of PaperTigers 2010 book set. The deadline for entries is midnight Pacific Standard Time, on Wednesday 19 January with the draw taking placing in San Francisco on Thursday 20 January.

When you write a nonfiction picture book, a biography (of any length) or other nonfiction topics, how much do you document? Do you use end notes, foot notes, or what?

Well-Documented Nonfiction Sells a Manuscript

Original Sources. You should use as many original or primary sources as possible. Go back to the original diary, the first photographs, the newspaper account of the time, letters, etc. I’m not talking here about how/where to research, but it’s worth saying that nonfiction for kids relied on original research.

The documentation of primary sources, though, is harder than with published resources. When I taught Freshman Composition, I told my students to put in more information than you think necessary. The main thing that documentation does is to let your reader know how they, too, might access that documentation to check your facts, or to dig deeper. If in doubt about “proper” documentation, look up the MLA or APA formats; my students liked using Easy Bib, an online service that will ask for infomation and return it properly formatted. If you are at a place where you can’t look it up, then record more than you think necessary. If you have found an original diary, then include everything you can about the diary: beginning date, ending date, # of entries, location that the diary was written, name of author, maiden name of women author, birth date and death date if available, and anything else about your access to it that seems important.

Be sure to document everything: written text, photographs, objects, film, recording, websites, multimedia, etc. Everything.

Writing the Manuscript. Make sure that as you write the manuscript, you are noting when and where you draw information from the source. I prefer to keep an ongoing bibliography and then follow the MLA format of adding the author’s last name and page number at the point where the info occurs.

Nonfiction should use original sources for information (Pattison).

Submitting the Manuscript. Ah, here’s where things get tricky. If you’re working with an editor and can ask preferences, do that. Endnote, footnote, in-text citation - it’s a matter of personal preference or house preference and should be followed if you know it.

If you don’t know, then pick one method that seems reasonable, given your topic and your research, and stick with it. Then, in the cover letter, explain what you’ve done. That’s it. Don’t stress out over this or try to go into too much explanation or apologize for the method of presentation. Just be straight forward about what you’ve done and if the publishing house is interested, they can ask you to re-format the revision a different way.

Creative Non-fiction. What if you write creative non-fiction and it reads like fiction and you don’t want those footnotes to interrupt the flow of the story. Then, you have two choices: the least intrusive method of documentation is end notes, where you put a super-numeral at the position the documentation is appropriate and at the end of a chapter or the end of the manuscript, you list the end notes.

OR, you can send in two versions of the manuscript, one with no documentation and one with documentation. That would give the editor the option of which to read and some editors would choose one, some the other.

Basically, do the original research, document the research, document the places in the manuscript where the documentation is used, and format either to an editor/publishing houses specifications, or if that is unknown, then the method that seems most reasonable. Then, submit.

Post from: Revision Notes Revise Your Novel! Copyright 2009. Darcy Pattison. All Rights Reserved.

Related posts:

1. Novel Hooks
2. Picture Books: Those Confusing 32 Pages
3. Rough draft of Declaration