A book in one hand. A computer in the other.

I love how collaborative Lit Circles are by nature. A student might be praised for bringing in a critical element which no-one else had thought of, or perhaps encouraged by a throng of “I was thinking that too!” when bringing up something else. Perhaps, however, I’m being too optimistic? After all, we don’t go far these days without encountering the viewpoint that attention spans in digital-age teens are shorter and bored quicker by traditional literacies. Are Lit Circles, or a young adult book like A Thousand Shades of Blue adequately contemporary for the digital age?

In a one-sentence summary, Thousand Shades is about a teen girl who travels from Ontario to the Bahamas on a sailboat with her family and encounters relationship difficulties, moral ambiguities and risky teen situations. I imagine a book like this could interact with the teen-age digital world. Firstly, the book is written in the first person, partially in present tense and partially in past tense. This is a very common style in which to write the journalistic and documentary-style social media posts which the hot-spots of the internet are rife with. A book like Thousand Shades could inspire students to write their own travel-narrative blogs based on real travels or metaphorical travels. In this regard, the novel provides an informal and conversational, but also literarily commendable format to aspire to. Most students are already representing themselves through text online. Assessing the elements to increase reader engagement and story-building technique are lessons which Thousand Shades could help to teach. Students could be encouraged, in their Lit Circles, to search for techniques the author uses to make us empathize with the protagonist, patterns in the story, or sentence lengths and effects. A Thousand Shades is written in short chapters and shorter sub-sections. Students could analyze the mechanisms of a single chapter or subgroup and then compare it with their own blog posts.

The online world also works well with the Lit Circles research components. Not only could students use online encyclopedias to look up nautical jargon, Google maps to chart the path of the Inter-Coastal Waterway, or online tour-guides to discover the history of the Bahamas, but students could directly email Thousand Shades’ author with questions (something which Stevenson encourages and makes easy on www.robinstevenson.com) and then return to class with the answers.

Thousand Shades has no pictures and in the online world it is uncommon for pages to be text only. Why not encourage a collection of digital images which could be put in an imaginary picture version of Stevenson’s book? Tracy Tarasiuk writes about having students create more multi-modal digital interaction with their novels, noting that student comprehension improved as they “chose music, sound effects, and images, [and] revisited their novels for clarification of the plots, characters, and central themes” (p. 549). Tarasiuk also suggested having students build, or contribute to an online Wiki about the novel they had read. “Instantly, I noticed that students put more effort into the work they completed on their wiki pages than they did on regular worksheets” (p. 548) writes Tarasiuk.

I think I’m starting to catch onto how Lit Circles, a book like Thousand Shades and the digital age can all serve the purpose of improving literacy in the modern classroom.

Works Cited:


Tarasiuk, T. J. (2010). Combining traditional and contemporary texts: moving my english class to the computer lab. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 53(7), 543-552. doi: 10.1598