ABSTRACT
Lisa Hannon is a fi rst grade teacher at a Catholic school. She has been teaching for fourteen years and doesn’t think of herself as a person who censors books or approves of censorship. She does recall picking up books to read to her class and then putting them down because of her own discomfort. Lisa owned a copy of Feathers and Fools (Fox, 1989), an allegory about war that makes some teachers uneasy because a group of swans and a group of peacocks become suspicious of each other and use the weapons they’ve collected to kill each other. Lisa owned the book for quite a while, but never read it aloud because of the references to the birds fi ghting and the mention of blood and weapons. While taking a class with Chris that focused on children’s books and critical literacy, Lisa decided to take a chance and read Feathers and Fools aloud to her fi rst grade students. Th e kids had a lively conversation and talked about the violence among the birds, but they didn’t connect the meaning of the book to people or war. Feathers and Fools ends on a hopeful note-two eggs remain, and the new swan and peacock hatchlings notice their similarities instead of their diff erences. Lisa’s students noticed the eggs and hatchlings and discussed how they hoped that the “kid” birds would do better than the parents and not fi ght with each other. When reading this “troublesome” book aloud to her fi rst graders, the world didn’t fall apart and Lisa realized the discussion they had was really an important one. Had she not enrolled in a class where diffi cult issues were discussed, she might have left the book on the shelf and this important conversation would never have happened. Th e experience of reading
Feathers and Fools and other risky books to her fi rst graders had such a signifi cant impact on Lisa that she talked to her principal about buying more social issues books for the school library. She also volunteered to do a webinar on critical literacy for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.
