This Year, 2015, My Graduate Students and I Are Asking Ourselves About Being Human: Why Are We Here?

We began with a white board last night. Actually, every student was given a word: suffering, empathy, integrity, focus, sense of humor, self-esteem, self-awareness, and Ubuntu. Then they were given the word,

HUMAN,

and asked to apply their thinking about the individual word and what they thought it had to do with being human. Of course, eventually the students came to the question of, "Why are any of us here?" which was my goal of asking such questions.

After all, we're reading We Were Here by Matt de la Peña and that is the question the young teenagers in this novel are also asking themselves, 
despite their suffering, their humanity, their sense of humor, and their need to feel alive.

This is what we'll explore this year in my Developmental Reading course as we consider 
theories of literature, ways of reading in secondary schools, best practices for teaching 
students to be active readers who are engaged in the texts they choose and other areas 
to avoid what Gallagher calls Readicide. 

I'm looking forward to exploring a new texts with another crop of students and to tie the 
Literacy4Life tools within the course (especially in its relation of asking enduring questions 
through the Jesuit University Humanitarian Network). 

And we shall see. Maybe at the end of the semester I will have a better idea of why such 
questions matter and why reading is so important.