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Activities based on a YA novel help students to become transformative agents for people who are bullied.
You don't know what goes on in anyone's life but your own. And when you mess with one part of a person's life, you're not messing with just that part. Unfortunately, you can't be that precise and selective. When you mess with one part of a person's life, you're messing with their entire life.
Everything . . . affects everything.
(Asher 201-02)
Everything . . . affects everything," from Jay Asher's young adult novel, Thirteen Reasons Why, captures a central message of this text in which a young woman named Hannah Baker leaves behind a series of tapes addressed to particular individuals who played a part in producing the snowball effect that led to her suicide. "Everything . . . affects everything" also functioned as a theme for Brandie's tenth-grade literature course in which students read Thirteen Reasons Why, discussed its implications, and completed inquiry-based instructional activities to dig more deeply into the causes and consequences of bullying and suicide. In what follows, we highlight some of the tools that Brandie used to support students' critical perspectives toward the topic of bullying, and focus specifically on one student's especially powerful development as a "transformative agent," a term that Richard Beach, Deborah Appleman, Susan Hynds, and Jeffrey Wilhelm use to describe a central goal for teaching literature to adolescents: the ability to read texts critically and try on multiple perspectives on issues of social justice to effect change in the world (86).
Instructional Context
The students who are featured in this article attended a mid-sized county high school in Appalachia. Just over half of all students in this school qualified for free or reduced-price lunches. At the classroom level, 27 students (six young women and 21 young men) represented a diverse range of life and academic experiences. There were students for whom the sensitive topics investigated in Thirteen Reasons Why-bullying, rape, sexual assault, the invasion of privacy, and drunk driving-seemed far removed from their everyday lives; for other students, some of these topics were far too familiar. The novel was relevant to both groups of students, however, because Asher focused his writing on how adolescents and adults responded...