Promoting Empathetic Reading With Between Shades of Gray Through a Global Blogging Project

Abstract

AbstractThe authors drew on empirical data from a blogging project that brought English teachers from the United States and Lithuania together online to discuss the young adult novel Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys. The novel tells the story of a 15‐year‐old girl, Lina, and her family, who are forcibly separated and deported to a Siberian labor camp under Stalin's occupation of the Baltic States during World War II. The authors argue that the pedagogical context sheds light on what an empathetic reading of the state‐sponsored atrocities described in this book might entail, thus avoiding common pitfalls with difficult knowledge when readers are positioned to try on through role‐play or detach through close reading and literary analysis. Throughout, the authors define and promote one possibility of what empathetic reading can look like when pedagogies position readers as empathetic learners.