As the summer approaches, each of our Canada office staff are eager to find a comfortable spot on a couch or in the sun, with a cup of cold water, tea or coffee and pick up a book.  Here's what we're reading this summer!

For many educators, back to school is a time of excitement; the idea of inspiring young readers, fostering new understanding, smelling and holding books together as a classroom community brings delight. You hope students will bee-line to the bookshelf during independent and community reading time.  

This blog post is the 2nd in a multi-part series. Natalie Steele, an educator with Peel District School Board in Ontario, will be sharing additional resources and strategies for your classroom over the next few months on the topics of Black identities, humanizing stories, amplifying missing voices in the curriculum, and correcting the systemic abuses of history in schooling.

Why Historical Fiction?

One challenge when studying the history of marginalized peoples is often the histories of these groups have a limited amount of primary source materials available for research to draw from compared to the prolific amount of Eurocentric sources. In your search to find primary sources that help students to connect to the humanity of those held in bondage in an inhumane system, you may encounter many barriers, like language, accessing the actual resource because it's no longer in print and/or digital versions are not available, and/or the only copy available is far away with limited access.