page 313 Language Arts, Volume 94, Number 5, May 2017 Amanda Haertling Thein and Renita R. Schmidt Challenging, Rewarding Emotion Work: Critical Witnessing in an After-School Book Club This case study of a preservice teacher’s experiences with critical witnessing illuminates the challenging and rewarding emotion work required of being and becoming a critical witness. F or the past four years, we have co-directed Strong Girls Read Strong Books, a weekly after-school book club that serves an average of 45 fourth- through sixth-grade girls in a diverse elementary school. In starting this book club, our goal was to create a space where young girls could read and respond to books with strong female pro- tagonists and develop complex ideas about what it means to be a woman. Strong Girls Read Strong Books, as well as our related longitudinal study, is grounded in the- ory suggesting that deep engagement with litera- ture is facilitated when students are encouraged to make connections between literary texts, their lived experiences, and the lives of others around them (Rosenblatt, 1978). In fostering deep engagement, we take care to choose texts that provide girls with “mirrors” relecting their own lives, “windows” into the perspectives of others, and “doors” for consid- ering new possibilities (Bishop, 1990; Botelho & Rudman, 2009). Further, we rely on a “reading-as- sensemaking” orientation that privileges a reader’s ability to comprehend texts whenever they are able to make sense of them and regardless of whether or not they are able to master conventional reading skills and strategies such as making particular kinds of connections, predictions, interpretations, or sum- maries (Aukerman, 2015, p. 56). Still, facilitating deep engagement is dificult. Teachers often encourage students to connect lit- erature with their lives but expect certain kinds of responses—responses that adhere to unspoken “emo- tional rules” (Zembylas, 2005) of literature learning. These emotional rules—or rules that specify appro- priate responses, dispositions, and attitudes—are typically those that encourage growth, tolerance, and empathy, but discourage anger, sadness, and frustration (Thein, Guise, & Sloan, 2015), and that align with White, middle-class norms and ideals that undergird schooling, texts, and curriculum (Delpit, 2006; Dutro, 2009). Moreover, teachers’ invitations for students to share their personal connections are often coded; the “hard stories” (Dutro, 2008) that children who have experienced trauma bring to the classroom are frequently marginalized or silenced when they fail to align with teachers’ experiences and expectations (Jones, 2004). With this scholarship in mind, we approached our book club through pedagogy that helped both us and the preservice teachers who served as dis- cussion leaders in our program to listen to and acknowledge all of the stories students brought to their experiences with literature and to disrupt prac- tices that marginalize students’ lived experiences and literacy practices. We turned to Jones’s (2006) work with girls, literacy, and social class, Hicks’s (2013) longitudinal work with girls in urban Cincin- nati, and especially to Dutro and Bien’s (2014) con- ceptualization of “critical witnessing” to guide us. Grounding their work in trauma studies (e.g., Caruth, 1995), Dutro and Bien (2014) argue that creating connections between students’ lives and experiences of schooling requires two kinds of wit- nessing. First, teachers must witness by listening to and acknowledging students’ “testimonies”— stories about signiicant dificult events in their individual lives. Second, teachers must witness and work to disrupt trauma that students experience as a result of accumulating marginalization within class- rooms and schools. Copyright © 2017 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved