My One-Pager

I. My question was about censorship. I wanted to know how teachers/future educators felt about censorship and book banning. What do they think would cause a book to be banned from a school or classroom? I was also interested in what actual students felt about the same question. Would they all say the same thing, or would their answers vary as well?
II. For my primary sources I asked several of my education classmates what they would think would be the reason a book was banned. I also asked them what grade levels they were planning on teaching to see if the grade level affected the answer. I went to a 7th grade class at Mead Middle School and asked them why they thought a book might not be allowed to them. Why they thought a book might be kept from their classroom or the school.
III. I expected the main reason to be named by the teachers to be things like sex or violence. What I received surprised me but made sense after analyzing the data. Almost every single one of them named religion as a context to be censored. Many of them also gave reasoning behind the answers that they gave me. I thought that the students would give me answers like sex, drugs, cuss words and so on. They did give me those answers but the majority responded with that the book was to mature for them. It seemed as if they knew that there were things that they had to wait to read and weren’t bothered by that fact. I was very surprised that a group of 7th graders would be so aware of the world and what went on in their own classrooms.
I had planned on going to more than one classroom, however that didn’t work out. I think that if I had gone to another class I wouldn’t have gotten the results that I did. I would have never seen that even in one single classroom that the students had these great responses about their class material. I was very impressed with the answers that they gave me and I really think that if I were to have surveyed more students that the results would have changed dramatically.
IV. In the future the number of books that have been censored can either grow or shrink depending on the decisions of an entire school or community. It is up to everyone in education, including the students, to know what is appropriate or not. What is read outside the classroom is out of the teacher’s hands but what goes into it may be entirely up to them to decide.
· American Psychological Association (APA): censorship. (n.d.). The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Retrieved December 04, 2008, from Dictionary.com website: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/censorship
· Cossett Lent, ReLeah. "Facing the Issues: Challenges, Censorship, and Reflection through Dialogue." English Journal 97 (2008).
· Unknown. "Intellectual Freedom and Censorship Q&A."
· Interviews of other English Education Major students
· Survey of 7th class at Mead Middle School, Mary Schaffer’s classroom