El Deafo by Cece Bell

“Superheroes might be awesome, but they are also different.

And being different feels a lot like being alone.”

(Bell, 2014, p. 46)

***quasi-spoiler alert***

El Deafo by Cece Bell is a graphic novel about a young girl’s experience with hearing loss in early childhood and her life through elementary school. 

We begin our journey with Cece, who at four years old was “a regular little kid” (Bell, p. 4).  But on page 2, we are thrown into an illness with her and taken to a hospital, where we begin her healing journey.  Recovery, home, and more doctor trips later, we realize something is different. At home, she loses her mom, calls out to her but she doesn’t respond, and can’t understand her Mom when she finds Cece.  Something is different – Cece can’t hear her mom.

From this point on, we go with Cece and her parents to get hearing assistive technology and hearing aids.  We go with Cece to her first day of school and follow her through elementary school. We are with Cece when she makes a first friend, then a second, then a third, and even when she is struck by her first crush. We learn what school feels like with adaptive technology in the 1970s – the physical experiences of hearing sensations and the emotional feelings of being different. We learn how she uses daydreaming and fantasy to escape and problem-solve at the same time. Through Cece’s imagination and creativity, a superhero is born – El Deafo! El Deafo allows Cece to do a trial run in addressing uncomfortable, embarrassing, and disastrous scenarios.  As each new challenge arises, Cece imagines herself showing up as El Deafo with superpowers and standing up to friends and teachers, often saving the day.  Wonderfully, Cece begins to integrate these solutions to struggles with relationships, deafness, schoolwork, and family in real ways.

El Deafo is recommended for children 7-10 years old, but I believe middle grades and even older adolescents would enjoy this book.  If a young person enjoyed this book, I would encourage them to read other books by Cece Bell and steer them toward considering graphic novels.  I believe this book would be an asset to classroom libraries for any upper elementary grade-level teacher, any English Language Arts and Reading (ELAR) in grades 4-10, reading intervention teachers, reading specialists and instructional coaches, and instructional specialists who work with adaptive technology.

The major strengths of the book are how real it is within the confines of anthropomorphic characters and high-quality art.  Bell brings us through the challenges of childhood through the eyes of a child with hearing loss with one-sentence captions and speech balloons.  The story is deep, thoughtful, relatable, and informative. 

I absolutely love how Cece’s imagination is her unnamed superpower! We do not talk about creativity and problem-solving enough and this book is a great catalyst for that conversation. The book gives representation to children with hearing loss and children without hearing.  It explains deafness to those of us who hear. I found myself over and over remembering what it was like to be a little girl and be pushed around by the only person who wanted to be friends with me or get in trouble for something that really wasn’t my fault.  Bell does not hold back in making the conversations between the children words the children actually say. I cannot emphasize how realistic the childhood experiences in El Deafo are.

For me personally, El Deafo was so realistic that though I thoroughly enjoyed the book, I had to sit for a good 30 minutes afterward.  Thankfully my stillness was interrupted by a call from a dear friend.  Sensing something, she asked, “What’s going on?” All I could muster to say was, “Oh…you know...I just finished a book about somethings a little girl goes through and I kind of had to sit with it.” I just wasn’t ready to talk about it yet.

“I will amaze everyone-”

(Bell, 2014, p. 45)

El Deafo by Cece Bell Blog Post by Sunny Stubbs, Personal reading time: 1:44:49, Personal blog writing time: 0:59:59

References

Bell, C. (2014). El Deafo. Amulet Books.

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang

“It’s easy to become anything you wish…

…So long as you’re willing to forfeit your soul.”

(Yang, 2006, pg. 29)

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang follows Jin Wang’s pilgrimage through “the outsider experience” in his formative middle and high school years (Yang, 2006, Afterword).  Through the weaving of multiple tales – parabolic, contemporary, archetypal – we learn how Jin unearths himself through a painful process of growing up as a child of immigrants, feeling unlike his peers and the world around him.

Within the myriad of storylines, I found myself on two parallel journeys while reading Yang’s amazing autobiographical story.  As a white, heterosexual, cis-gender, 5th generation-born (give or take) American-identifying female, I learned the agonizing experiences Yin goes through feeling different, looking different, being different. Yet again, as much as I tried to fight universalizing Yin’s experience, I found myself relating over and over to the experience of being different and doing things to fit in…Things I would later regret. I am astounded by Yang’s ability to connect and inform.

I absolutely loved this story. I must admit, I found myself jarred early on by the different story paths. Confident the fractured reading experience I was having would soon pay off, I faithfully read on.  I am grateful to learn the story of the Monkey King.  The negative racial stereotypes of Chin-Kee caused me to flinch and feel deeply saddened for Chin-Kee and Jin. I wanted so badly for Jin and Amelia to go on a date, and I felt Wei-Chen’s, Suzy’s, and Jin’s heartbreak in my soul.  Somehow Yang wove a tale that integrated story these lines with my personal side-by-side reading experiences so beautifully that I was sad when it ended.

While reading American Born Chinese, I often reflected back to my studies of multicultural education in graduate school, wondering if this tale voices and stories what Geneva Gay has referred to as a young person’s development of a “clarified ethnic identity?” (Gay, 1994, pp. 151-155). Yang’s story propels me to continue asking myself how we, as teachers, can support young people growing up in real-time in our classrooms. How can we foster sensitivity, empathy, and understanding in teacher candidates? How can we dissuade the view of a ‘universal experience’ that often, if not always, defaults into hegemony? How can we promote a mindset of humility and acceptance in our field and an endeavor to learn about our students and their families in what Jeffrey Andrade-Duncan might call ‘becoming an ethnographic researcher of the communities we teach in?’ (Duncan-Andrade, 2022, pp. 97-98).

American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang Blog Post by Sunny Stubbs, Personal reading time: 0:47:48, Personal blog writing time: 1:22:13

References

Duncan-Andrade, J. M. R. 2022. Equality Or Equity: Toward a Model of Community-Responsive Education. United States: Harvard Education Press.

Gay, G. (1994). Coming of Age Ethnically: Teaching Young Adolescents of Color. Theory Into Practice, 33(3), 149–155. http://www.jstor.org/stable/147650

Yang, G. L., & Pien, L. (2006). American born Chinese. First Square Fish edition. New York, First Second.

My Artist Origin Story

For as long as I can remember, all I wanted to do was be in plays.  I have always loved the theatre.  I cannot remember a time before I knew what theatre was.

I remember seeing my very first play when I was in preschool.  It was on the arena stage at the Alley Theatre in Houston.  What I remember most is looking at a blank stage while the lights faded out.  Pitch black was all I could see as we sat in complete darkness.  Suddenly, the lights came up, and the world of the play appeared.  I vividly remember the big, green caterpillar and all the smoke.  It was magic. I was hooked for life.

In school, I was never the strongest student.  I was a ‘slow reader’ and never finished my assignments as soon as everyone else.  I used to sit in my high school auditorium during theatre class and drum up ways I could convince my parents to let me quit and get a GED.  That was my goal when I was fifteen.  However, my high school theatre teacher saw something in me and cast me in plays.  The opportunity to perform put me on a different path.

I became a theatre kid and started staying after school for rehearsals.  I also stayed after school to paint sets, pull costumes, or do anything else that needed to be done.  I worked very hard.  I loved theatre and theatre helped me believe in myself.

And I did graduate from high school.  And then I went to college to study theatre, and I graduated.  Then I went to graduate school to become a theatre teacher, and I graduated.  Then I was accepted to a doctoral program and completed a dissertation centered on exploring the teaching practices of theatre teachers and how they build group-level confidence in their ensembles.  The kid that was not very good in school now has a Ph.D.

Theatre was my drop-in.