Summary
Amal is devastated when her big dreams to become a teacher are put on hold for her to stay home and take care of things while her mom recovers from the birth of their family’s newest baby girl. She finds her voice at the wrong time, and with the wrong person, in her village’s open air market over a piece of produce. It is this moment that will change Amal’s reality- forcing her into a life of indentured servitude that she is eager to escape. However, new friends and knowledge await her behind the walls of the Khan estate, and maybe, just maybe, these things will help her find her freedom again.
Amal Unbound, by Aisha Saeed, is the upper elementary/middle-grade choice for the Global Read Aloud 2018. To learn more about the Global Read Aloud, including how to make it a part of your own classroom, click here.
Discuss one of the main characters. How did the author make this character unique and believable? What issues does this character grapple with?
Throughout this book, we were asked to track characterization, and I must admit that I thoroughly enjoyed analyzing the way the Amal changed and grew over the course of the book. Aisha Saeed created an authentic character who begins the story relatively naïve and grow into a mature, responsible, and brave young woman. The thing that makes Amal unique though, in my opinion, is the circumstance that places her in indentured servitude. In the western world, we applaud people for being brave enough to speak out about injustices. We find these stories of people speaking up against the privilege of people and situation moving and seek to model our own actions after these endeavors. However, when Amal speaks out again about Jawad Sahib’s privilege she is punished. She is reprimanded for her bravery- and it’s disheartening. Prior to this moment, has grappled with the social justice issue of gender inequality in her life. On page 34, her father tells her that “this is how it has to be now. You’re the eldest daughter. Your place is here.” He continues saying, “But in any case, remember, you have already learned a lot. More than many of the neighborhood girls. You can read and write. What more do you need to know?” to which Amal replies online to herself, “The whole world, Abu, the whole world” (Saeed, 2018). As she ponders her father’s word over and over, she becomes frustrated at the reality that she would not have been pulled out of school has she been a boy- even if she was the oldest child. This strikes Amal as unfair, and it will likely strike readers as unfair as well. In the article Through the Sliding Glass Door: #EmpowerTheReader, C.S. Huck is quoted saying, “Literature has the power to take us out of ourselves and return us to ourselves a changed self, to enlarge our thinking while educating our hearts” (Johnson, Koss, & Martinez, 1987, p.576) This is exactly what happens to readers as they sort through some of the issues that arise in Amal Unbound. Learners, of all ages, will find themselves changed, their worldviews expanded, and their hearts more compassionate to the injustices that they have learned about.
“I’m not brave. I’m terrified. I just don’t have a choice.” “You always have a choice. Making choices even when they scare you because you know it’s the right thing to do- that’s bravery.” Amal Unbound, p.210
Classroom Connections
I would have students focus on two main things while reading this book. The first of these things is the characterization of the main character, but also possibly secondary characters as well. This book does an excellent job of creating a well-rounded cast of characters who are all dealing with a lot of issues, and I want my students to notice that! In particular, I believe that tracking characters through this book would allow students to grow as writers who realize that well-developed characters don’t have to always reveal every details about themselves to the readers. Instead, they leave some “holes” or “empty space” for readers to infer and fill in the blanks. As a reader of Amal Unbound, I found this strategy that Aisha Saeed uses so well to be both captivating and motivating. Her style of leaving me with questions and wonders about specific characters’ actions and words left me considering the impact of this book long after I had finished the final page. I would also have students establish a stance on a possible theme of the book by first tracking the plot using a t-chart. Sometimes it can be overwhelming for learners to narrow the theme of a book, but by tracking plot points as they read the story, students should be better able to ground their theme proposal in events from the story. I would ask students to share out with their classmates about the possible themes that they noticed in this book and use the variety of themes presented as a reminder to them that books often contain more than one theme. In fact, good readers will hunt for more than one theme in a book- and then, they will narrow their list of themes to the best possible option!
Summary
Malala, a Brave Girl from Pakistan/Iqbal, a Brave Boy from Pakistan provides two stories of individual bravery from young advocates who refused to be silenced. Students will find their stories captivating and inspiring as they come to see themselves as agents of change in the world thanks to the example of these young people from Pakistan.
Discuss the accuracy of this book. What affordances and challenges does it offer as a classroom text?
I really like this book as an entry point for learners into the stories of Malala Yousafzai and Iqbal Masih. The author, Jeanette Winter, briefly discusses her own interest in these individuals and provides an author’s note at the beginning of each story with further information for readers. Winter has clearly done her research and made the intentional effort to craft a text that is accessible to a younger audience. With that being said, through my own investigation of these stories this week, I have found that this book leaves out parts of the story that a reader deserves to know. Because of this, I would encourage educators to move away from using this book as a “single story” but instead to use it as a part of the whole story by including many other texts and resources that allow learners to gain more insight into who each of these people are/were as individuals and the impact of their activism.
For instance, on page thirteen of Malala, a Brave Girl from Pakistan, Winter includes a direct quote from Yousafzai’s speech to the United Nations. As an extension for my own students, I might choose to have them watch this speech and feel its impact in the same way that the United Nations representatives, and the world, did on July 12, 2013. If you would like to share this video with your own students, the link to that speech can be found here.
Classroom Connections
In my own classroom, I would have students compare and contrast these two characters using a venn diagram. The very structure of this book lends itself nicely to this task given its layout, but after adding ideas from the text, students could conduct further research about both Malala and Iqbal using KidRex. KidRex is a fun and safe search engine, powered by Google Custom Search, for kids that highlights kid related and kid appropriate webpages across the web. After completeing their research and the venn diagram, I would lead my students in a class discussion about how each of these individuals served as brave activists for something that they believed in. I would make sure to highlight the fact that both Malala and Iqbal are serving/served as young leaders in our world and that my students can make a difference as well no matter how young they may be.
References
Johnson, N.J., Koss, M.D., & Martinez, M. (2017). Through the sliding glass door: #EmpowerTheReader. The Reading Teacher, 71(5). 569-577. https://asulearn.appstate.edu/pluginfile.php/96950/mod_page/content/14/Johnson_et_al-2018-The_Reading_Teacher.pdf.
Saeed, A. (2018). Amal unbound. New York, NY: Nancy Paulsen Books.
Winter, J. (2014:. Malala, a brave girl from Pakistan/Iqbal, a brave boy from Pakistan: Two Stories of Bravery. New York, NY: Beach Lane Books.
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