Where In the World Do Trade Books Fit?
I was speaking to teachers in Glendale, CA the other day when one of them asked if I had ever written secondary materials for textbooks. I haven’t, indeed I have only the most shadowy sense of what such materials are. And yet it seems that they are precisely what trade books should be. It is just a fact, a reality, of K-12 public school education that the extremely large textbook publishers dominate instruction. They have such good contacts with the school systems, on both the approval-administrative level and the meeting-the-needs-of-teachers ground level, that they cannot be moved. They may gain or lose market share to each other, but no outsider will dent their hold. But if their dominance is a given, then they are also a distribution channel. The question then is how to develop materials that are author-driven, that have voice and individuality, but which fit well with textbooks.
I mention this because we in trade books work in an industry that is aimed at the library and the store. Our forays into the classroom are tentative at best, and rely on the kindness of strangers. We have no direct means of entry. And yet so many of the books we write link to curricular topics (in fact editors always ask precisely that), and often we as authors, editors, designers think our books combine passing on information with engaging writing — which, it would seem, is precisely what a teacher would want in a classroom. Sure there are tools like SLJ’s own Curriculum Connections, and Booklist’s Booklinks that aim to bring the two world together. But I have to think the textbook houses have a more direct feed.
Back in the whole language days, publishers bundled up paperback picturebooks to support reading instruction. Shouldn’t there be a way to bundle up trade nonfiction for upper elementary, middle grade, even YA so that students have a chance to read something that engages them — while they march through the swamps, forests, and deserts of the textbook? To put it a different way — why are we laboring in the fields to create engaging nonfiction, while they are filling up schools with educational materials, and there is not the slightest communication between us?