2011 ALA Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award: Dave the Potter

• Illustrator Study: Collage and Symbolism. Discuss the ways in which Bryan Collier embedded images of African-American history within his illustrations for Dave the Potter. Next, have students read a variety of fiction and nonfiction picture books illustrated by Collier. What are some of the media he uses in his collage-style illustrations? How has he used color, value, perspective, and line and shape to create complex layers of images, ripe for exploration and interpretation? Have students select a moment in your community’s history to illustrate in Collier’s style. Collier’s webpage, listed in the Further Explorations section below, will also be useful to you.

Grades 5-8

• Functional to Symbolic Objects. Dave built pots that people needed. Now, his work is understood in a larger capacity. Not only was he a skilled craftsman, but he learned this trade at a time when few enslaved Africans did. His work is in museums not only because of his skills, but because of his unique legacy as a literate, skilled, enslaved African-American craftsman. What are some examples of other handmade objects in the African American community, such as quilts, or from the students’ own cultural heritages, that originally served a functional purpose but now play an important role historically or have taken on a symbolic value in homes, houses of worship, universities, libraries, and museums?

• Skilled Work and Slavery. To what extent were enslaved Africans in colonial and antebellum periods of American history taught to do skilled work? To what extent have students been educated to understand the variety of roles that African-Americans played in the social and economic life of pre-Civil War America? Explore some of the books listed in the Further Explorations section below to find out more.

Critical Literacy

• Notions of Literacy. When Dave was alive, to be literate was to be able to sign your own name, and to have a working knowledge of sounds and letters to be able to read simple written works. How has our notion of literacy changed over time? What does it mean to be literate in the 21st century? Use this book as an introduction to notions of literacy and have students define what they believe will be the necessary skills to be literate when they are working adults.

• Forensic Anthropology and Enslaved Africans. Most enslaved Africans were, unlike Dave, illiterate, and they were not able to write down their stories. Some stories survive through oral histories, spirituals, and family tales; others were recorded through interviews. Modern technology and forensic science are now offering other ways of learning about people who did not leave a written record. Explore some of the online and book resources below that demonstrate how the skeletons and bones of enslaved Africans of the 17th-19th centuries are telling us more about their everyday lives than we previously knew. Ask your students to consider whether or not they are comfortable with this kind of research? Should bodies be left alone, to rest in peace? What should be done to commemorate bodies previously left to rest in unmarked graves? What do we owe these citizens of our past?

• Hansen and McGowan chronicle the discovery of a colonial-era African-American burial ground in lower Manhattan and its aftermath, including the activism required to transform a modern-day construction site into hallowed ground, a National Monument dedicated to enslaved and free blacks.

• Like Dave, Miles, the protagonist of this historical novel set in 1851, is secretly taught to read, and uses his new understandings of language and literacy to navigate his various roles on a Carolina plantation and escape to freedom.

• Providing a history of the skilled free African-American seamen in New England, this text highlights in particular the success of the black whaling communities in New Bedford and Nantucket, Massachusetts.

• This work of collected short stories uses the frame of a fictional father retelling Bible stories to his daughter within the context of everyday life for enslaved Africans in South Carolina in the early 19^thcentury, when Dave was a young child.

• Through poetry, photographs, and illustrations, this picture book biography tells of Fortune, an 18^thcentury enslaved African in Connecticut . Owned even beyond his death, Fortune’s skeleton was used first by his doctor owner, to teach medical students, and next, by a local history museum. Forensic research has allowed for Fortune’s bones to continue informing the world about his life.

• This collective biography of enslaved Africans, like Dave the Potter, demonstrates how many defied convention and found ways to resist slavery both large and small.

• Rooted in research currently featured at the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum, this book demonstrates how research teams are examining colonial era bodies in the Chesapeake region of Maryland and Virginia, using their bones to learn more about life for enslaved and free Africans and African-Americans and free and indentured white colonists.