Podcasts

Claire de Mezerville López

Hello everybody and welcome to Restorative Works!, a podcast where learning, practice, and research open new paths for transformation. My name is Claire de Mezerville Lopez, and it is a joy to introduce our guest, Stephanie Affinito. Stephanie, how are you today?

Stephanie Affinito

I am wonderful, Claire. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I can't wait to chat with you.

Claire de Mezerville López

Yes, me too. I've been looking forward to us talking about literacy and everything that you do. Before getting started, allow me to introduce you to our audience. Stephanie is a book loving, notebook hoarding, literacy educator on a mission to change lives one book and one notebook at a time. She podcasts weekly on books and reading, writing and notebooks and everything in between on Restorative Reading and Writing for Wellness. Please check it out. She also chats with a new children's literature author every week on her Kid Lit Love podcast. And Stephanie, would you let us know about your website and how people can find you on social media before getting started?

Stephanie Affinito

Absolutely. Thank you. The website is probably the easiest to find all of the different projects that I work on, and that is at Alitlife, short for literacy, Alitlife.com. And on social media, I am @AffinitoLit, so just my last name and lit, on all platforms to make it easy.

Claire de Mezerville López

And we'll remind you about these resources before wrapping up our conversation, but I really wanted to bring them up in the beginning. I was really interested in the last conversation that we had when we got to know each other about this relationship between literacy and restorative practices. But let me start with this. Stephanie, you have a longstanding relationship with reading. Will you please tell us about it and what you have found in the research recently about it?

Stephanie Affinito 

Yeah, I feel like I need to start at the very beginning. We'll go back to my childhood, but it will be really quick. I promise. You know, I have always been a reader and a writer as well. I was the kid who always had a book, who would do everything to get out of everything else so she could just go somewhere and read. And reading was always part of my identity, just something I loved to do. It was a hobby that I had, but when I was a child, I realized the power it carried as well. I became ill as a teenager with some, at the time, kind of mysterious thing that kept me out of school for a couple of years and hospitals and clinics, and just not feeling well, not really able to get out of bed. And so, the hobby that I loved to do became my lifeline. Reading was the only thing that I actually could do. And it became everything. I found new friends on the page. I learned what it would be like to be a normal teenager when I finally could, on the page. And reading became an escape. I felt better when I read. Now, thankfully, I got connected with the right doctors and the right people, and we figured out what was wrong. I got better and went on to lead a very wonderful life that, of course, revolved around reading and education. I was an elementary teacher and a literacy coach. I moved into higher education, where I've been for the past 22 years as a teacher educator, working with teachers who want to share that love of reading with students as well. In the midst of that, during COVID specifically, you know, the autoimmune illness that we finally figured out as a kid came back with a vengeance. I found myself in a very hard place on medical leave, thinking: "Not again, not again. What are we doing?" So I did the only thing that I could do, which was to rely on what felt better then. I relied on that now. And I really went back to my own reading life with a vengeance because once again, it was one of the very few things that I could do without pain and without leaving my home.

But this time I just didn't want to intuitively know that reading made me feel better. I was armed with an education background, with a PhD, with research. I wanted to know why. I wanted to know if I was actually right, if there was something to reading making me feel better. And writing is a whole other podcast we could talk about as well. And it turns out there is. So, side by side, me attempting to recover from a chronic illness once again, I started diving into the research on how and why reading could make us feel better. Could it make us feel better? Is it good for our health? Is it good for our wellness? And it turns out it definitely is. Across my research, I found so many wonderful bits, but they really could be categorized as: reading is good for our cognition, which most educators know and we really embrace in our field. But it's also good for our physical health. And it's also good for our mental health. Things like reading, even just for six minutes- Claire, that's all it takes- is six minutes to start a cascading effect on our bodies. It lowers our heart rate, lowers our breathing rate, our muscles relax, and our blood pressure decreases. When we read over time, we sleep better. And we have markers that improve our health, like blood pressure and levels of inflammation; cognition improves, of course, but it also decreases the risk of dementia and cognitive decline later on. And emotionally, reading- reading fiction, reading stories, activating certain parts of our brain- it actually has the power to make us feel better in a way that we want to. So, we may be feeling one way, but reading someone else's story, reading someone else's words, because of the magic of mirror neurons that fire in our brain, actually paves the way in our subconscious to feel a different way. And so, I started to learn and understand why reading as a kid when I was sick made me feel better because it actually was. It was doing something to my physical body, and it was also paving the way for a better mental state, which you need, of course, to feel better as well. And since then, I've just been shouting it from the rooftops and everything I teach and everything I share. That reading can be restorative as well as something that can help us change the trajectory of our life in the typical academic way. A very long answer to your question.

Claire de Mezerville López 

I love that. No, but we needed that. We needed that because we also believe that storytelling is restorative. And how wonderful that storytelling on the page is restorative as well. And I remember a friend of mine made a comment about research, and it might be one of the ones that you are mentioning, or it might be a different one, that said that reading novels actually activates the same brain centers for empathy because you need to relate to characters that you don't know in very unexpected situations. So, I am fascinated by this. Because you've been doing so much work on this, that is so interesting. How do you believe that this motivation to read can enhance creating a culture of relationships and community in a classroom setting? How can it help us with restorative practices?

Stephanie Affinito

I think in a traditional classroom, you know, and a traditional curriculum, literacy is about teaching kids how to read and write. It's teaching them their letters and their sounds and their alphabetics and their strategies and then comprehension. And we slowly move up in terms of skills to have students who know how to read so that they can make the choices they want to make and hopefully make the mark on the world eventually that they want to make as well. But what I have found in the benefits of reading in my own personal practice, especially, is that it is much larger than that. It is something that helps change our bodies in a physical way to help reduce stress and reduce overwhelm. It is something that can change the way we feel inside our mind, inside of our emotions. But I think the other piece is that, when you think of reading from that identity standpoint, like who am I? Who do I want to be? How do I want to feel? What do I want to do? When you start to look at those bigger pictures, you can't help but start to broaden your own thinking and broaden your own actions and the community around you. And when you make reading social, when you make those connections social, then the things that started out just in your own mind as something to make you feel better and think about start to have an impact on your actual life and grow; grow the circles, so to speak, around you. So that by sharing what you're learning, what you're thinking, what you're feeling with others in the context of developing that empathy as well, it just makes your world feel bigger first on the page. But then in the actual one, if we start to share our reading lives in these communities and build these connections, and as you said, story is what connects us together and gives us the chance to do that. So, broadening the lens from what we look at in terms of reading and in terms of the benefits of it, we can focus more on that whole human, that whole child impact and just make all of those bonds stronger.

Claire de Mezerville López 

I think this is fascinating because when we think about reading and restorative practices in an educational setting, it makes perfect sense because we're already doing pedagogical stuff, we already have content and curriculum. Reading is already something that we're supposed to be doing. But I'm just so curious as to how this relationship between reading and being restored will play out in juvenile justice settings, in community settings. So, before continuing, let us take a very short break so we can delve deeper into this conversation. Please stay tuned.

Welcome back to Restorative Works! Stephanie, I am so happy to learn from you today in this episode. Literacy is a concern in a world of screens, automation, and AI, but you found ways to make this work relational. How can more people do this?

Stephanie Affinito 

I think it starts by going inward and thinking about who we are as people, how we feel. I mentioned earlier, who are we? How do we feel? What do we do? And how do we want to move forward in those ways when we start with our own personal identity on the inside and look at our reading life from that point of view. Not just what book is the right level for me to read, or which book will help me practice my skills or learn more information? But which book is going to help me learn more about me? And which books might be the best fit for me in this particular time of my life, in this season of life, with this challenge that I am going through. And thinking about reading that way opens up a whole new possibility for talking to kids about books. You then become not just teacher and student, but you become reader to reader. And when your students realize, she does this stuff too, right? It kind of opens up this new level of connection where we're not just here to teach the skills. We're here to connect. We're here to share the books we're reading. We are here to learn from the books we're reading to actually make our life better, our classroom better, our community better, to develop that empathy and to look at reading as something that is different than just an academic skill that we must do or we have to do, but something that we can invite our students into and ourselves into our faculties, our entire school community, to look at reading as that missing piece to just open up those connections, open up that community around us so that we can actually feel better through the reading that we do. It really is all about those connections and the possibilities that the books and our reading open up.

Claire de Mezerville López 

What I love about what you're saying is that we know we need to connect with people to be better, to do better. But there's also a pleasure in being in good relationships with others. And we know that we need to read, especially because of screens and AI and everything that I just mentioned. But it seems like this homework, like this discipline that you need to do to prevent all of these bad things that come from a place of fear, instead of thinking: well, but actually there's a lot of pleasure, you know, and there's wellness in doing this. So, I think that this perspective on wellness is so important.

Stephanie Affinito

I agree, obviously. And I think especially in relation to teacher wellness and teacher burnout and the stress that a lot of teachers are facing as well. The very thing that they have spent their careers trying to be great at, which is teaching kids how to read, can also be the thing that can help them feel better on a different level. And so, I find that a lot of teachers, a lot of educators, even some students, they need that permission slip to look at reading in a different way, that it can be something that they embrace just for fun, you know- and they can't see me, but I'm putting it in air quotes because reading is so much more than that. But the permission to look at our work as being even larger, even more important, more powerful than we thought to help students feel better: to introduce reading as wellness, as regulation, as inspiration, as something that keeps them healthy over time, I think reminds us even more about the power of this work and hopefully gives ourselves permission to indulge in it first, so that we then feel better showing up, helping students do the same with it in the classroom.

Claire de Mezerville López

And it has to do also with getting to know yourself. What is it about a book that will make me feel passionate about it? Instead of this other book that might be interesting, but it's not necessarily for me. I wonder if we, as adults, stop reading for pleasure when we are feeling exhausted or overwhelmed. And it's the same thing as other self-care practices that will actually make you feel better, but you detach from them because we're too overwhelmed, and it's a vicious cycle. So, allow me to tell you about this experience that I had. I participate in book fairs, and I was very surprised to find that here in Costa Rica there is actually a very dynamic, vibrant reading culture among young people, especially with fantasy books. And they love to go to those fairs to find local writers who are writing fantasy books. And some of them are very passionate about them. But I have found that some people might be a little bit picky on saying, what's high quality, what's low quality, what are genres that we should recommend teens and others that are not so... that we should not recommend so much. So, I'm curious to ask you, how can we pave this way for discovery, for children, for teens, for ourselves?

Stephanie Affinito 

We talk about books, we make them visible, and we allow students as much choice in access as we possibly can. Right? We truly don't know what book, which book will have an impact on a particular student. And so self-censoring some of those before we even allow our students the opportunity to see if that book or that genre or that author or that story could be a good fit for them. I think gets in the way of allowing students that agency and that excitement and that meaningfulness of choosing it. But it also means we have to be talking about books all the time. We have to be putting them out there. We have to be sharing them with one another. My favorite thing, the first thing that I always ask students when I see them and now they know it and they see me coming, is "so, what are you reading lately?" Right. And sometimes they get that deer-in-the-headlights look of, "Gosh, I'm not reading anything." Sometimes they are excited to share. And other times they know that if they see me next time, they're going to have one ready. So, it's this expectation that reading is present; reading is front and central. The books are available, and we trust each other enough to choose the books that we think we need, knowing that some might hit the mark and some might not. Because we haven't read the book yet, but there's always something to learn that can help nudge us to the next one. And letting students, letting adults, letting everybody choose the books that might just appeal to them or spark them for whatever reason, without judgment, without evaluation, and just see what happens. That's really my philosophy in letting students see that there is a book out there for everyone. And for everything and every experience you are going through, you just have to be open enough to find it and hopefully be willing to connect with other readers who might point you in a helpful direction.

Claire de Mezerville López

That's lovely. I have found that sometimes I ask my students- they are freshmen or sophomores in college- and I ask them, what are you reading for pleasure? And they also see me coming. And sometimes I get crickets as a response. Like, no, nothing really. And I remember bringing short stories from really good books for them that illustrate something that we might be seeing in class. And it's not a literature class. So they're not expecting to have this kind of text in front of them. And just to see them as they read those short stories together and try to put together the assignment that we have in class, and just to see them enjoy and laugh about it and just crack up about something that happened in the story that they didn't expect. And it's like: we don't, we really need to not lose this. And what a wonderful way to build community. Stephanie, how do you envision this work evolving in the future?

Stephanie Affinito

Honestly, I would just love more people, more educators, more administrators to just understand that this aspect of reading research exists. That we could look at reading with an even broader lens than we currently do in our schools. And I would love to see reading become the culture of a school. And now I know that's an odd thing to say because we are trying to do that with students in our curriculum, but how can we support that in our educators? How can we help that leak into all corners of the school where reading is not just something to be taught, but it is actually lived and experienced in those four walls, so that teachers, everybody really understands that this is a tool that we've probably been focused on for our entire career that could be a very important, under-researched, underknown area to help us feel better in our jobs and in our work with students and have another tool in the toolkit to help students feel better in whatever it is they are grappling with or going through as well. So, you know, just like you know, you go to a doctor and you get a vitamin or you get a medicine, I would love for books to be seen as, you know, these prescriptions for what might make us feel better, no matter what it is and no matter how old as well.

Claire de Mezerville López

Wow. I'm going to use the hashtag #readingrestores. I really feel that we should do that. What a wonderful way to remember that restorative practices beyond the behaviors is about going inwards. Stephanie, will you please remind us how people can find you and can find your work?

Stephanie Affinito

Yes, thank you. You can find me at my website at alitlife.com or on pretty much any social media handle @AffinitoLit. And I love to talk to new people about this work. So, thank you so much for letting me share my story here on your podcast.

Claire de Mezerville López 

Thank you for being here today, and thank you all for tuning in to Restorative Works! To learn more about our guests, log on to IIRP.edu and let's continue to build transformation through dignifying relationships, kind conversations, and stronger communities. Until our next episode!