Take a Look, It’s in a Book

Penn GSE alumni and students translate their passion for education into careers as children’s and young adult authors.

hile teaching music to young children at an independent school in Brooklyn over two decades, musician Carolyn Sloan, GED’17, was shocked to discover that many had never heard a symphony.

At the same time, she was reading books about music to her young son and was disappointed she couldn’t find any that offered a concrete, kid-friendly understanding of musical concepts, that played the sound of an instrument or, say, a melody. “Why would you make a book about a violin,” Sloan said, “without any sound? It’s very abstract to a little one who doesn’t know what a violin is.”

So grew a seed of an idea that has blossomed over the years into a series of fun children’s books that introduce the orchestra, jazz, and opera (so far)—complete with sound buttons. Her first, the 2015 award-winning Welcome to the Symphony (Workman Publishing Company), uses Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 to explore the orchestra and plays snippets of not only the major instruments but also key concepts such as the main theme, melody, and the famous da-da-da-daah end of the first movement.

Since then, she has written two other books for the same publisher: Welcome to Jazz, winner of the 2019 Gold Nautilus Award for best children’s nonfiction book, and the brand new Welcome to the Opera. Meanwhile, Sloan left the classroom in 2021 to focus on an education platform (TeachMe TV) she founded with the help of her Penn GSE degree in education entrepreneurship.

“I was trying to give access to music and culture in a book,” she said. “At a time when schools are cutting arts programs, it’s crucial for kids to have exposure to music, art, dance, and theater.”

Sloan is one of several alumni who have translated their passion for education—further honed during their graduate studies—into children’s and young adult (YA) books that take on a range of topics. The other Penn GSE authors have written about positivity, community service, and different types of families. One middle-grade book tackles sexting. Another YA novelist tells a story of police brutality involving a teenager of color. Often, the authors are driven to create stories they would have enjoyed as children or adolescents, books that reflect a diversity of people, places, and experiences.

Growing up on the North Shore of Long Island, where she and her family were some of the only Korean Americans in the community, Yuna Hur, GED’20, said she felt like an outsider, at times. Books only reinforced that perception. “I never saw a book with my name. I rarely saw a book that had a character that looked like me. How powerful it would have been to have something like that growing up.”

Something like ABCs of Positivity. A self-published children’s book that Hur co-authored with her cousin last year takes young children on an alphabet journey with positivity as the theme. It showcases racially and ethnically diverse characters with lived experiences from different cultures—including their names.

For instance, “C” is for “confidence”: “Cerys is unsure about answering her teacher’s question,” the text reads with an illustration of an Asian American girl. “Her classmates encourage Cerys to raise her hand with confidence.”

Hur said her passion for diversity and inclusion was cultivated at GSE’s two-year Independent School Teaching Residency, where master’s students teach at partner schools as they pursue their degrees through on-site and online courses. Empowered, the former math and computer science teacher said she strove to create a classroom where the diverse students at her Connecticut boarding school felt “seen and heard and represented.”

“Throughout my Penn program,” said Hur, who worked on curriculum development for an electric-vehicle manufacturer and a learning-tech startup after leaving the classroom in 2021, “being able to understand with empathy and a growth mindset who is part of our community and giving voice to those who perhaps may not have had a voice have been the fuel for my professional experiences thus far, and the origins of the book.”

Similarly, current doctoral student Maritza Moulite, who’s researching diversity in children’s media and its impact on self-perception, said she created a YA novel she wished she could have read growing up in Miami, where she said she practically lived at the library and mostly read books about “a lot of white girls with red hair.” Think Anne of Green Gables and tales of Pippi Longstocking.

Published in 2019, the widely praised Dear Haiti, Love Alaine (Inkyard Press, an imprint of HarperCollins), written with sister Maika Moulite, is the story of a rambunctious Haitian American high school senior who is sent to Haiti when a school prank goes very wrong. The sisters followed with One of the Good Ones, which takes on police brutality when a teen dies in custody. And currently, they’re working on The Summer I Ate the Rich (MacMillan Children’s Publishing Group), due in 2025, which delves into socioeconomic and racial inequality through the story of a zombie (an important figure in Haitian lore) who is hungry for revenge.

“I like being able to connect my creative endeavor with my academic life,” Moulite said. “I definitely want to keep championing diversity, so enough people see themselves and learn about people different from themselves.”

Former Broadway performer (The Lion King, Rent) and youth advocate Philip McAdoo, GRD’15, also melded his doctoral studies in educational leadership, concentrating on diversity and inclusion, with the themes of his 2017 self-published children’s book Every Child Deserves…

“The Penn program spoke to diversity in a way that I hadn’t seen,” said the DEI consultant and former vice president of DEI at Earthjustice who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland. “It was really mission-driven—to create an equal playing ground in terms of access to education.”

The sweet Every Child Deserves… mines the experiences of Zaden—who McAdoo and his partner adopted from foster care when he was six years old—to send the message that all children deserve equal access to a family and a plethora of rich experiences, including “to be buried in the sand, … hate cello, … swim to the edge of the ocean,” as the story said. Depicting diverse characters and family models that include two dads (like Zaden’s parents), the story was inspired by a visit to the Capitol, said McAdoo, where he and his partner, along with Zaden, met with the late Rep. John Lewis in support of LGBTQ+ rights. In response to a reporter’s question, a young Zaden replied, “‘Every child deserves a family,’” McAdoo recalled. “That became our mantra.”

In 2022, he coauthored the children’s book Darius Wants a Dog (Ingram Sparks). Its theme is financial responsibility, but like his first book, the story is grounded in diverse characters and family types. “We tend to think about this work from a trauma space,” McAdoo said. “I really want to find ways and spaces to tell these stories in a joyful, celebratory way.”

Even though Cynthia Weill, GED’87, director of the Center for Children’s Literature at the Bank Street College of Education in New York City, never anticipated becoming a children’s author during her master’s in foreign language education, the degree set her on the path to writing nine multicultural children’s books and counting. First, she landed a job as a Spanish teacher at Glastonbury High School in Connecticut, where the district had a rare K–12 foreign language program.

“The entire department met regularly to talk about how cultural artifacts could be used in the classroom to teach basic concepts, as well as more sophisticated ones,” said Weill, who lives on the Upper West Side.

A dozen years later, she left the classroom to work for Catholic Relief Services, where she met an expert embroiderer during a stint in Vietnam. The encounter inspired a counting book—Ten Mice for Tet (Chronicle Books, 2003)—illustrated with original embroideries highlighting the Vietnamese New Year. Once again, she was using cultural artifacts as a teaching tool.

Since then, Weill has used Mexican folk art by Oaxacan artisans to illustrate a series of eight bilingual books, published by Cinco Puntos Press, that teach basic vocabulary and concepts (opposites, colors, animal sounds). The first, ABeCedarios: Mexican Folk Art ABCs in English and Spanish (2007), co-authored with K.B. Basseches, GFA’88, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly. Her latest, last year’s Vámonos: Mexican Folk Art Transport in English and Spanish, is an exploration of transportation through delightful wooden carvings of animals traveling by plane, taxi, boat, and more. Her next installment will feature animals playing musical instruments.

“It’s truly work of the people,” Weill said of the original carvings. She also supports the folk art tradition by buying the pieces from artists in Oaxaca and then donating them to Chicago’s Field Museum, where they are part of its permanent MesoAmerican collection.

At heart, of course, most of these authors are educators first—and they view books as valuable teaching tools that inspire children.

“Penn really opened my eyes to how children’s books can be used in the classroom as tools to ignite a child’s imagination and interest in a particular theme,” said Villanova resident Meredith Newman, GED’02, a former early elementary teacher in Philadelphia and New York City, and author of this year’s The Lost Umbrellas of Lexington (Ethos Collective). “In my own classroom, I would springboard an entire curriculum or unit from a children’s book.”

Newman found inspiration for her story while walking on a rainy afternoon past an empty playground on the Upper East Side that normally bustled with children on drier days. “It was such a sad scene to me,” she said. Fast forward to the pandemic, when the Penn GSE master’s graduate who concentrated in children’s literature finally wrote the story that had long captivated her.

In this cute tale of creativity and giving back to the community, a taxicab-driving dog uses ingenuity to build a playground cover from a patchwork of umbrellas lost in his cab and gives the neighborhood animals a place to play on a rainy day. Newman made use of her classroom experience by including curriculum-related extension activities, such as identification of umbrella patterns (math) and discussion of rainy-day poems (language arts).

“Children’s books can be used to teach, to inspire, to support, and to nurture as well as for pure enjoyment,” she said. “Almost everything I did in the classroom began with a children’s book and I learned that from my coursework at Penn.”

Amy Feldman, GED’94, L’94, general counsel and chief diversity officer for the Philadelphia business consultancy The Judge Group, would agree. Her middle-grade novel, Ezra Exposed (Blackstone Publishing), which came out this year in paperback, educates tweens on the legal liabilities of sexting—but without lecturing them.

“The best way to get information across to a kid is through the corner of your mouth,” said the mother of three who lives in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, and earned her higher education administration master’s while pursuing her law degree at Penn. In other words, tell a tale about a 10-year-old boy who shares a funny picture of his derriere taken with his new cell phone that lands him in big trouble. It’s a story that has its seed in the experience of Feldman’s friend, whose 13-year-old son was accused of pornography when he texted a naked picture of himself to his 12-year-old girlfriend and she reciprocated.

“I thought, OK, enough is enough,” said Feldman when she heard about the legal troubles of her friend’s son. “It’s time to start teaching kids this.” She also created a companion curriculum that includes lesson plans and learning assessments. “I learned all of that at GSE.”

Meanwhile, music-inspired author Sloan is weighing a fourth book, this one about Broadway, even as she continues to build TeachMe TV, which provides online activities, games, videos, and worksheets to help children improve their learning strategies. Her GSE education entrepreneurship courses, she said, confirmed her “intuitive choices for an interactive [music] book and introduced some new ways I could continue to engage students through multimedia.”

“What Penn helped me realize and work toward,” Sloan continued, “is a kind of honing of skills, really showing me where my strengths already were but also where I needed to get better. That’s the best thing an education can do.”