Diana Marc-Aurele-January Blogpost

Invasive curiosity is when curiosity crosses a line and becomes intrusive to the person on the receiving end of curiosity.  The challenge as educators is how we encourage curiosity while teaching children how to navigate boundaries that will vary from individual to individual.  Some people may be happy to share about themselves and others may not be willing to share.  

Lessons around this issue may include building relationships, initiating conversations, reading body language and building empathy.  Students will need to learn how to first have conversations with people they first meet before asking deeper questions of people they are curious about.  It is much easier to respond to a potentially invasive question if the person who asks it has already shown a genuine interest in you.  If a person avoids eye contact or their posture changes it indicates they may be uncomfortable with the conversation.  Part of this teaching will also involve asking questions in a way to give the person a chance to decline answering and for children to learn to accept when someone doesn’t want to answer a question.  All of this teaching will involve children developing empathy so they can work on building relationships and trying to understand a person’s reluctance to share their experiences.

Using picture books is a powerful way to do this work as there are multiple ways to use the books.  Students can learn the same life lessons as the characters in the books.    Students can think from the perspectives of different characters and think about how it would feel in different situations.  Teachers can also direct questions or create scenarios with different choices being made by the characters or encouraging students to think about how the character could have handled things differently.  Doing this work through a picture book allows access to different situations and allows students to have a degree of separation from the characters and learning from the character’s mistakes rather than their own.  

Teaching responsible decision making connects nicely to building classroom community and helping students realize they are part of a bigger community and their choices have an impact on others.  My teaching space is the school library and it is a space shared by over 500 students.  I refer to students as library citizens to help them realize they are part of a large community of students who get to share the beautiful library space, makerspace materials and the collection of books.