Jason Reynolds & Jason Griffin's "Oxygen Mask" teachers' review

Brief description and distinctive features

Brief description of Oxygen Mask:

The dedication at the front of the book says: 

For everyone we lost
And everything we learned
In the strangest year of our lives- 2020

The story is set in the USA during the world-wide Covid pandemic and takes place within the walls of one family’s apartment. Told from the point of view of one of the family members the narrator poignantly shares with the reader the isolation within the family’s walls. His mother is watching an endless loop of news broadcasts covering the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement following the death of George Floyd: “I’m wondering why the news won’t change the story and why the story won’t change into something else.” His brother seeks refuge in his video game, his sister spends her time on her phone texting to her friends and his sick father is isolated in his bedroom where he coughs incessantly “like something in him is breaking up and breaking down at the same time.” The description of his father “lying in the bed his body an out-of-tune instrument that somehow only plays thunder” is tragedy at its simplest and finest. 

The narrative is fast-paced as it alerts the reader to the challenges many faced during the pandemic and the freedom to breathe, the freedom to laugh, the omnipresence of masks and questions about how we treat each other and whether the world will ever be the same again.

Jason Reynolds is a Carnegie winner and critically acclaimed, multi award-winning writer and poet. He has just completed his role as National Ambassador for Young People's Literature in the US, and has written several books including All American Boys, Boy in the Black Suit, Long Way Down and the Run series.

Jason Griffin's first publishing endeavour was My Name Is Jason, Mine too, with Jason Reynolds. He's a gallery artist, street artist and book artist.  

Distinctive features of Oxygen Mask:

• Collaboration of two talented Americans – one a YA writer and the other, an acclaimed illustrator.
• The book resembles a notebook as if the writer and illustrator are making notes about what was happening in 2020.
• 384 pages but only three sentences (albeit long sentences) and many pages are word-free.
• Jason Griffin’s art is powerful, contemporary with lots of bold black and red.
• The narrative does not move beyond the family’s claustrophobic apartment but aspects of 2020 are cleverly referenced.
• The search for an oxygen mask becomes the motif of the times and of the family’s own inertia.
• It is divided into three sections: Breath One, Breath Two, Breath Three—breathing becomes a strident metaphor for the physical impact of Covid, the terrified pleas by George Floyd: ”I can’t breathe” and the elemental role of breath as our symbol for life and living.
• In the interview transcript at the back of the book Jason Reynolds says: that the three breaths are “one for the past, one for right now, and one for the future.” 

Ways to use Oxygen Mask in the classroom

Facilitate a class discussion either in small groups or a full class about 2020.
If students are now fifteen, they would have been eleven or twelve, possibly in their final year of primary school.

What do you remember most clearly about COVID?

• If students need prompting:
• No weekend sport
• Birthday party restricted to only 3 people
• LGA lockdowns
• School via Zoom
• Zoom in your pyjamas
• Face masks
• New words: epidemiology, PCR, RAT, pandemic

Create a class summary to get students thinking about this unique time of our lives.

In his dedication Jason Reynolds calls 2020 “the strangest year of our lives”.

• To build student interest in the text, watch the opening 2-3 minutes of this video about Jason Reynolds not being a reader nor a writer and what finally motivated him to both read and write.
• Distribute Oxygen Mask and encourage students to flick through to see how it is constructed. Allow time in the lesson for students to read this or read it to the students as they follow and seek student responses of their initial impressions.
• Students could explore the text for its ideas and how the clever combination of words and images create layers of meaning for an increasingly complex experience.
• Select 3-4 double pages to provoke discussion about these layers of meaning; for example:
  
• In small groups students to choose the 3 double pages which most engage them in the ideas and context of Oxygen Mask.
• In small groups students collaborate to create an analytical response or a discursive piece which explores Oxygen Mask and 3-4 other texts which represent different representations of youth culture. A digital essay or a feature article for a weekend newspaper would be an authentic publication point. 
• As background for this task students could read this article from The Guardian where Jason Reynolds discusses his books, some of which have been banned in the USA:
  

  “I represent all of the young people, but I definitely want to be a springboard for the ones that just haven’t felt safe in literature or in the world,” he adds, in what feels like an apt closing statement for his time as national ambassador. “So that they can then see that the world is broad and big and beautiful. And theirs.”

Suggested texts could include other graphic novels, verse novels, slam poetry, performance poetry, songs.

Relevant details in relation to the new English 7-10 syllabus

Text requirements: Oxygen Mask is a quality multimodal text from around the world.  It includes a range of cultural, social and gender perspectives.
For more recommended texts suitable for Stage 5, explore our Year 9 texts and study guides and Year 10 texts and study guides.

Concepts could include Context • Representation • Connotation, imagery and symbol

Relevant NSW English 7-10 Syllabus content

As the focus of learning in each Stage, students are required to engage meaningfully with:

• a range of types of texts inclusive of short prose, visual, spoken, multimodal and digital texts.

Across each stage, the selection of texts must give students experiences of:

• a range of quality texts from around the world, including texts about intercultural and diverse experiences
• a range of cultural, social and gender perspectives, including from popular and youth cultures
• texts chosen by students for personal interest and enjoyment.

Reading, viewing and listening to texts

A student: uses a range of personal, creative and critical strategies to interpret complex texts EN5-RVL-01

• Develop a deeper understanding of themes, ideas or attitudes by revisiting and reinterpreting texts to find new meaning
• Analyse the main ideas and thematic concerns represented in texts
• Investigate how layers of meaning are constructed in texts and how this shapes a reader’s understanding and engagement
• Clarify and justify personal responses to texts, explaining how aspects of the text, such as character, genre, tone, salience or voice, position a reader and influence these personal responses
• Read increasingly complex texts that challenge thinking, pique interest, enhance enjoyment and provoke a personal response
• Consider how the social, cultural and ethical positions represented in texts represent, affirm or challenge views of the world
• Evaluate experiences of reading by sharing responses to texts
• Evaluate the ways reading texts help us understand ourselves and make connections to others and the world
• Reflect on how reading promotes a broad and balanced understanding of the world and enables students to explore wider universal issues

Understanding and responding to texts A

A student analyses how meaning is created through the use and interpretation of increasingly complex language forms, features and structures EN5-URA-01

• Analyse how language forms, features and structures, specific or conventional to a text’s medium, context, purpose and audience, shape meaning, and experiment with this understanding through written, spoken, visual and multimodal responses
• Analyse how figurative language and devices can be used to represent complex ideas, thoughts and feelings to contribute to larger patterns of meaning in texts, and experiment with this in own texts

Understanding and responding to texts B

A student evaluates how texts represent ideas and experiences, and how they can affirm or challenge values and attitudes EN5-URB-01

• Evaluate how texts can position audiences to accept, challenge or reject particular perspectives of the world, and reflect on this in own texts
• Analyse how elements of an author’s personal, cultural and political contexts can shape their perspectives and representation of ideas, including form and purpose
• Appreciate how all communication is a product of cultural context
• Research, select and sequence appropriate evidence from texts and reliable sources to construct cohesive and authoritative arguments

Expressing ideas and composing texts A

A student crafts personal, creative and critical texts for a range of audiences by experimenting with and controlling language forms and features to shape meaning EN5-ECA-01

• Use the structural conventions of analytical writing purposefully, including a well-articulated and considered thesis, a sustained and cohesive progression of supporting points, and a rhetorically effective conclusion
• Use the structural conventions of discursive texts purposefully, including the transition between personal and abstract texts, to present complex and nuanced ideas

(English K-10 Syllabus 2022 © NSW Education Standards Authority for and on behalf of the Crown in right of the State of New South Wales, 2023)

Connecting texts