“An Offense to Their Human Rights”: Connecting Bud, not Buddy to the Flint Water Crisis with Middle School ELA Students

This article explains how a middle school ELA teacher used Christopher Paul Curtis’s Bud, Not Buddy to engage students in a research project on Flint, Michigan's water crisis. The article offers insights into the capabilities of middle school students by highlighting their work and their voices. The students in this classroom displayed an ability to demonstrate critical perspectives and genuine empathy, pose challenging questions, make thoughtful connections between their research and the novel, and employ complicated rhetorical strategies to convey their idea, all of which challenge the oftentimes low expectations of young students, especially students-of-color and low-income students.