Activism & Volunteering

Activism & Volunteering is part of the Crabtree’s “Our Values” series. This series is an eclectic mix of topics which claims to help students “appreciate the diversity of cultures and faiths of the people around them, [so] they will discover what it means to be part of a society”.
Activism & Volunteering has very limited success in achieving this goal. Photos show people of all ages, ethnicity, and genders involved in volunteering and activism, but, as demonstrated in the excerpt at the beginning of this review, the text is not always concise or clear.

Activism & Volunteering follows the traditional nonfiction format with a table of contents, glossary, and index. Also included is a page titled “Think About It” which includes four questions or activities for the reader to reflect on individually or to discuss with a group. This will provide students with the guidance to think about their own responses to the content of Activism & Volunteering”.

Most of the subheadings are presented in a double-page spread. Topics covered include common causes for volunteering and activism, such as the environment and disasters, reasons why people get involved, and goals achieved through activism and volunteering, such as women’s suffrage, a reduction in the hole in the ozone layer, and the Civil Rights Act in the United States.

A 2015 survey showed that about 25 percent of Americans volunteered that year. A Canadian survey showed that 44 percent of people volunteered in 2013.

Weaknesses:

The text and photos in Activism & Volunteering are presented to look like torn pieces of paper overlapping each other on a page. The result is messy. It looks like a poorly presented Grade 4 project. It is sometimes difficult to follow where you are supposed to look or read next. Some pages have as many as eight different chunks of text and pictures overlapped across the pages.

Speech bubbles are used to add information but are not meant to attribute the information as speech. It is a small point but adds to the confusion in some places. A clearer presentation of this information would be to include it in a shape bubble without the tag end looking like it is supposed to be spoken by someone.

Words included in the glossary appear as bold in the body of the text. Unfortunately, some of the bolded words appear in black on a dark coloured background, an approach that makes the word less visible, instead of highlighting it.

Conclusion:

There is a lot of important information in Activism & Volunteering. Unfortunately, too often the text is not clear or concise, and the presentation on the page is neither professional looking nor reader-friendly.