- Examine the powerful role that diverse literature can play in ensuring all students have access to literate practices that enable them to be powerful and active global citizens.
- Consider the harm and long-lasting impact of relying on monocultural books.
- Explore implicit beliefs that impact on the selection and use of children’s books, including how they are implemented and discussed with children.
- Learn how to select texts for their classroom and the different types of books and purposes they might use these for.
- Be challenged to become readers of diverse literature as a way of understanding ourselves and others, and to build knowledge and understanding of the children we may teach.
For Roald Dahl's Matilda, books gave her a hopeful and comforting message - ‘You are not alone’. Building kids that love to read is important: it teaches them about others and about the world, and gives the comfort of knowing we are not alone.
It is important that all children, like Matilda, are able to see themselves in books to receive these messages-- books that they can access and read themselves. Our classrooms should be full of them.
Children’s sense of identity starts very young, and race and culture play an important part in forming it. If we can show them different cultures from this age, we can help disrupt their own racial bias and encourage critical conversations about equity. And if we can show them thoughtful examples of their own life and culture in books, it affirms their identity.
Educators today are faced with the challenge of preparing students from diverse populations and backgrounds to live in our rapidly changing world, but our resources often only represent a monocultural view of that world.
Because books have a central place in the classroom, we can really make a difference by considering which books we bring in. Books should be windows and mirrors; windows allow us to see other cultures, and experiences, and books that are mirrors reflect our own communities and experiences back to us, affirming identity.
Most children’s books, even those with animals, present a monocultural viewpoint:
Helen takes us through her research, and walks us through the benefits & implications of books that fall into 3 categories: culturally neutral/melting pot (look out for positive equity, not implications of inequity); culturally generic/socially conscious (watch out for stereotypes); and culturally authentic/specific (these books often truthfully showcase hardship, which is important, but be careful to contrast these with books that show joy - there must always also be joy, so that negativity isn't the only message received.)
"Just because a book reflects diversity in some way, it doesn’t mean it’s a mirror. "
She ends the session by explaining how schools can start their journey into more diverse children’s literature, one teacher and teacher-librarian at a time.
Helen's new book Transforming practice: Transforming lives through diverse children’s literature, is now available for pre-order, and is written about this exact topic.
Here are the two readings Helen recommended during this keynote:
Souto-Manning M (2009) ‘Negotiating culturally responsive pedagogy through multicultural children's literature: Towards critical democratic literacy practices in a first grade classroom’, Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 9(1):50-74.
Morrison A, Rigney LI, Hattam R and Diplock A (2019) Toward an Australian culturally responsive pedagogy : A narrative review of the literature, University of South Australia - Document Services, Adelaide.
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