Missing Adventures: Diversity and Children's Literature

Classroom Library Assessment: How Culturally Responsive is Your Library? Teachers, let’s talk about a popular topic across education blogs and Pinterest: the classroom library. A quick search on the Internet results in numerous tips, tricks, and ideas for different ways to configure and organize your classroom library. It’s an intensive and thoughtful process that involves thinking about genre, reading levels, interest levels, grade-level content, categories, and themes. Why Teach Multicultural Literature? iStockphoto.com I have taught literature at the college level for almost a decade and at as many as six different campuses. These have mainly been classes that were focused on non-western writing. One semester, I had assigned Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and only a week earlier her TED talk, Danger of a Single Story had started to circulate on the web.

Making Connections: Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain In reality, cultural responsiveness is more of a process than a strategy. It begins when a teacher recognizes the cultural capital and tools students of color bring to the classroom. She is then able to respond to students' use of these cultural learning tools positively by noticing, naming, and affirming when students use them in the service of learning. The most common cultural tools for processing information utilize the brain's memory systems -- music, repetition, metaphor, recitation, physical manipulation of content, and ritual. The teacher is "responsive" when she is able to mirror these ways of learning in her instruction, using similar strategies to scaffold learning.

Opening Up New Perspectives With Literature Students in classrooms across the United States are a reflection of the diverse people, perspectives, histories, and values in our society. Yet if we were to take an inventory of classroom texts, curricula, and literacy materials across classrooms settings, we’d find that these instructional materials do not reflect the diversity of our students, let alone the diversity of our society. Multiple studies have shown the power of using multicultural texts to address critical topics in classrooms—not only for students of color but for all students. Rudine Sims-Bishop provides a pedagogical basis for this in relation to literature as windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors. She maintains that literature can serve as a mirror to those whose lives are reflected in texts that are read in the classroom.

Multicultural Fiction for Teenagers The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. 2007Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. 2006Alternates three interrelated stories about the problems of young Chinese Americans trying to participate in the popular culture. Presented in comic book format. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. Vol. I, The Pox Party by M.T.

A Culturally Responsive Approach to Discussing Thanksgiving in the Classroom In this ongoing series, we explore what culturally responsive teaching looks like at different grade levels and offer concrete examples and resources. Last week we explored going beyond “The Single Story”. Today, educator Lindsay Barrett offers a culturally responsive approach to discussing Thanksgiving in the Classroom. More in this series: Discussions of holidays can be challenging for teachers to navigate. School expectations can range from complete avoidance to blind participation in longstanding outdated projects and events.

Multicultural Fiction for Teenagers The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. 2007Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot. American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang. 2006Alternates three interrelated stories about the problems of young Chinese Americans trying to participate in the popular culture. Presented in comic book format. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. Vol.

HuffPost is now a part of Verizon Media I have taught literature at the college level for almost a decade and at as many as six different campuses. These have mainly been classes that were focused on non-western writing. One semester, I had assigned Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and only a week earlier her TED talk, Danger of a Single Story had started to circulate on the web. I sent the link to my students and thought we could incorporate it into our discussion on colonialism, multiculturalism, issues of race and of course, the novel itself. Little did I know that this simple talk would elicit the intensely disproportionate response that landed in my inbox the next morning. A young male student had found the video very offensive.

Teaching Multicultural Literature: A Workshop for the Middle Grades - Annenberg Learner Teaching Multicultural Literature: A Workshop for the Middle Grades is a production of Thirteen/WNET New York. Copyright 2005, The Annenberg Foundation. All rights reserved. Thirteen/WNET Multicultural Music and Songs that Build an Appreciation of Diversity Add some interest to your Social Studies curriculum by supplementing your lesson plans with Multicultural Songs! Whether you need educational music for teaching about diversity, songs from around the world or songs for embracing our differences, you'll find a varied selection below. These Multicultural Songs are for children of all ages... and many will also appeal to grown-ups. These song lyrics about diversity are available from a variety of albums: Songs About Diversity and Embracing our Differences A Train Ride to the Great Wall – Ella Jenkins All Over This World – Two of a Kind All the Children Sing - Wendy Rollin Asikatali - Children of Africa – Traditional Folk Song Because We're Friends – Music with Mar.

10 things every white teacher should know when talking about race This week on the Truth for Teachers podcast: 10 things every white teacher should know when talking about race in the classroom Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room–why I am talking only to white people? Isn’t that racist? (Hold that question in your mind, because I want you to ask yourself that same question again after you’ve read my words here, and see if your thought process has changed.) I’m specifically addressing white people in this episode because around 83% of teachers in the U.S. are white. Most of you reading my blog are in fact, white.

Forcing Kids To Stick To Gender Roles Can Actually Be Harmful To Their Health Raising children in societies that adhere to rigid gender roles, with fixed ideas about what should be considered “masculine” and “feminine,” can actually be detrimental to their physical and mental health, according to a study that observed 14-year-olds’ interactions over a three month period. “Usually we think of gender as natural and biological, but it’s not… We actually construct it in ways that have problematic and largely unacknowledged health risks,” lead researcher Maria do Mar Pereira, the deputy director for the University of Warwick’s Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, explained in an interview with ThinkProgress. Pereira drew her conclusions after being embedded in a class of teenagers in Lisbon, Portugal.

Strategies To Support Multicultural Instruction Essential for developing multicultural/diverse perspective learnings is a positive and trusting classroom environment - one in which all students are made to feel welcome, comfortable, and respected. Listed below are several strategies that are particularly useful in promoting multicultural/diverse perspective learnings in such a classroom. Questioning Styles Questioning techniques that personally involve students will allow them to respond in a way that reflects their cultural diversity and that will expose their fellow students to those differences (Evans, 1991).

Multicultural Literature - NCTE Many awards and literature celebrations are held this time of year, which makes it a perfect time to look at multicultural literature. The following materials from NCTE and ReadWriteThink.org provide more resources on the topic of multicultural literature. The Language Arts article Transactional Theory and the Study of Multicultural Literature works to answer the question, “Is transactional reader response theory still a viable and valid theoretical guide for the study of multicultural literature?” In Understanding the Questions: A Community-Centered Approach to the Teaching of Multicultural Literature from Voices from the Middle, the authors challenges her preservice students to expand their understanding of “culture” beyond racially specific contexts and into the many roles people play within the communities to which they belong—local, regional, national, racial, religious, language, etc. How do you use multicultural literature?