As I was sitting at home at my desk wondering what to blog about I glanced at my bookshelf. Although it does not have very many books on it, one shelf is full of books that I read as a kid. I remember these books clearly and loved every page of them. Some of them include Black Beauty, Mandy, Stranded, and the BFG. When I think about multicultural literature and my collection the two really do not go together. The only books that I have that I would include in multicultural literature are Number the Stars and Esperanza Rising. The first one I remember reading and purchasing due to my background as a Jewish American and interest in the Holocaust and the second one was required for my TE 348 class. I look back to the rest of the books which were purchased when I was in elementary school and I think to myself, why the lack of diversity?
After contemplating this question I can only think of several things. The first is that as a child I wanted to read books about adventure and other things I enjoyed such as swimming and animals, these books really did not have much to do with diversity. The second thing I can think of is that at the book fairs I went to, many of the book were chosen by cover and title. I would probably read the back but it never occurred to me that I could learn about another culture and actually enjoy what the book has to say. The last thing is, the books in my elementary classrooms and libraries were lacking when it came to diversity and I was not encouraged to explore.
After thinking about all these things and taking this course, I have realized there is a lot of quality multicultural literature out there that students are not being encouraged to explore. If it wasn't for this class, I may have never picked up the books and engaged in the reading and research of finding other books. I have enjoyed all the books that we have read in class because they have great stories. They also have taught me a lot about other cultures and being able to identify stereotypes and generalizations that are written into the text. Once again I look forward to expanding my collection of children's literature for the day that I have my own classroom and I can open students eyes to the wide variety of excellent diverse literature that is out there hidden amongst the bookshelves.
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Wow! I can really relate to your post because I have the same thing at home. I have a whole bookshelf full of books and many boxes more (I really liked reading!) and there are very, very few that have anything to do with multicultural literature. As a child, I like, you would pick books by their covers and got many of them from book orders and book fairs. I also loved reading series. While I think that it is always good when a child reads, it is also very important to promote multicultural literature to children, as we have learned in this class. I think that one of the best ways to do this is to provide childen with this literature in the classroom. If students are able to be exposed to this in the classroom, they may choose to pick out these books for their own libraries at home. Hopefully reading this in school will encourage them to continue this outside of school and they will see the value of reading this other type of literature. Do you have other ideas what could be done to promote their reading of more mulitcultural books?
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