The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child's Bookshelf

Diversifying Your Classroom Book Collections? Avoid these 7 Pitfalls - MindShift Middle grade: Farah Rocks Fifth Grade by Susan Muaddi Darraj, Clean Getaway by Nic Stone, Ways to Make Sunshine by Renée Watson Young adult: A Phoenix First Must Burn edited by Patrice Caldwell, Wicked Fox by Kat Cho, With the Fire On High by Elizabeth Acevedo Surface-level Diversity In February, Barnes & Noble canceled a plan to release twelve classic novels with covers featuring protagonists of color after critics called the promotion “literary blackface.” 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. Unfortunately, we often see classroom libraries that group diverse books into categories that isolate or limit their use. Simply having a book bin labeled “cultures from around the world” or “black history month books” does not mean your library is culturally responsive.

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. 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.

Doing a YA Collection Diversity Audit: Understanding Your Local Community (Part 1) Tomorrow as part of the Library Journal/School Library Journal training on diversity Diversity and Cultural Competency Training: Collections & RA (which you should do), I will be doing a presentation on doing a diversity audit. I will outline what a diversity audit is, how to do one, and what I learned doing mine. I will be sharing parts of that presentation with you here tomorrow. As part of doing a diversity audit, I tried to develop an understanding of what a diverse/inclusive book collection might look like: I tried to develop target goals.

Module 24b: Transforming Library Collections Part 2 – Project READY: Reimagining Equity & Access for Diverse Youth After working through this module, you will be able to: Discuss some of the key topics that must be considered when collecting diverse texts.Develop a plan to stay up-to-date with and address these topics and others that may arise. Introduction There are a number of important topics that need to be considered when collecting diverse texts. In this module, we will highlight several of them for you to think about and act on.

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: 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.

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 A major American cultural and educational institution for nearly four decades, Thirteen/WNET supplies more than one-third of all primetime programs aired on PBS, including acclaimed cultural, science, and public affairs series and specials. The award-winning Children’s and Educational Programming group is a leading and innovative provider of programming for a variety of projects, from teacher professional development to instructional television and interactive multimedia.