We’ve covered alot of ground this semester in my early childhood class about diverse children and families.  The first half of the semester was spent helping students develop a framework for supporting diversity in the classroom.  Our time together this past month has focused on developing ways to build diversity practice for professional application.  To this end, we conducted an exploration of how diversity is portrayed in children’s literature.

Developmentally, we know that very young infants recognize racial differences and that young children make decisions about who to play with, how to play based on racial biases before they ever get to preschool (Shutts, 2015, Cole & Verwayne, 2018).  One of the goals of my ECE class was to ensure that soon-to-be ECE teachers understand the importance of addressing issues related to culture and race in their classrooms.  As such, I introduced them to the idea of an anti-bias approach and the teaching tolerance framework promoted by the Southern Poverty Law Center (splcenter.org, 2019).  This framework centers on race related teaching practices (RRTP’s) that are known to help children develop race awareness and introduce them to the ideals of social justice and their active role in eliminating discrimination.  Because storytime is a foundational part of any ECE curriculum, this is the ideal space for teaching young children about race and culture.

While the vast majority of children’s books are written for white children about white characters, there has been a marked increase in the number of children’s books portraying different races and cultures that are readily available.  It is important to recognize that these books provide an opportunity for children to relate stories to their own life experiences.  When we utilize a variety of books that represent diverse cultures and experiences, we not only make our classrooms more inclusive, but we also give children the opportunity to experience different cultures and perspectives in a very relatable way (Durden, Escalante, & Blitch, 2015, Wanless & Crawford, 2016).  For this assignment, ECE students were to find a children’s book that portrayed diversity in some way.  They then completed an analysis of how the book portrayed ethnicity and culture and how it could contribute to a child’s cultural development.

My students found wonderful and unique books for this project.  They did an excellent job of talking about the themes and how they could use their books to teach children about culture and social justice.  Teh lesson plans they produced were good, but I believe I will provide more structure for that part of the assignment next year – perhaps including a few examples of good examples for them to model after.  I’ve compiled a padlet of the books that were used for this assignment here:  https://padlet.com/cdeacons/m3v9toj3jsul.  I hope to add more books as I come across them.

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