In this episode, I am honored and humbled to be joined by 3 professors from the University Wisconsin Stevens Point to discuss and opportunity that is incredible important to me. Their passion and excitement is infectious. In previous episodes we have touched upon the increasing diversity and adding perspectives of those in our classroom and as the resident social studies teacher. That is my, my life goal. To be sure all people are heard. Amber, Stacy and Jackie provide incredible insight and resources to deliver just that. Check out their bios.

Where To Start?

The first step “would be to look at your social studies curriculum and see where you think you can bring in additional voices. And I would start small thinking about one unit, whether you’re a third grade teacher teaching immigration and you’ve historically taken the perspective of the lens of European immigration and of 1800s into the 20th century or you’re looking at that in a more sophisticated middle school or high school level. Start thinking about what voices are underrepresented.

Then look for a text. There’s amazing texts that tell the Ellis Island story and they tell multiple voices within that experience. Even now we have a much richer alternate experiences to immigration documented through text. We have access to those people through live interviews we have that we can record for our students. We have access to video. So when we talk about text sets and creating these dimensional resources, we are really looking at text broadly, including visual images, video, multimedia poetry, songs, you name it. The more genres that you can touch, perhaps the more voices you will be able to incorporate.

You could even have students interview their parents or interview other community members, and bring that in to get more authentic voices represented in our classroom.

Diversity – Know What You Have

Get to know your students who are in your classroom. Know them inside and out. Know their backgrounds. Give them that opportunity to share their story, to bring in their experiences, and then look for how to enrich that by asking, what are my students missing? What lens haven’t they been exposed to? What are the diverse voices we can bring to them?

Picture Books and Where to Find Them

I read the book Journey about a Syrian refugees experience to my eighth graders. Even the nostalgia and the novelty of reading a picture book is effective. What are the resources? What are the approaches to infuse that, especially if you don’t have those people to interview or those unique perspectives in the classroom to be the voice on others behalf. Illustrated texts draw the reader in and they experience it in a different way. That ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes through someone else’s narrative. Certainly a Google search is not a bad place to start when you’re talking about a theme, a topic or a text. There’s a lot of resources that teachers are sharing in this mode and we can see other people’s evaluation of texts and whether it’s representative, authentic voice.

Evaluation of Diverse Texts

TeachingBooks.net has some questions that guide instructors in selecting texts that are authentic, texts that represent a community of voice while doing its best to avoid tokenism. Teachers might evaluate a text and talk about the pros and cons of using that text. For example, if you find something problematic, like does it turn a viewpoint of a marginalized person into a victim? There are some things like that to be careful about when we’re selecting texts. This sometimes happens around the topic of the Holocaust and many other topics. When you see someone that was in a powerful position that turns into a hero at the expense of a marginalized person. That would be another example of a problematic scenario in a narrative, a children’s book.

Wisconsin DPI has a web resource for text evaluation. Use those questions just to guide your thinking. If this is an appropriate text, is it going to meet the needs that you want it to meet for your classroom instruction?

Public libraries are amazing as are university libraries. Collaborating with reference librarians is just fabulous and they can get you resources immediately and the resources that are sharing those diverse voices in story form, but also in verbal form. Collaborate through blogs and even collaborating with people in other countries.

Madison’s CCBC is a fantastic site to use. You will find some really great articles on diversity.

Diversity – How Far Have We Come?

Of recent years as far as the include these texts and that provide this diversity that we’re seeking?

We’re making some slow gains and some success in publishing perspectives that are minority perspectives. There is demand for this. The pandemic potentially slowed it down a little bit or gave us an interruption to the direction we were going. I’m excited that we’re starting to see more perspectives. CCBC tracks some information and their publishers send them what they’re publishing in the children’s literature world, and they track the main characters as well as some of the main supporting characters. They report out the percentage of minority characters annually. We are seeing small, small upticks representing minority characters.

However, we’re also seeing a shift to kind of a colorless world. Thus there is an increase in animals or personified beings as main characters. That may be a way to try to address inclusion but it removes the diversity. We have to be careful of that. We want to hear the rich perspectives. Hopefully we as consumers can continue to put pressure on publishers by showing our interest. Just as teachers, we do this by purchasing those books.

We have to show that there’s more than one perspective. That’ll help us get over the desire to exclude a perspective. We do have book banning that’s going on and it could be really treacherous from a standpoint of understanding other walks of life that ultimately build compassion. Part of the value of a text set is that there’s compassion building. When you see another perspective, and these are the skills that I think will lead to a more democratic society, because we can take on different perspectives and hopefully come back to a place where we can compromise.

“We don’t have to all have lived all of those experiences, but we have an authentic desire to learn from each other’s experiences and find some common ground for the good of our society.”

Amber Garbe

Take a Look. Its in a Book.

There is a critical importance of providing diverse literature for gifted and talented students as well. In an article by Dr. Newel, she states multicultural text offers us the perfect opportunity to engage all students in analysis and reflection on the roles and opportunities of various members of our society.

In Reading Rainbow they say “take a look. It’s in a book.” He’s always saying, look it up. Look it up yourself in a book. We need to provide access to all of those books for all of our students to get those diverse viewpoints and have those opportunities in our classrooms to discuss those texts and those views and what we can do to move our society and culture forward.

***The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of any entities they represent.***

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