Building on Windows and Mirrors: Encouraging the Disruption of "Single Stories" Through Children's Literature

Abstract

Tschida, Ryan, and Ticknor combine conceptual tools to guide preservice teachers to make diverse and equitable choices in classroom literature selections.WHEN OUR MOSTLY WHITE, middle class, female undergraduate preservice students enter our respective social studies, reading, and language arts methods courses, they usually have not yet been asked to think critically about the curriculum that they will be responsible for teaching to their future students and the implications for equity that arise as a result. Although we teach in different subject areas, we are all committed to guiding our students through this kind of critique, particularly as it relates to the images and messages that these future teachers will send their diverse elementary school pupils about themselves and the world around them. We also recognize that one of the primary conduits for sending these messages to students is through the children's literature and other media included within their elementary school classrooms and libraries.We know that we are not alone in facing this challenge. Scholars of children's literature have long stressed the need for turning a critical eye to the stories we tell, who is doing the telling, and who gets left out (e.g., Bishop, 1990a; Dyson & Genishi, 1994; Fox & Short, 2003). Such scholars have defined multicultural literature (Harris, 1992; Hillard, 1995; Yokota, 1993), encouraged preand in-service teachers to become familiar with diverse titles (Hefflin & Barksdale-Ladd, 2001; Hermann-Wilmarth, 2007; Lazar & Offenberg, 2011; Nathenson-Mejia & Escamilla, 2003; Swartz, 2003), and shared the power of exploring diverse texts with children (CopenhaverJohnson, Bowman, & Johnson, 2007; DeNicolo & Franquiz, 2006; Enciso, 2003; Jones, 2013; Ryan, Patraw, & Bednar, 2013; Souto-Manning, 2009; Tyson, 1999). In spite of these efforts, however, authors and illustrators representing diverse races, classes, religions, sexualities, abilities, and other areas of marginalization, when published at all (Cooperative Children's Book Center, n.d.), are routinely left out of classrooms (American Library Association, 2009; McNair, 2008). This means that for most students in the United States, the literature they encounter in school consists mainly of White, middle class representations. Furthermore, some books that include particular cultural groups may be written from outsider perspectives and therefore do not always represent a reality of those groups' lived experiences (Reese, 2007).The question then becomes how to guide preservice teachers in considering the texts that are available and how to effectively mobilize those texts in their classrooms to create a more complex and authentic picture of the diverse lives of their students and the diverse world of us all. Book awards, multicultural booklists, and other reference materials are certainly a good start, but they do not provide preservice teachers with abstract, conceptual tools to help guide a continual questioning of the texts in their curricula and classrooms. In this article, we look at two particular lenses that have been helpful for motivating and guiding our students as they consider the need for and uses of diverse literature. The first, discussed by children's literature scholars for some time, is the idea of texts serving as windows and mirrors (Bishop, 1990a). A second, more recent contribution (that our students have found particularly helpful) is Adichie's (2009) warning about the dangers of the single story. Not only are both concepts useful when we work with our students, but we have also found that when brought together, they stretch and reinforce each other in productive ways that support our students' attempts at making their book selections more critical and equitable. In this article, we begin by discussing Bishop's concept of windows and mirrors and connecting it to Adichie's concept of the single story. We then illustrate how the recursive relationship we create between these two ideas provides a tool that supports our students as they learn to make text selections for their classrooms that provide more diverse representations for all of their students. …

Cite this

Christina M. Tschida, Caitlin Law Ryan, Anne Swenson Ticknor (2014). Building on Windows and Mirrors: Encouraging the Disruption of "Single Stories" Through Children's Literature. Journal of children's literature.

@article{m2014building,
  title  = {Building on Windows and Mirrors: Encouraging the Disruption of "Single Stories" Through Children's Literature},
  author = {Tschida, Christina M. and Ryan, Caitlin Law and Ticknor, Anne Swenson},
  year   = {2014},
  journal = {Journal of children's literature}
}

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