Children's Literature and Justice

Though injustice is not limited to matters of race, class, and gender, in this course we will spend some time focusing upon the potential meanings of race, class, and gender in children's books and questioning those potential meanings. There are many books on the market that discuss the validity of why multicultural education and multicultural children's literature are important. There are quite a few books available that describe hundreds of good multicultural books. There is very little available that talks about how one might read the culture encoded in a children's book or how to help children read for the meanings of cultural markers such as gender, race, and class. As a result, there is a subtle de-skilling of teachers occurring. Many teachers feel ill-equipped to decide if a multicultural book is a good book or not. As a result they rely upon the opinions of a few experts in the field to tell them if a certain book is good or not, authentic or not.

In this course we will present a vision of multicultural education and multicultural children's literature that rests on how readers attend to the signs of race, class, and gender in children's stories. The result is that adult readers will expand their repertoire of knowledge about multicultural literature and gain new strategies for interpreting cultural texts. Then in turn, I hope that adults will enable children to develop and assume their own authority in understanding and transforming the images of race, class, and gender the dominant culture asks children to assume.