Critical multicultural analysis provides a philosophical shift for teaching literature, constructing curriculum, and taking up issues of diversity and social justice. It problematizes children’s literature, offers a way of reading power, explores the complex web of sociopolitical relations, and deconstructs taken-for-granted assumptions about language, meaning, reading, and literature: it is literary study as sociopolitical change.
Bringing a critical lens to the study of multiculturalism in children’s literature, this book prepares teachers, teacher educators, and researchers of children’s literature to analyze the ideological dimensions of reading and studying literature. Each chapter includes recommendations for classroom application, classroom research, and further reading. Helpful end-of-book appendixes include a list of children’s book awards, lists of publishers, diagrams of the power continuum and the theoretical framework of critical multicultural analysis, and lists of selected children’s literature journals and online resources.
Chapter 1. The Metaphors We Read By: Theoretical Foundations
Chapter 2. The Historical Construction of Children’s Literature
Chapter 3. Reading Literacy Narratives
Chapter 4. Deconstructing Multiculturalism in Children’s Literature
Chapter 5. Theorizing Critical Multicultural Analysis of Children’s Literature
Chapter 6. Doors to the Diaspora: The Social Construction of Race
Chapter 7. Leaving Poverty Behind: The Social Construction of Class
Chapter 8. Genres as Social Constructions: The Intertextuality of Children’s Literature
Chapter 9. Cinderella: The Social Construction of Gender
Chapter 10. Shock of Hair: The Endurance of Hair as a Cultural Theme in Children’s Literature
Chapter 11. Teaching Critical Multicultural Analysis
Further Dialogue with Mingshui Cai, Patrick Shannon, and Junko Yokota
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