Foreword
SONIA NIETO
Professor Emerita University of Massachusetts Amherst
Nancy Larrick’s 1965 groundbreaking article, “The All-White World of Children’s Literature” pointed out what many already knew but were reluctant to voice, that is, that children’s literature was a racist domain. In the context of children’s literature, the emperor had no clothes, and the fiction of a representative children’s literature was laid to rest.
It has been over 40 years since that historic article was first published. Thefield of multicultural children’s literature was born partly as a result of the awareness inspired by that article as well as by demands from within and outside the discipline of children’s literature. It has been a robust and exciting area of study and practice for at least three decades. Because of advocacy on the part of various communities, as well as the nation’s changing demographics, and the publishing industry’s recognition that their bottom line could improve if they were more inclusive, children’s books today reflect a much broader racial and ethnic representation than ever before. But is that all there should be to making children’s literature more inclusive, more socially just, more democratic?
Maria José Botelho and Masha Kabakow Rudman’s Critical Multicultural Analysis of Children’s Literature: Mirrors, Windows, and Doors represents the next step in the evolution of the field. In their insistence that an analysis of power relations must play a decisive role in how we read children’s literature, they invite readers to think about the interplay of race, class, and gender in books (and, indeed, in life in general). They ask us to think about the context in which children’s books are published, written, disseminated, read, and used in the curriculum. That is, they want us to recognize that the school and library are not islands unto themselves but rather that they exist within a sociopolitical context that is global, national, and local. This context currently includes, on the national and world levels, globalization policies that are leading to increased poverty and deprivation, particularly in developing countries. In those countries, it is a context that is resulting in decreasing opportunities and increasing oppression, and consequently, in greater immigration and, at the same time, in harsher immigration policies, particularly in Western Europe and the United States. It is also a context that includes an undeclared war in which thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed; and a “war on terror” leading to a growing fear of the “Other” in our own nation, a chipping away of our civil rights, and, on an international level, to a greater mistrust of the United States among many other nations in the world. In schools, and, increasingly, in colleges and universities, the context includes rigid accountability structures, the scripting of the curriculum and erosion of faculty rights, and even the imposition of particular teaching methods (for example, at the school level, the exclusive use of phonics) or approaches to research (in schools of education, inflexible conceptions of “scientifically based research”) that make teaching, and especially the teaching of literature to children, almost an impossibility in many schools. This is the context that Botelho and Rudman think about as they ask us to consider using a critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature in our work as teachers and teacher educators.
The critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature presupposes an understanding of this sociopolitical context. In these pages, you will find, for instance, a history of the publishing industry in terms of children’s literature, as well as a history of the representation of people of color in the literature. You will find theoretical discussions of the social constructions of race, class, and gender, and a deconstruction of multiculturalism. You will learn to use various lenses to develop multiple analyses of the same texts, and you will read descriptions and analyses of many children’s books. While theorizing about gender, you will read about the Cinderella story in numerous global contexts; while learning about the controversies and conflicts inherent in the topic of hair, you will find cogent and helpful analyses of children’s books that treat this topic in many different ways. And, at the end of the book, you will find yourself engaged in conversation not just with the authors but also with Junko Yokota, Mingshui Cai, and Patrick Shannon, some of the most significant scholars in the field, as they reflect on the critical teaching of children’s literature. Throughout, you will discover that it is the weaving together of theory and practice that makes this book especially unique and timely.
Children’s literature is a contested terrain, as is multicultural education. Taken together, they pose a formidable challenge to both classroom teachers and academics. As such, they are of fundamental significance for the Language, Culture, and Teaching Series and a welcome addition to our understanding of children’s literature. Rather than deny the inherent conflicts and tensions in the field, in Critical Multicultural Analysis of Children’s Literature: Mirrors, Windows, and Doors, Maria José Botelho and Masha Kabakow Rudman confront, deconstruct, and reconstruct these terrains by proposing a reframing of the field. In the process, they invite readers to, in the words of Paulo Freire, read both “the word and the world” (Freire, 1970), that is, to reflect on the words in the text and on their meaning in their lives and in the world so that they can become active agents in the world. Surely all of us—children, teachers, and academics—can benefit from this more expansive understanding of what it means to read books.
Works Cited
· Freire, Paul (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Seabury Press.
· Larrick, Nancy (1965, September). The all-white world of children’s books, Saturday Review, 48 (11), 63–65.
The metaphors of mirrors, windows, and doors permeate the scholarly dialogue of “multicultural children’s literature” as using literature to provide ways to affirm and gain entry into one’s own culture and the culture of others. These are powerful metaphors because they presuppose that literature can authentically mirror or reflect one’s life; look through a window to view someone else’s world; and open doors offering access both into and out of one’s everyday condition. The mirror invites self-contemplation and affirmation of identity. The window permits a view of other people’s lives. The door invites interaction.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) argue that metaphors govern both our thought and action, that is, these conceptual systems influence “how we perceive the world, how we get around the world, and how we relate to other people” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980: 3). Metaphors are often implicit; we are not aware of them. But if we examine our language use, Lakoff and Johnson maintain, we will find evidence of how they define and shape everyday experiences.
By examining the metaphors of mirrors, windows, and doors, we can identify how they structure our perceptions (how we perceive), thoughts (how we think), and actions (what we do). In our book, we reclaim these metaphors and take children beyond text to self connections and link them to social practice. We expand how children perceive multiculturalism and children’s literature, and create a space for reading power through critical multicultural analysis.
The prevailing pedagogies for studying multiculturalism in children’s literature have emerged from the black-white oversimplification of race relations in the United States. While the racialized context of the United States contributes to this paradigm it distracts us from the more complex intragroup and intergroup cultural dynamics and social relations, rendering many cultural experiences invisible and making the complexities of power relations an abstraction. Further, it supports the erroneous assumption that in naming literature “multicultural,” it represents diverse experiences other than White, European American.
In this book, we argue for a critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature, an orientation towards reading, learning, teaching, and the world. This kind of analysis can help readers deconstruct taken-for-granted assumptions about language, meaning, reading, and literature, and leads to “resocialization” (Shor, 1992) for and construction of a society that is socially just.
When we untangle multiculturalism from “multicultural children’s literature,” we can ask: Who is represented, underrepresented, misrepresented, and/or invisible? How is power exercised? We can challenge all texts. We can argue with the author, question assumptions, unmask ideologies, and examine how the author uses language. We can speculate on ways to acknowledge alternative perspectives. And we can re-imagine and transform the world in which we live (Botelho, 1998, 2004).
We advocate for reading that goes beyond stretching children’s cultural imagination, to reading that fosters historical and sociopolitical imagination. Bringing a critical lens to the study of multiculturalism in children’s literature invites the reader to deconstruct dominant ideologies of U.S. society (e.g., race, class, gender, and individualism) which privilege those whose interests, values, and beliefs are represented by these worldviews. It is reading power, the complex web of sociopolitical relations.
Race, class, and gender matter. Critical multicultural analysis brings socioeconomic class into the conversations about race and gender, so we can better understand how these systems of oppression intersect (hooks, 2000). A critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature interrupts the social myth that we live in a classless, equitable, and just society, and that everyone has access to the “American Dream” as long as they demonstrate initiative, effort, and ability (Sleeter, 1998). This dominant ideology circulates in children’s books.
Our past and present social locations and aspirations for the future have implications for where and how we might take action in challenging existing power relations. Bronwyn Davies (1999) argues that feminist poststructuralist theory requires a “recognition of oneself as historically and discursively located, that is, as located in a context (or contexts) where that which is taken as given (both in the everyday world and in the world of theorists and researchers) forms a background that necessarily shapes any question. What is understood as askable … varies from one time to another, from one research tradition to another, and from one set of politics to another” (Davies, 1999: 13).
We are two White women of working-class backgrounds; one over seventy, and one who is over forty; one of Eastern European Jewish heritage and one of Catholic Portuguese heritage. We recognize the contextualized and ideological dimensions of literacy. Our awareness of our place in the world has led us to this work. Our life experiences both with classism and ethnic bigotry and our long term participation in critical multicultural teacher education have moved us to be allies to underrepresented groups and social activists in our work with children and adults.
Critical multicultural analysis is a frame for teaching literature and constructing curriculum and spaces to take up issues of diversity and social injustice by problematizing children’s literature: It is literary study as social change. It prepares teachers to analyze the ideological dimensions of reading and studying literature. Readers, young and adult, can address issues of social transformation and justice through their reading. By uncovering systems of meaning that perpetuate social inequities, readers can reposition themselves in the world and envision new intellectual spaces, breaking ground for constructing new social worlds. Critical multicultural analysis creates a site for re/construction.
Our audience is diverse. We have written this text for experienced teachers, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, teacher educators, literacy researchers and scholars of children’s and young adult literature.
The cover of our text is a representation of Maria José’s family home in São Miguel, Açores, where she lived the first seven years of her life. This image is based on photographs of her father Jacinto and sister Conceição, all taken by her brother José during the 1970s. This context is where Maria José learned about how power was exercised within her family as well as the power relations that her parents and siblings experienced in this island community. It was in this house where Maria José was first socialized to participate in the world.
Her family owned only one mirror that was approximately the size of this book. It was hung up high on the kitchen wall, for the taller members of the family to use during grooming activities. However, she caught glimpses of her reflection in the windows of the kitchen door, which looked out into a small yard, packed with plum, pear, peach, and fig trees. It was through the front windows that she first peered out to look at the farmers returning from the fields in the late afternoon, the fishermen selling the daily catch, the neighbor children gathering for play, or the neighbor women engaging in dialogue. The door opened out into the world of her community. The carpet of flowers made by her father from flower petals and greens, in preparation for the passing of a religious procession, evokes the sacredness and social transformative possibilities of everyday life. Within this house, a construction site of sorts, her parents guided Maria José and her siblings in the deconstruction and reconstruction of unjust ways of being in the world.
Overview of the Book
Our theoretical framework of critical multicultural analysis has had a great influence on how we organized this text. Multiple U.S. histories and their sociopolitical contexts anchor the book chapters. We consider how genres, words, images, perspectives, social interactions among characters, and story closures shape how stories get told. We apply our theoretical framework to trade books published in the United States and Canada, clustered as text collections, reflecting particular cultural themes, genres, and storylines. We analyze these texts and others, both literary and nonliterary, alongside each other and other texts.
Throughout the book we review the research on multicultural children’s literature and re/consider its pedagogical possibilities and dilemmas. At the end of each chapter, we provide recommendations for classroom application, classroom research, and further reading, as well as bibliographies of the works cited. At the end of the book, we have compiled appendices on children’s book awards and publishers; created diagrams of the power continuum and the theoretical framework of critical multicultural analysis; and generated lists of children’s literature journals and online resources.
Chapter 1 grounds and frames our book. We introduce critical multicultural analysis and define “critical” and “multicultural.” The theories we draw on are explicated and connected. We describe the role of genealogical (historical) work in re/contextualizing children’s literature. The power positions of domination, collusion, resistance, and agency are explored. The assumptions that we bring to this project about literature, authors, reading, children and critical analysis are considered.
In Chapter 2, we reflect on the window metaphor and provide a historical overview of the constructions of childhood alongside children’s literature. The key historical developments in children’s literature are outlined and publishing trends are explored. We apply some common approaches to literary study to a children’s book, Leon’s Story, thinking about how they position the reader, the text, and society.
In Chapter 3, we historicize everyday and school literacies practices, as they developed in Western Europe and the United States. We use the literacy resources of code breaker, text pariticipant, text user, and text critic (Luke & Freebody, 1999) to analyze how literacy is depicted in children’s literature.
The definition of culture is deconstructed and reconstructed in Chapter 4, creating a space to retrace the development of the literary category of multicultural children’s literature, and to review its scholarship. We reveal the scholarly silence of class in children’s literature and advocate for bringing class into the critical dialogue on race and gender. Class is an overlooked social construct, even though it is central to the U.S. context. (We demonstrate how class works with race and gender in books when we analyze children’s literature about Chicano/a migrant farmworkers in Chapter 7.)
Chapter 5 examines the discourse of multicultural children’s literature by locating the discursive threads of otherness and self-esteem, and naming issues of invisibility and silences. We consider the theoretical constructs of ideology, identity, subject positions, and power, and theorize a power continuum, using a multi-layered lens to examine how texts embody power relations.
Chapter 6 offers a historical sketch of how race has been socially constructed over time. We deconstruct the American Dream and propose that we consider the United States as a diaspora, creating a space for examining the complexities of power. We particularly focus on the history and sociopolitical context of Mexican American participation in migrant agricultural work as well as a review of Mexican American representation in children’s literature, which we utilize in Chapter 7, in analyzing the text collection that represents this culture/power experience in children’s literature.
In Chapter 8, we consider how genres shape how stories get told as well as influence the reader’s expectations of the text. In Chapter 9, we consider the story of Cinderella as a genre and explore its structural elements. We offer a cross-cultural and cross-temporal analysis of multiple variants of this storyline, showing its endurance across place and time. The Cinderella folk tales are implicated in the social construction of gender.
We analyze the cultural theme of hair in Chapter 10 against the controversy surrounding a White teacher’s use of the children’s book, Nappy Hair, by Carolivia Herron. In Chapter 11, we revisit the sociopolitical dimensions of critical multicultural analysis by considering the pedagogical implications of what we read and how we read. We review the research literatures on the teaching of multicultural children’s literature and use our theoretical/pedagogical framework to speak to the possibilities, dilemmas, and challenges addressed. We end the chapter with the possibility of children writing their own stories, as a way to talk back to publishing practices, and capturing and analyzing their own language use in action.
We invited Mingshui Cai, Patrick Shannon, and Junko Yokota to respond to our theoretical framework. At the end of the book, you will find our negotiated dialogue, constructed from an ongoing e-mail exchange.
While the book may be read in any order, we deliberately organized it to guide the reader in developing an understanding of the constructs and practices of critical multicultural analysis. Our intent is not to standardize the reading process but to make our critical reading public, as a way to “scaffold conscientizaçãoo” (Sleeter, Torres & Laughlin, 2004).
We have been working together on this book for several years. During this time, we grew together theoretically and pedagogically, experiencing our theoretical leanings in many ways: It was a decolonizing experience. Our writing changed over time. Our language became explicitly political. In reading multiple drafts of this text, we found our layered selves, our multiple understandings. We do not want to contradict ourselves, but given our multiple subjectivities, questions are inevitable. This is not a final text, but rather a work in progress, leading us to rethink the teaching of children’s literature. We invite you, the reader, to read and apply this text critically and multiculturally.
References
· Botelho, Maria José. (1998). The postmodern untangling of critical multiculturalism from multicultural children’s literature: Creating space for critical literacy. Unpublished manuscript, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
· Botelho, Maria José. (2004). Reading class: Disrupting power in children’s literature. Unpublished dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
· Davies, Bronwyn. (1999). What is feminist poststructuralist research? Examining texts of childhood. In Barbara Kamler (Ed.), Constructing gender and difference: Critical research perspectives on early childhood (pp. 13–31). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
· hooks, bell. (2000). Where we stand: Class matters. New York: Routledge.
· Lakoff, George & Johnson, Mark. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
· Luke, Allan & Freebody, Peter. (1999). A map of possible practices: Further notes in the four resources model. Practically Primary 4(2), 5–8.
· Shor, Ira. (1992). Empowering education: Critical teaching for social change. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
· Sleeter, Christine. (1998). Teaching Whites about racism. In E. Lee, D. Menkart, & M. Okazawa-Rey (Eds.), Beyond heroes and holidays: A practical guide to K-12 anti-racist, multicultural education and staff development. Washington, DC: Network of Educators on the Americas.
· Sleeter, Christine, Torres, M. N. & Laughlin, P. (2004). Scaffolding conscientization through inquiry in teacher education. Teacher Education Quarterly, 31(1), 81–96.
Acknowledgements
The poet Antonio Machado says that we make the road by walking. The road to this work has been long and arduous, but I have not walked alone: Great companions walked with me along the way. My two beloved mentors, Sonia Nieto and Masha Kabakow Rudman, accompanied me. Their research and teaching are central to my work. Thank you to Masha for the invitation to co-write this book because it created a space for us to think, learn, and write together, time that I will always cherish. Thank you to Sonia for the many invitations to teach multicultural education, experiences that deepened my understanding of how power works in the United States.
Thank you to Professors Cathy Luna and William Moebius for their thoughtful participation during my doctoral studies, mentoring that greatly contributed to this book project.
Thank you to my dear mentors at the Ontario Institute for Studies of Education at the University of Toronto: Dean Jane Gaskell and Professors Dennis Thiessen, Tara Goldstein, Doug McDougall, and Normand LaBrie. Their inspiration and support over the past several years was instrumental in the completion of this work. What a blessing it is to have my beloved OISE colleagues in my life: David Booth, Linda Cameron, Patricia Chow, Sarah Cohen, Jim Cummins, Mary Kooy, Lisa Leoni, Miriam Patterson, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, and Padma Sastri. Thank you to Shelley Stagg Peterson, my cherished OISE “buddy,” for her support and interest in this book. Thank you to Eunice Jang and Julie (Jules) Kerekes for their love and understanding. I am so blessed to have them. They will be forever in my heart.
Thank you to my wonderful graduate assistants: Ed Dixon, Agnes Kieltyka, Chyleen Shih, Yamin Qlan, and MinKyeong Suk. Their many contributions enriched this work.
My mother and father nurtured in me a great sense of social responsibility. They taught me about collaborative power through their sharing of resources and social power. Thank you to Annie, Jesse, José, and Conceição, my loving siblings, for being embodiments of our parents’ teachings. Their love sustains me.
My beloved family, Jim and our children Emma and Elihu, has nourished my heart and soul. Jim has been a loving and supportive companion on this road. I hope this book makes a difference in the world because my children are the reason I took this trip in the first place.
This collaborative book project would not have been possible without the financial support from the University of Toronto Connaught Start-Up Grant.
Maria José Botelho
First and foremost I must acknowledge the steady competent support of my assistant, Kathy Boron, without whom I could not have completed my work. She helped me in every phase of the research and writing. She grappled with the foibles of the computers, helped in the editing, and managed the many tasks that I could not tackle.
I owe a debt of gratitude to those scholars and colleagues whose work has informed and guided me over the years. Sonia Nieto has been a friend as well as colleague and has always encouraged me in my work. Debbie Reese, Rudine Sims Bishop, and OYATE have all been gracious in their responses to my queries.
Sara Young has worked by my side in studying children’s literature and the direction we are going in our thinking. We have co-taught, conferred, and bounced ideas back and forth.
My daughter, Reva Rudman, has contributed ideas, opinions, and emotional support to me in ways too numerous to mention, including bringing to my attention authors and titles I might otherwise not have seen.
I am indebted to all of my students, especially those in my Issues in Children’s Literature classes over the years. Their questions and research spurred me to probe more deeply into the numerous texts and reviews that led to several of the chapters in our book. Some of the many names are John Raible, Patty Bode, Martha Morgan, Marisa Campbell, Nia Taylor, Diane Mercomes, Tara Nappi, Eileen Gould, and Tina Bisanti.
I beg forgiveness of those whose names I have not included here. I fear that there are many I have overlooked. Suffice it to say that this has been a collaborative project from the beginning and will continue to be so.
Masha Kabakow Rudman
We are grateful to Naomi Silverman, our wonderful editor, whose belief in this project was unending.
Thank you to Mingshui Cai, Patrick Shannon, and Junko Yokota for their generosity and insightful contributions during our online dialogue.