Children throughout their lives develop four kinds of vocabulary: listening vocabulary, speaking vocabulary, reading vocabulary and writing vocabulary.
Diversify Your Classroom Library
by
New Author
The writing workshop is a block of instructional time in which students practice the writing process (Dorfman & Shubitz, 2019). Writing workshops can be used with young children and with adolescent students. This article provides a brief overview of instructional methods involved in the implementation of a writing workshop.
Conducting a Writing Workshop
Increased time to write with a focus on the strategies of pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing are linked to increased writing quality (Graham & Harris, 2016). Unfortunately, students tend to demonstrate a decrease in enthusiasm for writing from early childhood to middle school and high school, due to less time to write and less engaging writing opportunities (Graham & Perin, 2007) so it is imperative to engage students in workshops that are personally and culturally meaningful. We recommend that it should be evident that multicultural literature is being read, enjoyed and analyzed across the curriculum. Writing workshops provide opportunities for lively inquiry and discussion about texts with diverse characters, settings, and cultures (Alexander, 2018).
Conversations
Harry
by Monica Thomas
by
New Author
The writing workshop is a block of instructional time in which students practice the writing process (Dorfman & Shubitz, 2019). Writing workshops can be used with young children and with adolescent students. This article provides a brief overview of instructional methods involved in the implementation of a writing workshop.
Conducting a Writing Workshop
Increased time to write with a focus on the strategies of pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing are linked to increased writing quality (Graham & Harris, 2016). Unfortunately, students tend to demonstrate a decrease in enthusiasm for writing from early childhood to middle school and high school, due to less time to write and less engaging writing opportunities (Graham & Perin, 2007) so it is imperative to engage students in workshops that are personally and culturally meaningful. We recommend that it should be evident that multicultural literature is being read, enjoyed and analyzed across the curriculum. Writing workshops provide opportunities for lively inquiry and discussion about texts with diverse characters, settings, and cultures (Alexander, 2018).
Conversations
Harry
Issues related to race and equality are hot topics in our country right now so there is no better time for teachers to diversify their classroom library. The goal in doing so should be to give students a safe, unbiased place where students can find books that “represent the diversity of identities and experiences of the students in our classrooms, as well as people and cultures across the country and around the globe” (Crisp et al., 2016, p. 31).
The population of the United States is becoming more diverse; therefore “educators must focus not only on developing their own cultural awareness but also on assisting their students in developing their cultural awareness” (Howlett & Young, 2019, p. 40). Classroom libraries are the perfect place for such knowledge to be found as “reading literature is one way for them to learn about the diversity of society and the larger world” (Lafferty, 2014, p. 208). Books that expand our students’ schema about their own culture and others’ should be located in every classroom.
Convinced? Well...easier said than done. It has been long understood that “the world depicted in children’s books is overwhelmingly white. It’s also a world that is predominantly upper middle class, heterosexual, nondisabled, English-speaking, and male” (Crisp et al., 2016, p. 29).
Two decades ago, research exposed a lack of informational texts in classrooms. That finding brought pedagogical conversations about nonfiction use and presence in classrooms to the forefront. However, the knowledge of the lack of books with cultural diversity in classrooms has not brought about the same results. Unfortunately it is not much different than it was 50 years ago.
Start with what you have already in your classroom library. Examine the texts to determine their
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Weed out the books that
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Keep the books that
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To ensure your library includes a wide-range of topics, while you are examining the books, you could sort them into the following categories: race, religion, socioeconomic status, disability, developmental differences, sexual identity, gender, parallel cultures, language, to name a few. Some books will fall into more than one category, so a tally sheet may be more helpful. Just do not keep the books sorted in these categories when you are finished.
Have deficits? Get help! The following resources are devoted to topics of diversity in children’s literature.
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Feeling overwhelmed? Don’t be. This is important and necessary work. Remember the motivation behind diversifying your library. These books will:
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Done diversifying? Great! Now start promoting! Find a prominent place within the classroom for your library. Make sure it is attractive and well organized. To make browsing for books easy, face as many covers out as you can. It will make the books feel more accessible and appealing. Hang rain gutters and use plate stands to showcase even more books.
It is not enough to just have the books in your library. Read and share these books with enthusiasm so students will seek these books out. Read them “in a way that promotes reflection on self, society, history, opportunity, and possibilities” (Moller, 2016, p. 65).
Don’t forget...“Cultural issues, relationships, languages, understandings shift and change across time and context, and we need to be evaluating the contents of our libraries on an ongoing basis” (Crisp et al., 2016, p. 39).
References
Crisp, T., Knezek, S. M., Quinn, M., Bingham, G. E., Girardeau, K., & Starks, F. (2016). What’s
on our bookshelves? The diversity of children’s literature in early childhood classroom
libraries. Journal of Children’s Literature, 42(2), 29–42.
Howlett, K. M., & Young, H. D. (2019). Building a classroom library based on multicultural
principles: A checklist for future K-6 teachers. Multicultural Education, 26(3–4), 40–46.
Kleekamp, M. C., & Zapata, A. (2018). Interrogating depictions of disability in children's
picturebooks. The Reading Teacher, 72(5), 589–597. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1766
Lafferty, K. E. (2014). “What are you reading?”: How school libraries can promote racial diversity
in multicultural literature. Multicultural Perspectives, 16(4), 203–209.
https://doi.org/10.1080/15210960.2014.951888
McNair, J. C. (2016). #WeNeedMirrorsAndWindows: Diverse classroom libraries for K-6
students. The Reading Teacher, 70(3), 375–381. https://doi.org/10.1002/trtr.1516
Moller, K. J. (2016). Creating diverse classroom literature collections using Rudine Sims
Bishop’s conceptual metaphors and analytical frameworks as guides. Master teacher.
Journal of Children’s Literature, 42(2), 64–74.
Routman, R. (2018). Literacy essentials: engagement, excellence, and equity for all learners.
Stenhouse Publishers.
Wepner, S. B., Strickland, D. S., & Quatroche, D. J. (2013). The administration and supervision
of reading programs (5th ed.). Teachers College Press.
Monica Thomas grew up in South Dakota and met her husband at the University in North Dakota. They settled down in the Kansas City area to raise their family and teach students to read. Thomas has worked as a first grade, fourth grade, and now a second-grade teacher. She has also been a Reading Recovery Teacher, Title I Teacher, and a Reading Specialist.
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