Multicultural/Multiethnic/Multiracial alloys: Reading the “mixed” experience in Brandy Colbert’s Little & Lion (original) (raw)
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Stories of multiracial experiences in literature for children, ages 9-14
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Language is a universal phenomenon that is the foundation of human relationships to each other, ourselves, and the world around us—the avenue by which people create connections between what is personally and collectively experienced and the meaning made by reflecting upon said experiences; however, in a society in which the discourse of the powerful and privileged silences and delegitimizes all other discourse varieties, this essential meaning-making process is thwarted. This research details and analyzes the meaningful inclusion of community and cultural discourse varieties found within culturally relevant literature, and the impact that its inclusion had on historically underserved students from a predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American community whose previous relationships with reading were overwhelmingly negative.
Beyond Black and White: Bicultural Characters in Young Adult Realistic Novels
With the steady increase of immigrant populations to the United States, there have come many intermarriages between different races and cultures. The year 2000 was the first time individuals were allowed to mark more than one race on the United States Census forms. The desegregation of schools in the 1950s also created a diverse population in kindergarten through high schools. This content analysis looks at current young adult literature to observe parallel trends in books for teens. Earlier studies on multicultural subject matters have focused primarily on monoracial, non-white characters. This study looks closely at the diverse individuals in literature who are products of different racial and cultural backgrounds, and the issues of identity surrounding them. The results of this study indicate that cultural identity does factor into many Asian and Hispanic sides of biracial characters. However, the white and black halves of the characters are not equally portrayed and relies on phenotype and racial characteristics rather than culture.
Promoting Multicultural Readings of Children's and Young Adult Literature
Savvas Learning Company, 2021
There is often a conversation in English Language Arts about the selection of children’s and young adult literature with an eye toward adding what we call diverse or multicultural texts. We translate that to mean that we want authors from the past and present who represent a wide range of lived experiences, cultural and linguistic heritages. While we would stop at classifying some authors as multicultural and others as “mainstream” we do agree that diversity and difference, as they cohere across a group of authors is important. And underrepresentation and misrepresentation of certain authors and groups need to be addressed in the ELA classroom. The purpose of this article, though, is to ask a different question about the texts we choose to teach to children and adolescents. It isn’t what we teach, but how we teach the texts we choose to teach. More specifically, how should we read all children’s and young adult literature multiculturally?
2019
This manuscript explores representations of protagonists of various multicultural backgrounds in three transitional series. Prior studies, such as Gangi (2008) and Green and Hopenwasser (2017), exposed the deficiencies of multicultural literature in elementary classrooms, particularly among transitional series books. Green and Hopenwasser emphasize the developmental importance of equal representation in transitional books with characters of diverse ethnicities, because they act as mirrors and windows for students to learn, grow, and reflect. These studies argue that in order to allow children to see themselves and to develop a positive self-image in primary grades, it is critical for teachers to be thoughtful while choosing series books. For the purposes of this study, to explore ethnic and racial representations of protagonists with the actual demographics of third graders, researchers conducted an equity audit on three transitional series, published across different decades and c...
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1998
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Black Adolescent Girls' Use of Literary Practices to Negotiate Boundaries of Ascribed Identity
Journal of Literacy Research, 2005
This qualitative study highlights the interconnectedness of literature, literacy practices, identity, and social positioning within a framework of a common enactment of multicultural education: adding literature by and about people of color to the language arts curriculum. The study provides a window on the meaning-making of six 16-year-old Black girls as they studied The Bluest Eye (Morrison, 1994) in their high school English class. Drawing primarily on group and individual interview data, this research shows participants spending little time analyzing the literature per se. Instead, spurred by incidents in the novel, they used the text as a launching point from which they analyzed their own life experiences. Socially positioned as young Black women, participants have found that they are expected by people in their school, community, and outside their community to behave in particular ways as a reflection of their assumed values and ways of being in the world. They also have exper...
Ideologies of Identity in Adolescent Fiction
2012
Walton's place and steered me through the dissertation's completion. He was standing by at that time of crisis and mourning, and I must add that he has been standing by as a supportive friend for over a decade. We are engaged in an ongoing conversation about literature and culture, a conversation that helped lay the groundwork for this study. Finally I am grateful to my husband, Dick, who assisted me in large and small ways and offered support when I felt swamped by real or imagined difficulties. A Note on Usage In this study the term "Black" is used to mean all peoples of African descent. People of mixed African and European descent come under this heading since they generally face the same problem as other Blacks in the United States and other Western nations. The term is capitalized because it refers to a specific population, the peoples historically connected by the Black diaspora. In recent years the term "White" has taken on a similar meaning, referring to people of European descent. We now find "White" used in books, conferences, and college courses that specifically focus on a field called White studies. I capitalize the term when it designates or implies an ethnic population, but not in instances where the "color line" is the primary connotation (as in "white supremacy," "white racism," "white hegemony" and so on). In such value-oriented fields as history, sociology, and art, labels become quickly outmoded; the usages in this book reflect current self-definition within groups as well as my own preferences. Malcolm Cowley has noted how literature is less abstract than other art forms and more socially relativistic. He writes: Literature is not a pure art like music, or a relatively pure art like painting and sculpture…. Instead it uses language, which is a social creation…. The study of any author's language carries us straight into history, institutions, moral questions, personal stratagems, and all the other aesthetic impurities or fallacies that many new critics are trying to expunge. 4 The kind of "impurities" Cowley refers to are compounded in children's literature because cross-generational activities tend to be purposeful-purposeful in directions beyond an interest in artistic form. A move into youth culture on the part of creative artists is, among other things, a move in the direction of culture maintenance or culture change. This point is but a logical extension of the findings of such sociologists as Peter L.Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The sensitive approach suggested here has enabled Kelly and others to answer important questions about the literature of the past and about those who produced and circulated it. But this inside view of the publishing world is available in Books: The Culture and Commerce of Publishing by Lewis A.Coser, Charles Kadushin, and Walter W.Powell. 17 In the field of Black studies, Nancy Larrick checked on the quantity of children's books about Blacks and reported on her findings in "The All-White World of Children's Books." 18 The Council on Interracial Books for Children did The Aesthetic Focus The formal features in a text either empower or enfeeble it. Eloquence, clarity, textural richness, strength of characterization, plausibility of plot-these are among the elements that can give a text an almost autonomous sense of strength. On the other hand, circumstances surrounding the reading experience, as well as reading readiness, have a lot to do with what makes a text compelling in a child's eyes. Children seem able to make something out of nothing, or conversely, remain oblivious to the most manifest literary delights. Peter Hunt sees this problem as inherent in the art form: Unlike other forms of literature, which assume a peer-audience and a shared concept of reading (and which can therefore acknowledge, but play down, the problem of how the audience received the text) children's literature is centered on what is in effect a cross-cultural transmission. The reader, inside or outside the book, has to be a constant concern, partly because of the adult's intermediary role, and partly because whatever is implied by the text, there is even less guarantee than usual that the reader will choose (or be able) to read in the way suggested. 20 But irrespective of this unpredictability in the young reader, the generalization still holds that formal qualities need to be treated as a Introduction xxi significant cultural variable. In earlier eras, this variable was discussed by literature specialists in terms of high art or high culture. Now theorists treat high art (more inventive art) and low art (more formulaic art) as two points on a continuum. They see the reader as able to make use of both. From this perspective (developed by John Cawelti in "Notes Toward an Aesthetic of Popular Culture"), 21 a historian can examine a range of cultural uses and meanings in a work. The high art dimension-formal elements that impact on meaning-will not be neglected. The critic will engage in the close reading that uncovers patterns, ironies, resonances, and the kinds of spontaneity and inventiveness that often make a work memorable over time. The case for aesthetic sensitivity and analysis in children's literature has been made by Lois R.Kuznets. She advocates cultural pluralism combined with the approach of the New Critics-that is, the scrutiny of the structure created by an author out of plot, characterization, theme, imagery, symbolism, point of view, and time and space projections. 22 The historian needs this perspective because it is a way to discover a certain kind of wholeness in a literary object, and that wholeness affects the synthesizing that is the historian's job. However, the very elements that loom large in a New Critic's dissection are highly culture-bound. The formalistic elements that Kuznets sees as a prerequisite to discussion of a book's political (i.e., rhetorical) level changes somewhat if one is referring to a Black aesthetic, a Hispanic aesthetic, and so on. The cultural specificity of the work is not its political content alone; it is also part of its stylistic content. In "Towards a Black Aesthetic," Hoyt Fuller writes about nuances of style and speech in the works of Black writers-distinct qualities that come directly out of the Black world. 23 Summarizing his sense of a Black aesthetic, Julian Mayfield writes: "[It is] our racial memory and the unshakable knowledge of who we are, where we have been, and springing from this, where we are going." 24 Addison Gayle Jr. has noted that "a critical methodology has no relevance to the Black community unless it aids men [sic] in becoming better than they are." 25 The Council on Interracial Books for Children makes a related point when it argues that when books cause children harm and pain, "one can hardly talk about their 'beauty'; the inner ugliness of their racism…corrupts the very word itself." 26 Young People and Audience Response Theory Reader response theory springs from a new level of solicitude for the reader. It involves an exploration of how a reader makes meaning from a text, and the intent underlying such exploration includes the idea that meaning should be beneficial. This welcome human focus is combined with a generalization from gestalt psychology: that the mind handles holistic configurations better than fragmented ones. A One job for historians is to discover why such specific protective strategies are necessary-why classic publications denied Blacks dignity, distorted the quality of the African heritage, and provided a convenient channel for hate feelings. These issues have been insufficiently analyzed by theorists; however, historian Samuel Pickering Jr. points critics in a direction that could lead to a more pluralistic practice. He notes that many children's books (being structurally simple) do not warrant multiple close readings. He says that "close readings are often less valuable than broad readings which examine both the text and the world beyond." 32 This perspective is seen as advantageous for all types of critics: 1. A study of the white supremacy myth is not an antiquarian exercise. In April of 1987, a grand jury indicted fifteen individuals for alleged criminal actions associated with white supremacist beliefs. Each person was affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan or Aryan Nations-groups implicated in the "killing of blacks, Jews, Federal officials, [and] journalists…," and committed to creating an all-White nation in the northwest corner of the United States
Co-Editor Introduction - The Multiethnic Experience in Children's and Young Adult Literature
Journal of Literacy Innovation, 2023
Set in the Central highlands of México, 73 youth, ages 10-17, became authors and writers (autores y escritores) of their own insider stories. A multinational/multi-institutional research team trained university students from México, the U.S., and Germany on a narrative text structure strategy, that included multimodal representations of text structure (chants, icons, visual text mapping) and in the creation of theme-based (immigration and intercultural competency) wordless picture books for eliciting oracy/literacy development, through story retells. Conducting action research, during a four-day community-based summer camp, university students leveraged magic tricks, theme-based storytelling and retelling, and the Embedded Story Structure (ESS) Routine to facilitate the campers' creation of their own, insider-written, themebased stories. Forty Latinx-authored bilingual children's books about immigration and intercultural competency, were also used as mentor texts for the campers' own stories. All 73 campers completed individual, insider-written children's books. Examples of student-authored stories from each theme and of how youth leaned on the ESS Routine for organizing their thoughts and writing their stories, are shared. Observational and anecdotal data from students, including students with disabilities, are relayed through two vignettes that point to the positive impact of storytelling (oracy) and the ESS Routine on campers' increased motivation and ability to become autores y escritores.