We read Walter Dean Myers’ brilliant essay, “Where Are the People of Color in Children’s Books?” and used Traci Gardner’s Cultural Relevance Rubric to assess books in the children’s section of our local public library. In pairs, students discussed their early experiences of reading and their memories of favorite books from childhood. We began the “Where’s My Story?” project by working to understand the problem. And because my school’s project-based curriculum revolves around addressing real-world problems, we tackled it by seeking out culturally relevant children’s books, writing books of our own, and sharing them with 1st graders at a local elementary school. Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes this phenomenon in her TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story”: “Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify.”įor my students as learners and for me as their teacher, this is an important problem.
And it means that most of my students have come to know books as largely irrelevant to their lives. After nine years as students in these schools, my students are very familiar with isolated “passages” and multiple-choice comprehension questions and much less acquainted with books that inspire curiosity or reflect their experiences.īut the problem extends beyond school policy and begins before kindergarten the lack of children’s literature that is representative of urban children, people of color, and the wide diversity of society is well-documented. Some of their indifference to the written word could be attributed to the drill-and-test regimen common in urban elementary schools.
Ctq collaboratory how to#
They knew how to read, but they thought of reading as teacher-mandated drudgery. When I met my students on their first day of high school, most of them were not readers. In this guest post, originally posted at EdWeek and reposted here with permission, Philadelphia-based teacher Kathleen Melville shares the “Where’s My Story” project she developed to teach her ninth-grade students about diversity-or the lack thereof-in children’s books.
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