Access and Equity
Equity requires that we provide all children with the resources they need to reach their full potential. As educators, our goal must be to build learning environments where we have high expectations for every student. Diverse books and culturally responsive and respectful learning supports are essential in helping to achieve this goal. Why Rising Voices? In 1990, Rudine Sims Bishop published an essay about the importance of providing all young readers with diverse books. She used the phrase “windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors” to emphasize the need for all children to experience diverse stories through the characters and real-life people they meet in books. When children read books that serve as mirrors, they see aspects of their own experiences and cultures reflected in texts. When children read books that serve as windows, they gain insights into the world beyond their own personal experiences. All children need access to diverse books that allow them to look in and look out, making text-to-self and text-to-world connections. Ideally, every classroom would contain a robust classroom library, filled with hundreds of books that reflect the mosaic of our society. Yet, excellent texts with accurate, dignified, and appealing portrayals of people of color are still largely lacking from most classroom and school libraries (Thomas, 2018; Routman, 2018). And this lack of diversity takes a toll. Messages are embedded in the textual mirrors and windows. When children do not see themselves in books—or worse, see only distorted or stereotypical reflections—they can internalize negative views about their gender or culture and feel as if school is not a place where they matter. Positive textual images can change that, resulting in children who have higher self-esteem, better social-emotional functioning, and increased classroom engagement (Schwartz, 2019).
“It’s not just kids of color, kids from the margins who need diverse literature and media. It’s all kids who need stories about all kinds of people.”
—Ebony Elizabeth Thomas (2018) Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania Literacy, Culture, and International Education
6 • Rising Voices Library
4 Rising Voices | Books Empowering Girls in STEAM
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