Effective teachers of reading understand that children from culturally diverse backgrounds learn best when the classroom environment is respectful of their linguistic, social, and cultural heritage. These teachers surround their students with culturally appropriate and relevant trade books that capitalize on the background knowledge and experiences that their students bring to school. By connecting these children with meaningful, culturally responsive books, they can relate to, teachers validate and build on their students’ cultural and world knowledge. For this reason, the literacy director of Chicago Public Schools, Jane Fleming, maintains that we need more books that depict positive images of urban life to engage our growing populations of urban students and bolster their literacy development (Fleming et al., 2016). In this poignant example, trade author Jewell Parker Rhodes (2015) helps us understand the need for books that reflect all the children in a class: I was a junior at Carnegie Mellon when I saw, on the library’s new fiction shelf, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora . Black women wrote books? It was a revelation. I switched my major the very next day. In my creative writing class, I was the only person of color. My classmates would say, “Why didn’t you tell me your characters were black?” “Why didn’t you tell me yours were white?” But truth be told, the experience confirmed that I, too, “read white” unless an author told me differently. A rich classroom collection of culturally responsive trade books acknowledges the background experience of culturally diverse students, bridges the gap between home and school, and enhances their engagement in reading. As Lehman, Freeman, and Scharer note, “As technology advances and opportunities for global communication expand, the value and importance of international children’s books will continue to grow” (2009). Dr. Alfred Tatum promotes what he calls enabling texts, books that are deeply significant and meaningful to all adolescents, but especially important for our diverse students living in high poverty urban environments. Enabling texts, at times authored by writers who have overcome adversity themselves, form a textual lineage that speaks to the rich possibilities of a life both thoughtful and well lived. Tatum believes these books offer their readers a roadmap to life as they strive to develop their own “plan of action” and a “healthy psyche” (Tatum, 2009).
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CHAPTER 1: READERS
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