THE IMPORTANCE OF DIVERSITY IN SCHOOL LIBRARY COLLECTIONS Here’s why educators and librarians/media specialists should introduce students to a wide range of stories and voices—along with how to do so effectively. In a powerful TED Talk, author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recalled how she read mostly British and American books as a young girl growing up in Nigeria. As a result, the first stories she wrote as a child featured blond, blue-eyed characters who played in the snow and ate apples. “What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children,” she said. “Because all I had read were books in which the characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books … had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. The unintended consequence was that I did not know people like me could exist in literature.” 1 How we perceive the world—and, just as importantly, how we see ourselves —is a function of the stories we experience in books and other media. Yet, while the United States has become more culturally and ethnically diverse, children’s books largely haven’t kept pace. That’s beginning to change. School librarians/media specialists are consciously seeking to diversify their library collections, and publishers are amplifying the voices of underrepresented groups in the children’s books they produce.
This white paper examines why these efforts are important—and it looks at how librarians/media specialists and other K–12 leaders can make a difference.
Why Diversity Matters in School Library Collections—And How to Achieve It 1
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