Today, we examined why having diversity in children’s literature is important. We did a ‘scavenger’ hunt through our classroom library to try to find books that had characters that were similar to/different from us.
We noticed that, oftentimes, different cultural/racial communities do not have as much representation. Here are some things that we noticed:
“The Gauntlet is the first book I’ve read with a Muslim main character”
“We should try to find more books with multi-racial characters like The New Kid”
“There are lots of book about Black history. I hope we can get more about women’s rights”
“Do we have any books with blind or deaf characters?”
“I hope more books will be published that have Indigenous characters (without stereotypes)”
What do you think? Have you read a book with a character that represents you (culture, race, gender, family, etc.)?
Take a look at the graph below to get some more insight into diverse representation in children’s literature publishing!
