Reading and Remembering: Self-Reported Early Encounters With Race in Children's Literature

• In Event: 63.087 - Sheraton Roundtable Session 11 - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 63.087-8 - Reading as Transformative: The Power of Texts to Spark the Imagination of Young Readers

Abstract

How does our childhood reading influence the way that we read the world and the world (Freire & Macedo, 2005)? Specifically, how do these early stories influence the way that we perceive race — as part of our own identities, and in the world around us? Taking into account the work reader response theorists such as Louise Rosenblatt (1938) and Lawrence R. Sipe (2008), and informed by memoirs from readers of color, such as Karla Holloway’s BookMarks (2006) and Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory (1983), the background of Reading and Remembering study is both autoethnographic as well as phenomenological, informed first by my experiences as a Black child reader, and in the virtual social communities of the digital world, which culminated in a forthcoming book. Similarly, 20 self-selected adult participants from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds will be interviewed about their experiences with children’s literature. Data collected will include video and audio recordings of the interviews, as well as a follow-up questionnaire after all interviews have taken place. The interviews will be analyzed via narrative analysis as well as systemic functional discourse analysis.

Author

• Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, University of Pennsylvania