Partnership and Pedagogies for Equity and Against Censorship: An Urgent Call for Scholars of Children's and Young Adult Literature

• In Event: Critical Responses to Literature: Using Texts for Social Justice

Abstract

While book bans are nothing new, censorship of children’s and young adult literature has been on the rapid rise over the past two years, increasing in scope, pace, and politicization, and creating a troubling context for teachers committed to teaching diverse texts in their classrooms. In this paper and through practitioner research, I examine and theorize my recent equity work with literacy teachers and librarians in a public school as a venue for activism, mutual knowledge generation and inquiry. In the paper, I offer a framework for strategic equity work, that involves selecting diverse texts and articulating compelling rationales for those texts in the face of current pushback and challenges.

Author

• Jessica Whitelaw, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author