Affordances and Tensions of Incorporating Global Children’s Literature: Lessons From a Teacher Professional Development Initiative

• In Event: Disrupting the Single Story: Transformative Children’s Literature for Social Justice

Abstract

As a result of “increasingly multiracial, multilingual, and multicultural” (Ponciano & Shabazian, 2012, p. 23) societies and classrooms due to global mobility, scholars are increasingly making calls for shifts in the pedagogies and materials used by teachers. One area that has particularly received great attention is how students can be exposed to diverse children’s literature to support their multicultural awareness (Iwai, 2019) and sense of belonging (Ford et al, 2019). In this study, we discuss the affordances and challenges of incorporating global children’s literature in US classrooms by a group of teachers after attending a series of professional development workshops that aimed at supporting them to include diverse literature in their curriculum.

In this paper, we draw on culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2017) exploration of how diverse literature could be integrated in a way that nurtures and sustains students' cultural identities within the educational context. The Intercultural Curriculum framework (Short et al., 2016) informed our understanding of how to encourage students to inquire from a critical stance and how teachers can be supported in integrating global perspectives and literature across school curriculum. These frameworks served as the lenses through which we examined the impact of a PD workshop on instructional practices and identified potential challenges and improvements for inclusive and culturally responsive teaching.

Data for this project were drawn from a project that included a series of professional development workshops attended by 17 teachers from different schools in a Midwestern state in the US. The workshops were conducted at a research university in spring 2023 and were facilitated by faculty as well as doctoral students with knowledge and expertise on diverse children’s literature. Various topics to support teachers to understand the concepts, benefits and pedagogical approaches for incorporating global children’s literature were covered. Besides, they also included activities to introduce them to literature from and about different geographical regions such as Asia, Africa and Latin America. Data sources included analysis of materials used in the workshops, field notes taken during the workshops, artifacts (e.g., lesson plans and materials), and semi-structured interviews with 5 focal teachers conducted after the completion of the workshops. Data were analyzed using a thematic approach (Braun, & Clarke, 2006).

Overall teachers had positive experiences attending the workshops as they were engaged in reading and discussing various aspects of incorporating global children’s literature in their curriculum followed by hands-on activities to select books and design lessons. Sharing their experiences and lesson plans with each other also helped them expand their pedagogical repertoire. However, teachers also reported various challenges in diversifying their use of children’s literature such as lack of resources to get new books, growing restrictions on diverse books, difficulty in finding books that can provide authentic cultural representation. Additionally, teachers reported challenges navigating issues such as diversity, race and justice used as the theme of the diverse books they selected to use in their classrooms.

Authors

• Laxmi Prasad Ojha, Michigan State University

• Anara Akhmetova, Michigan State University