How Can Multicultural Children's Literature Be Utilized to Facilitate Transnational Students to Be Border-Crossers?

• In Event: Understanding Immigrant Students and Educators' Transnational Experiences

Abstract

Using Border Pedagogy as a guiding lens, this study examines the third-grade Korean American students’ responses to multicultural children’s literature that illustrates different kinds of borders (i.e., physical, political, ethnic, religious, linguistic). Throughout the semester, 14 different multicultural picturebooks (Asian, Hispanic, European, and African) are introduced to the transnational children in a Korean language school in the U.S. The students’ responses during book discussions shows that multicultural literature facilitate different levels of the students’ border crossing. The findings provide implications that using multicultural children’s picturebooks can be an influential pedagogical instrument to provide experiences of crossing borders between cultures of themselves and others so that students can self-growth and change their thinking/viewpoints to become culturally aware, sensitive, and responsible citizenries.

Author

• Chaehyun Lee, Southeastern Oklahoma State University