Language Arts - Volume 83, Issue 2, 2005

This article discusses children’s experiences with a literacy project intended to celebrate the cultures represented in a highly diverse fourth/fifth grade urban elementary classroom. However, when other children questioned the claimed identities of three biracial children, the project was transformed from a rather straightforward attempt to acknowledge and honor diversity into a critical literacy project in which children grappled with the complexities of race and what it means to claim membership in racial categories.

Critical literacy practices in a third’grade classroom involved working with texts that disrupted commonplace assumptions about social norms. As students read and talked about social issues such as racism, ageism, and sexism, they became “border crossers” in their school lunchroom.

This multicultural feminist critical narrative inquiry examines how one Dominican Spanish and English speaking poor immigrant first grader, Pam, utilizes her critical literacies to intervene against inequitable teaching practices and affirm her cultures. Implications for early childhood educators to develop culturally responsive practices that better support children are discussed.

This article affirms the vision of scholars, writers, and educators who have initiated and complicated the authenticity debate. Their discussions have inserted new standards of interethnic understanding within children’s literature. In addition, this article enlarges this vision by shifting the selection emphasis from only racial and cultural authenticity to issues such as reparation, justice, domination, and liberation. These issues create a discourse through which educators, authors, book sellers, and publishers may more thoughtfully and ethically consider multicultural topics in children’s literature.

This article focuses on how two boys in an ethnically diverse fifth–grade classroom shifted their perceptions of poetry, moving from views of poetry as “sappy” to seeing the transformative potential of poetry. This shift was linked to their opportunities to interact with poems written by Janet Wong and Sherman Alexie that deal with issues of racial prejudice and discrimination. Through journal writing and discussions with their classmates and teacher, the students were challenged to think and feel about issues that moved and mattered to them.

This article describes an exploration of gender and identity with a group of working-class, fifth-grade students. Using read aloud, literature circles, and mini-lessons rooted in the students’ experiences, the teacher’s successes and failures are explored within a context where students are put at the center of a literacy unit.

Perceptions of race, class, and gender are culturally and socially shaped and form the roots for inequities in our society and our classrooms. In this column we review three books that question institutionalized perceptions of race and class. The authors examine the history of schooling that contributes to great divides among human races and ranks individuals based on race, speech, and class. These books posit that to question and examine our perception of race, class, and gender is the key to providing justice and equal education to ALL children, especially those who come from family backgrounds that are historically and socially marginalized.

The Orbis Pictus Award Committee of the National Council of Teachers of English proudly announces the best in nonfiction literature for readers in grades K-8.

Sonia Nieto is a strong advocate of multicultural literacy for all teachers and students, which she expresses through a profound respect for self and others.