(If you want to read more about it, we were featured in UNH Today right here!)
As I look towards this semester, I've been thinking about ways to further support the UNH students in the project. This next semester, I'm going to introduce Tschida, Ryan, & Ticknor's (2014) work around windows, mirrors, and single stories as a theoretical frame.
Tschida, Ryan, & Ticknor (2014) introduce and merge two perspectives in talking about children's literature, Bishop's (1990) Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors and Adichie's (2009) Danger of a Single Story.
Bishop's (1990) work points to the importance of classroom literature that represents many different identities. She notes that literature can be a mirror (reflecting your perspective back at you), a window (offering you a view outside your own culture), or a sliding glass door (an opportunity to walk through via your imagination into other ways of being).
In her TED Talk, Adichie (2009) talks about the formation of stereotypes and how they come from hearing the same story about groups of people or events over and over again until we only understand those people or events in single, reductive, monolithic ways.
As I've been working on the Book->Art for Social Justice project, I've been thinking a lot about silence and essentializing. The silence part is because, often, when I've read books that engage with issues of social justice with predominantly White students, the conversation around the book sounds like crickets. Hagerman (2018) notes that one reason for that silence includes fear of saying the wrong thing. The essentializing part is because, often, when I do get a group of predominantly White students talking about a book focused on social justice, their interpretations often involve, "This happened a long time ago, but now it's better," "That's how is always is," or "Don't we feel bad for these people." And those types of responses mostly distance the learner from the social issues the literature brings up by assuming the social issues are solved, there's nothing to be done, or reinforcing a feeling of superiority.
So, how to unlock talk about social justice issues, and how to unlock that talk in a way that considers nuance in social justice issues? In their article, Tschida, Ryan, & Ticknor (2014) have their students read multiple books around the same historical topic, and they ask their students to consider from whose perspective each book is told. By analyzing the perspective of the writer, students consider what the writer believes to be true, and in so doing, consider the single stories that the book might be promoting as well as which window or mirror the readers might be looking through.
So, this semester, as we prepare for the Book->Art Social Justice series, my plan is to ask the students to explore the literature through this lens. We'll read three picture books on the same topic, and think about how what we learn is different based on who is telling the story. I'm excited to see where the conversations go.
Adichie,
C. N. (2009, July). The danger of a single story. Retrieved from TED
Talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript
Bishop, R. (1990).
Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. Perspectives: Choosing and using
books for the classroom, 6(3).
Hagerman, M. A.
(2018). White kids: Growing up with privilege in a racially divided
America. New York, NY: New York University Press.
Tschida, C. M.,
Ryan, C. L., & Ticknor, A. S. (2014). Building on windows and mirrors:
Encouraging the disruption of "single stories' through children's
literature. Journal of Children's Literature, 40(1), 28-39.
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