Diversity, equity, and inclusion has long been the focus of educational scholarship. This study explores the potential of wordless books with protagonists of color for children to access portraits of diverse characters and engage with various stories. To expand the existing body of literature on diversity in picturebooks, this study offers two…

The existence of transgender children is not new. However, for over 100 years, Western culture has worked to restrict the gender expressions and gender identities of children. This forces them into a binary model of gender understanding. This critical content analysis examined the ways that transgender children within picturebooks can both conform…

This article asks: How is peacemaking represented in the Jane Addams Children's Book Award (JACBA) collection of children's book awardees (2015-2021)? The authors sought to build on previous scholarship that has examined JACBA, including Taber's (2015) study of JACBA for older readers and Colabucci and Napoli's (2017) study of JACBA's books for…

Liminality, both etymologically and practically, is generally meant to be navigated through, not permanently occupied. The Disney "Descendants" series, marketed for ages seven to twelve, is an example of children's literature that engages with liminality as not only a lasting choice but also one of joy and reconciliation. The books…

Transformative, anti-oppressive curricula, as theorized by Banks (1989, 2014) and Kumashiro (2001, 2009), directly address present-day realities of racism, discrimination, and oppression. According to Banks (1989), a transformative curriculum includes "the infusion of various perspectives, frames of reference, and content from various groups,…

In the United States, a majority-white children's publishing industry is increasingly marketing books labeled as "antiracist," which may inadvertently center the comfort of white children, often at the expense of BIPOC children. This article proposes a critical "white" literacy approach and uses it to analyze two children's…

In this article, we argue that picturebooks about food production, consumption, and distribution can provide rich opportunities for early childhood educators to facilitate critical conversations about culture, power, social action, and justice with their students.

This article examines the pedagogical potential of art-based, early critical literacy as a space in which young bilingual children can explore the issues of human diversity and uniqueness. Adopting a qualitative case study approach, this study focused on 12 five-year-old children of Mexican origin at a charter school located in Texas.

Body image is a broad, multidimensional construct that encompasses an individual's perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about their own body, most often in relation to its physical appearance (Cash & Pruzinsky, 1990; Schilder, 2013; Thompson et al., 1999). Until relatively recently, the majority of body image and body-dissatisfaction research…

In this article, the author considers the affordances of bringing theories of affect (e.g., Davies, 2014; Dutro, 2019; Leander & Boldt, 2013) to understandings of meaning-making with culturally sustaining picturebooks within an intervention setting. Culturally sustaining picturebooks are defined as books reflective of multiple languages and…

Nationally, one in 100 adults is currently incarcerated. Meanwhile, more than 2.7 million U.S. children--or one in 28 children (The Pew Charitable Trusts, 2010)--currently have a parent who is incarcerated, and many more U.S. children face the daily effects of familial incarceration due to past parental incarceration or the incarceration of other…

Rudine Sims Bishop (1990) emphasized that children need to see themselves as well as others reflected in the books available to them. For children who are deaf, images of themselves that are "distorted or laughable or inaccurate" (Bishop, 1997) negatively impact their self-esteem and reinforce their marginalized status. The portrayals of…

More than just the movement across borders, transnationalism represents the entwining of past and present and the once discrete notions of the local, national, and global (Kivisto & Faist, 2010; Schiller, 1997). Transnationalism calls for a reconfiguration of identity and settlement that encompasses the realities of immutable linkages across…

The rise in hate crimes toward immigrants across communities (Potok, 2017) has led to a focus on children's literature with immigration themes for opening up conversations in classrooms (Rodriguez & Braden, 2018). Because children's knowledge about people and the communities they live in is informed by the media, portrayals of immigrants'…

Educators and librarians have a responsibility to capture the transnational border-crossing experiences of all students, including children of the African diaspora. Narratives of African diaspora border crossings disrupt stories of linear migration. These stories feature histories of displacement, trauma, and unbelonging. And yet, they embrace…