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…

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 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.

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…

The educational needs of the children of migrant laborers have often been neglected by educators who have dismissed them as someone else's responsibility (Vocke, 2007). The migrants' complex transnational experiences have been largely overlooked in school curricula. This deficiency allows anti-migrant attitudes to fester among teachers and…

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'…

Historically, early lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer-inclusive (LGBTQ+) picturebooks deployed representations of (in)human characters (i.e., birds, bunnies, shapeshifters, and more) to open readers to queer subjects (Young, 2019). While useful for expanding conceptions of queer life, such a move has had unintended consequences. The…

LGBTQ+ identities complicate the ways in which #OwnVoices can be deployed in literary analysis and author studies. Recognizing LGBTQ+ identities in literature is about more than just the text; it is about the visibility and success of LGBTQ+ authors as well. Through a discussion of reader response theory and politics of recognition, the author…

Sharing literature representative of students' diverse experiences opens up conversations, invites inquiry, and develops empathy (Ward & Warren, 2020). It is well documented, however, that these books can be challenging to locate in schools, libraries, and bookstores (Bickmore, Xu, & Sheridan, 2017; Crisp et al., 2016; Jipson & Paley,…

The Children's Literature Assembly (CLA) Master Class in the Teaching of Children's Literature session, currently in its 26th year, provides opportunities for those who teach in university settings to share experiences related to teaching children's literature in the university and discuss contemporary trends and issues in the field of children's…

Research has shown that individuals resettled as refugees are represented as passive victims who are dependent on government aid, and are often associated with trauma (MacDonald, 2015; Shapiro & MacDonald, 2017). This should not undermine the traumatic and difficult experiences that people resettled as refugees undergo, but a focus on such…

The current state of homelessness in the United States, the barriers and challenges students who are homeless face, and the prevailing neoliberal construction of homelessness provide the situational context for this study and the discourse within which this analysis of nine children's novels was written. The authors initiated this study with the…

A limited number of studies have examined Asian American children's literature over the last half century. While the selection and availability of this literature has increased substantially in the last two decades, many of these texts continue to perpetuate stereotypes (Morgan, 2012), such as the overachieving model minority (Loh-Hagen, 2014) and…