Maria José Botelho - Critical Multicultural Analysis of Childrens Literature

Childrens literature is a contested terrain, as is multicultural education. Taken together, they pose a formidable challenge to both classroom teachers and academics. Rather than deny the inherent conflicts and tensions in the field, in Critical Multicultural Analysis of Childrens Literature: Mirrors, Windows, and Doors, Maria Jos Botelho and Masha Kabakow Rudman confront, deconstruct, and reconstruct these terrains by proposing a reframing of the field. Surely all of us children, teachers, and academics can benefit from this more expansive understanding of what it means to read books.

Sonia Nieto, From the Foreword

Critical multicultural analysis provides a philosophical shift for teaching literature, constructing curriculum, and taking up issues of diversity and social justice. It problematizes childrens literature, offers a way of reading power, explores the complex web of sociopolitical relations, and deconstructs taken-for-granted assumptions about language, meaning, reading, and literature: it is literary study as sociopolitical change.

Bringing a critical lens to the study of multiculturalism in childrens literature, this book prepares teachers, teacher educators, and researchers of childrens literature to analyze the ideological dimensions of reading and studying literature. Each chapter includes recommendations for classroom application, classroom research, and further reading. Helpful end-of-book appendixes include a list of childrens book awards, lists of publishers, diagrams of the power continuum and the theoretical framework of critical multicultural analysis, and lists of selected childrens literature journals and online resources.

Maria Jos Botelho, Ed. D., was a faculty member at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education of the University of Toronto and is currently Assistant Professor of Literacy Education in the Language, Literacy, and Culture Concentration of School of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Masha Kabakow Rudman, Ed. D., is Professor of Childrens Literature and Multicultural Education in the Language, Literacy, and Culture Concentration of School of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Sonia Nieto, Series Editor

Janks Literacy and Power

Botelho & Rudman Critical Multicultural Analysis of Childrens Literature: Mirrors, Windows, and Doors

Spears-Bunton & Powell (Eds.) Toward a Literacy of Promise: Joining the African-American Struggle

Bruna & Gomez (Eds.) The Work of Language in Multicultural Classrooms: Talking Science, Writing Science

Morrell Critical Literacy and Urban Youth: Pedagogies of Access, Dissent, and Liberation

Edelsky With Literacy and Justice for All: Rethinking the Social in Language and Education, Third Edition

Harmon/Wilson Beyond Grammar: Language, Power, and the Classroom

Berlin Contextualizing College ESL Classroom Praxis: A Participatory Approach to Effective Instruction

Vasquez Negotiating Critical Literacies with Young Children

Goldstein Teaching and Learning in a Multicultural School: Choices, Risks, and Dilemmas

Nieto Language, Culture, and Teaching: Critical Perspectives for a New Century

Collins Community Writing: Researching Social Issues Through Composition

Maria Jos Botelho

University of Massachusetts Amherst and Ontario Institute for Studies in Education/University of Toronto

and

Masha Kabakow Rudman

University of Massachusetts Amherst

First published 2009

by Routledge

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Simultaneously published in the UK

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Botelho, Maria Jos, 1961

Critical multicultural analysis of childrens literature : mirrors, windows and doors / by Maria Jos Botelho and Masha Kabakow Rudman.

p. cm.(Language, culture, and teaching)

1. Childrens literatureHistory and criticism. 2. Young adult literatureHistory and criticism. 3. Multiculturalism in literature. I. Rudman, Masha Kabakow. II. Title.

PN1009.5.M84B68 2009

809.89282dc22

2008043368

ISBN 0-203-88520-1 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN: 041599666X (hbk)

ISBN: 0805837116 (pbk)

ISBN: 0203885201 (ebk)

ISBN: 9780415996662 (hbk)

ISBN: 9780805837117 (pbk)

ISBN: 9780203885208 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9780203885208

For Jim and our children, Emma June and Elihu Bellamy, with all my love MJB

With heartfelt thanks to Maria, the perfect writing partner, colleague, and friend MKR

SONIA NIETO

Professor Emerita University of Massachusetts Amherst

groundbreaking article, The All-White World of Childrens Literature pointed out what many already knew but were reluctant to voice, that is, that childrens literature was a racist domain. In the context of childrens literature, the emperor had no clothes, and the fiction of a representative childrens literature was laid to rest.

It has been over 40 years since that historic article was first published. Thefield of multicultural childrens literature was born partly as a result of the awareness inspired by that article as well as by demands from within and outside the discipline of childrens literature. It has been a robust and exciting area of study and practice for at least three decades. Because of advocacy on the part of various communities, as well as the nations changing demographics, and the publishing industrys recognition that their bottom line could improve if they were more inclusive, childrens books today reflect a much broader racial and ethnic representation than ever before. But is that all there should be to making childrens literature more inclusive, more socially just, more democratic?

Maria Jos Botelho and Masha Kabakow Rudmans Critical Multicultural Analysis of Childrens Literature: Mirrors, Windows, and Doors represents the next step in the evolution of the field. In their insistence that an analysis of power relations must play a decisive role in how we read childrens literature, they invite readers to think about the interplay of race, class, and gender in books (and, indeed, in life in general). They ask us to think about the context in which childrens books are published, written, disseminated, read, and used in the curriculum. That is, they want us to recognize that the school and library are not islands unto themselves but rather that they exist within a sociopolitical context that is global, national, and local. This context currently includes, on the national and world levels, globalization policies that are leading to increased poverty and deprivation, particularly in developing countries. In those countries, it is a context that is resulting in decreasing opportunities and increasing oppression, and consequently, in greater immigration and, at the same time, in harsher immigration policies, particularly in Western Europe and the United States. It is also a context that includes an undeclared war in which thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have been killed; and a war on terror leading to a growing fear of the Other in our own nation, a chipping away of our civil rights, and, on an international level, to a greater mistrust of the United States among many other nations in the world. In schools, and, increasingly, in colleges and universities, the context includes rigid accountability structures, the scripting of the curriculum and erosion of faculty rights, and even the imposition of particular teaching methods (for example, at the school level, the exclusive use of phonics) or approaches to research (in schools of education, inflexible conceptions of scientifically based research) that make teaching, and especially the teaching of literature to children, almost an impossibility in many schools. This is the context that Botelho and Rudman think about as they ask us to consider using a critical multicultural analysis of childrens literature in our work as teachers and teacher educators.