Blogs

by Louise Derman-Sparks

Children’s books continue to be an invaluable source of information and values. They reflect the attitudes in our society about diversity, power relationships among different groups of people, and various social identities (e.g., racial, ethnic, gender, economic class, sexual orientation, and disability). The visual and verbal messages young children absorb from books (and other media) heavily influence their ideas about themselves and others. Depending on the quality of the book, they can reinforce (or undermine) children’s affirmative self-concept, teach accurate (or misleading) information about people of various identities, and foster positive (or negative) attitudes about diversity. Children’s books teach children about who is important, who matters, who is even visible. Consequently, carefully choosing quality children’s books is an indispensable educational and child-rearing task.

It is important to offer young children a range of books about people like them and their family—as well as about people who are different from them and their family. All of the books should be accurate and appealing to young children. Fortunately, there are some good anti-bias children’s books, which are available as a result of the ongoing activism of many individuals and groups over many years. However, while choices have improved over past decades, the lack of quality multicultural kid’s books currently being published has frustrated many communities. The number of children of color in the United States continues to rise, but the number of books published by or about people of color stays the same or even decreases.

District Comics: An Unconventional History of Washington, DC

Edited by Matt Dembicki

On November 1, 1950, Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, two Puerto Rican nationalists, attempted to assassinate President Truman. Their goal was to draw attention to the U.S. colonization of Puerto Rico and the repeated legal and military measures to deny Puerto Ricans self-determination. At the time, Truman was staying at Blair House while the White House underwent repairs. The two men converged on Blair House and, after a shootout that left Torresola and one policeman dead, Collazo was arrested and imprisoned. District Comics: An Unconventional History of Washington, DC tells a slice of this story in “Truman,” by Art Haupt, Rafer Roberts, and Wendi Strang-Frost. In their version, three journalists on their way to Blair House happen upon the gunfight. In its aftermath, the young photographer is pressed into service to record the crime scene while his coworkers interview the police lieutenant. Truman leaves for his next engagement, saying “[a] president has to expect these sorts of things,” and all assembled marvel at his sang-froid. “Truman” reveals some of District Comics’ major shortcomings. Like many other stories in the book, the line between fact and “creative liberties,” as editor Matt Dembicki puts it, is unclear. Were there actually journalists at the scene or were they inserted into the story as a framing device, along with their extensive dialogue? And if an effective framing device was needed, couldn’t the story have been better told from the perspective of Oscar Collazo, rather than the wooden, possibly fictional journalists and policemen who talk like soft parodies of 40’s gangsters? Whose DC history is being told, and why?

by Louise Derman-Sparks

By Amy Rothschild, early childhood educator and Teaching for Change volunteer 

Banned Book week provides us the chance to reflect on what is and what isn’t available for us to read at different moments in history and different places.  We think of Orwell, and we think of more recent events, like the banning of the Mexican American Studies program in Tucson, AZ.

Government censorship, of course, is just one element that determines what we can and cannot read. People often overlook another cultural phenomenon that can have a similar effect: publishing industry censorship. Each year there is a scarcity of excellent children’s picture books published. Missing are titles that reflect the realities of students’ lives and communities while encouraging children to think beyond the headlines.

By Amy Rothschild, pre-school teacher and Teaching for Change volunteer

I teach in a preschool program at a public school, and while my teaching team and I have ample freedom to follow the children’s interests in our planning, our school does place a high value on the teaching of nursery rhymes. Nursery rhymes are to early childhood curricula what Frost and Poe are to high school--we may come to love them, but we teach them first out of obligation to a “common cultural knowledge.” But what exactly is--or should become--common cultural knowledge for students from diverse linguistic, racial, and national backgrounds? At my school we stock books showing a wide range of families and realities, many from Teaching for Change’s selections. How hard could it be, I wondered, to find a little space on the shelf for nursery rhymes, considering they would be a part, and not the whole, of what we read and learn? Some nursery rhymes, like Ten Little Indians, reinforce negative stereotypes and roles and teachers should avoid them. Others are more mundane--folks baking pies, sitting on tuffets--hard to understand, but not unconscionable. I assumed that while nursery rhymes have an Anglo-Saxon origin, there is no reason that only white people can be depicted wishing upon a star. But practically every felt-board piece, website, puzzle, and book I found preserved the link of nursery rhymes to whiteness and Eurocentrism. White Little Bo Peep counting her white sheep, white Mary bringing her white lamb to her all-white school. Enter Nina Crews’ The Neighborhood Mother Goose. Crews spent three years choosing settings in her Brooklyn neighborhood to stage child-appropriate nursery rhymes, and the result is a phenomenally engaging book that I am proud to show my students. One four year-old African-American boy called out at the page for Hey Diddle Diddle: “Hey, that boy looks like me when I was a baby!” Such moments of seeing oneself reflected positively in the world are vital for children--they need to see themselves both as agents of change and in more everyday moments, like those that Crews presents. Of course, in addition to contemporary illustrations paired with Anglo-Saxon nursery rhymes, we need to offer our children chances to learn rhymes and poems from many languages and traditions. Teachers who talk about nursery rhymes extol their benefits for teaching children rhyme and awareness of the sounds in words, and for increasing their oral language-- overlooking that these are the benefits of short texts in general, not the exclusive rights of Jack Horner, “good boy” though he thinks he is. In that spirit, the list, and we welcome your suggestions. First, a note: The list presents a wide variety of songs and poems for young children. Too often, teachers fall into the trap of presenting the “normal” nursery rhymes and the “other” or alternative one. That framing is inaccurate and fails to take into account the growth and concurrent development of distinct literary traditions. Each of these works is a complete and self-sustaining reality. Recommended Booklist Hip Hop Speaks to Children: A Celebration of Poetry with a Beat [With CD] By Nikki Giovanni, Kristen Balouch, and Michele Noiset  The Neighborhood Mother Goose By Nina Crews The Neighborhood Sing-Along By Nina Crews Pio Peep!: Traditional Spanish Nursery Rhymes By Alma Flor Ada, Vivi Escriva, F. Isabel Campoy Tortillitas Para Mama: And Other Nursery Rhymes By Margot C. Griego, Barbara Cooney, Betsy L. Bucks Skip Across the Ocean: Nursery Rhymes from Around the World By Floella Benjamin, Sheila Moxley Diez Deditos and Other Play Rhymes and Action Songs from Latin America By Jose-Luis Orozco, Elisa Kleven Down by the River: Afro-Caribbean Rhymes, Games, and Songs for Children By Grace Hallworth, Caroline Binch

Cinthya Felix and Tam Tran were pioneers of the undocumented youth movement.

The seats, benches, and every space on the floor were filled with eager listeners for the book launch of Undocumented and Unafraid: Tam Tran, Cinthya Felix, and the Immigrant Youth Movement at Busboys and Poets, co-hosted by Teaching for Change, on Aug. 20, 2012. The event opened with a short film by Tam Tran about a young woman who found out that she was undocumented in her final years of high school. She likened the reality of being an undocumented youth to that of being a child forever -- unable to obtain a license, passport, bank account, and more. Roxana Olivias, director of the D.C. Mayor’s Office on Latino Affairs, introduced the speakers: Hareth Andrade, Sofia Campos, Mathias Ramos, and Cristina Jimenez. The four speakers represented the Immigrant Youth Movement, advocating for the 2.1 million undocumented youth in the U.S. today. Cristina Jimenez, managing director of United We Dream, described the process of transformation that occurs when undocumented youth share their stories. The impact includes moving from being labeled as “illegal” to being referred to as a “DREAMer” and transitioning from fear to being unafraid. As one participant noted, “The hearts and minds of people change when you share your story,” because it connects people to one another: it reveals that, “Like you, I have a family. Like you, I have dreams.” Panelist Matias Ramos explained that the book Undocumented and Unafraid was inspired by the sudden deaths of Tam Tran and Cinthya Felix, two pioneers in the undocumented youth movement. The book captures the importance of their struggles in immigration rights through photographs, poetry, art, narratives, and academic papers.

Event summary submitted by Shilpa R. Sharma, educator and Teaching for Change volunteer.

The event co-sponsors were: Immigrant Youth Movement, Teaching for Change, Busboys and Poets, Institute for Policy Studies, UCLA Labor Center, United We Dream, Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, and the United States Student Association. The book is a publication of the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education.

We commemorate Howard Zinn’s 90th birthday this week with an article by Bill Bigelow celebrating Zinn’s wisdom and underscoring the importance of teaching a people’s history, as the new school year begins and the election season heats up.

Bigelow writes, “This week—August 24—would have been the 90th birthday of the great historian and activist Howard Zinn, who died in 2010. Zinn did not merely record history, he made it: as a professor at Spelman College in the 1950s and early 1960s, where he was ultimately fired for his outspoken support of students in the Civil Rights Movement, and specifically the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); as a critic of the U.S. war in Vietnam, and author of the first book calling for an immediate U.S. withdrawal; and as author of arguably the most influential U.S. history textbook in print, A People’s History of the United States. ‘That book will knock you on your ass,’ as Matt Damon’s character says in the film Good Will Hunting.

“It’s always worth dipping into the vast archive of Zinn scholarship, but at the beginning of a school year, and as the presidential campaign heats up, now is an especially good time to remember some of Howard Zinn’s wisdom.

“Shortly after Barack Obama’s election, the Zinn Education Project sponsored a talk by Zinn to several hundred teachers at the National Council for the Social Studies annual conference in Houston. Zinn reminded teachers that the point of learning about social studies was not simply to memorize facts, it was to imbue students with a desire to change the world. ‘A modest little aim,’ Zinn acknowledged, with a twinkle in his eye.” Continue reading.

Read full article on Huffington Post.      Read full article on Common Dreams.