Diversity Through Children's Multicultural Literature

The article Experiencing Diversity through Children’s Multicultural Literature by Kathryn L. Davis, Bernice G. Brown, Ann Liedel-Rice, and Pamela Soeder, discusses how teacher candidates today are mostly European-American and monolingual with little to no experience with diversity or perceive diversity in a negative way. This lack of experience and understanding could lead to problems in the classroom because teachers will have kids from all types of backgrounds and cultures. To become successful teachers the candidates need experience with the different types of diversity and this can be easily obtained through multicultural literature. Multicultural literature can help build background knowledge for important issues like: racism, poverty, …show more content…
The books listed by the article ae to help the candidates understand what students and their families go through if they are poor and for the candidates to eliminate any stereotypes they have associated with poverty. Bud Not Buddy explores the life of a little boy who runs away from a foster home in search for his father. This book can help a teacher candidate understand how a student feels when he/she might not have a place to sleep or food to …show more content…
It’s important for teachers to understand and acknowledge different religions and books can help the teachers learn more about different religions. Magid Fasts for Ramadan is about a Muslim boy who wants to participate in Ramadan and he learns how difficult it is to go without food. This gives insight to one type of religion that might not be known to the teaching canidates. With the help of multi culture literature teaching candidates can have a better understanding of the different cultures and backgrounds of their students. This is necessary to help them feel included, give them a positive educational experience and to better understand how they learn. Reading literature is very important because it helps the child feel included, which is important to help them learn. I was interning in a class where a child was Hispanic and celebrated Day of the Dead instead of Halloween. The teacher, just like on Halloween, gave a whole day to Day of The Dead: read books, did activities, ate snacks, and celebrated the day. This made a difference to the student because it was important to the child to know her heritage is important and cared about. One important aspect the article didn’t touch on is helping the students learn about different cultures through books. This can be very beneficial to the kids, even if no one in the class is in poverty, it can still benefit the kids to learn about it. During an observation