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Welcome to Hamilton Southeastern Schools

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Ball State University

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Rethinking Literature - Children's and Young Adult

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Hear and learn from Coretta Scott King illustrator award winner and Indiana native, Michele Wood, and learn more about her award winning book, "Like a Bird: The Art of the American Slave Song." View featured book trailers from a variety of leading children's & YA authors including Jaqueline Woodson, Sharon Flake, Nikki Giovanni, Jason Reynolds, Rita Williams-Garcia, Debra Wiles, Walter Dean Myers, and Eve Bunting.

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NoveList: Discover Books Based on Culture or Place

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NoveList: Discover Books Based on Culture or Place

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NoveList: Discover Books Based on Culture or Place

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There are several ways to find books by a specific culture or location in NoveList. Use our Advanced Search and limiters to find exactly what you are looking for.

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Build Literacy-Based, Anti-Bias Learning Plans.

Teaching Tolerance’s Perspectives for a Diverse America is a literacy-based curriculum that marries anti-bias social justice content with the rigor of the Common Core State Standards.

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ability to access audio and video on your device;

pen and paper;

your lesson book for reference throughout;

and about one hour.

Learn
Culture refers to a wide range of identity and community characteristics. Culturally responsive pedagogy engages identities and identity issues across all groups and communities: gender, ability/disability, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, language and nationality.

Culturally responsive classroom culture exists when classrooms are safe spaces where students are seen, valued, cared for and respected as their full selves.

In looking more directly at classroom culture, we must keep in mind that culturally responsive pedagogy:

allows all students to be their full selves.

asks teachers to lead by example in matters of respect and inclusivity.

encourages both students and teachers to speak up against bias, bullying and exclusion.

encourages deep exploration of complex and challenging issues.

ensures that everyone's voices and participation are valued.

recommends teachers and students both participate actively in teaching and learning.

values respect, diversity and equity.

In this professional development, learners will:

Identify thoughtful classroom setup and structure that honor student experience

Establish norms for shared inquiry and dialogue

Establish how to create social-emotional learning safety in the classroom

Analyze behavior management practice to ensure value-based components

Learn More:
Think about a classroom that makes you feel safe.

List five to 10 characteristics of that classroom.

Think about a classroom that makes you feel unsafe.

List five to 10 characteristics of that classroom.

Working in a cohort? Share your lists with a partner.
Honoring Student Experience:
Let's begin by looking specifically at honoring student experience. A culture that honors student experience includes the following:

A sense of openness and cultural humility

An asset-based view of youth, groups or experiences that may be unfamiliar

A commitment to avoiding and challenging stereotypes

A willingness to let students define their own identities

One way of honoring student experience is to have students share their own stories and experiences.

Teacher Amber Makaiau facilitates a discussion with her students about "being local." How does the activity in the video honor student experience? Which of the four elements of this practice (listed above) are demonstrated in the classroom exercise?
Go Deeper:
Another way to make room for students to talk about their experiences is to talk about yours. There is great power in the authentic, thoughtful sharing of personal anecdotes by teachers. Choose stories carefully, keep them relatively brief and communicate them at a level that invites appropriate student sharing.

Imagine you are teaching a lesson on gender messages using " Jerrie Mock" by Tamera Bryant from the Perspectives text library. To help illustrate the lesson, share with your students a time when you were personally impacted (positively or negatively) by society's ideas about gender.
Apply:
Think about a time you were personally impacted (positively or negatively) by society's ideas about gender. Write down as many key details as you remember. Look at your upcoming lesson plans, and determine when you can incorporate telling this story to your students. Write one to two questions that encourage students to share stories related to the same theme.
Classroom Setup and Structure:
The next segment looks at classroom setup and structure.

Keep your students and the following consideration points in mind when arranging your classroom:

Inclusions of multicultural images

Arrangement of furniture and supplies that supports collaboration, fosters dialogue and encourages student ownership and comfort

Learn:
One way to increase consciousness of your classroom surroundings is taking an inventory of how the room is decorated.

Watch Amber's video a second time; focus on the images displayed throughout the classroom. Consider race, ethnicity, language, nationality, gender, ability/disability, religion, family structure, age and environment/surroundings as you watch.
Apply:
Using the inventory sheet, do a physical or mental scan of your classroom and school building.

Look for images representing race, ethnicity, language, nationality, gender, ability/disability, religion, family structure, age and environment/surroundings. Are images displayed inclusive of multiple groups in each category? How does your classroom compare to the school environment? Which groups are underrepresented? Which groups are overrepresented? What can be done to include more groups?
Shared Inquiry and Dialogue:
The next piece will look specifically at shared inquiry and dialogue. A classroom that bases itself on shared inquiry and dialogue has five main components:

1. Listening: deeply listening to what others say and to the feelings, experiences and wisdom behind what they say

2. Respect: trusting the integrity of others, believing they have the right to their own opinions (even when different from your own), and valuing them enough to risk sharing your own ideas

3. Humility: recognizing that our own ideas and opinions are only a part of the story and that other people may have access to pieces of the puzzle that we don't know about

4. Voice: speaking the truth as we see it and asking questions about things we don't know or understand-particularly on topics related to identity, difference, power and justice

5. Trust: building a safe environment to try on new ideas and work through the conflicts, controversy and "ouch moments" that often arise in talking about difficult topics
Learn:
Diving further into your analysis of shared inquiry and dialogue by looking at participation norms within a classroom. For example: How do we communicate with one another? How well do we listen to each other? While watching this video, list in the right column examples of how the teacher includes the five components above.
Apply:
Think about inquiry and dialogue in your classroom. Take a minute to review the five components of shared inquiry and dialogue.

With each component in mind, brainstorm ways to encourage participation from your students. In the right column, list at least one option for each component.
Social and Emotional Safety:
The next segment of this professional development looks specifically at social and emotional safety within a classroom environment. There are multiple ways to create a safe environment:

Teach social-emotional skills

Actively create positive relationships

Practice bullying prevention and intervention

Build community

Focus on understanding and appreciating differences

Engage in meaningful conflict resolution

Teach students to challenge bias and exclusion and to stand up for each other as allies

Research shows that students need to feel both physically and emotionally safe to learn; safety includes being free from the threat of stereotypes, harassment and exclusion. Safety is especially important when learning about issues of identity, power and justice. Many of these issues touch students at a personal level and leave them feeling simultaneously vulnerable and passionately invested. Creating a safe climate takes time and work on the part of both teachers and students.
Learn:
A safe classroom culture (one that incorporates social and emotional standards) requires that teachers engage the "whole child." While you watch this conversation with Teaching Tolerance Award for Excellence recipient Amber Makaiau, look for ways Makaiau addresses social and emotional well-being in addition to academic growth.
Go Deeper:
When reflecting on the importance of looking at the "whole child," the 2013 CASEL Guide, Effective Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) Programs, is a great place to start.

There are many powerful programs and strategies available to support teachers in building social-emotional skills, addressing bullying and harassment, managing conflict and building community. Here are a few suggested approaches:
Apply:
Attending to social-emotional learning and school climate helps create the conditions for productive conversation, nurtures relationships across lines of difference and models inclusiveness of all people.

Let's review some of the most important components of social and emotional safety:

Active teaching of social-emotional skills

Attention to creating positive relationships

Bullying prevention and intervention

Community building

Explicit focus on understanding and appreciating differences

Meaningful conflict resolution

Teaching students to challenge bias and exclusion and to stand up for each other as allies

How will you incorporate these components into your classroom routines?

Choose one area to focus on and plan for how to integrate it into your teaching and classroom management.

Working in a cohort? Share your plan with a partner.
Values-based Behavior Management:
We now look at values-based behavior management.

This critical practice asks you to consider five key principles of behavior management that support and model the values of anti-bias education:

1. Belief in the dignity of every person

2. Community building

3. Equity and fairness

4. Respect for cultural differences

5. Respect for the safety and inclusion of all individuals and groups

There are many ways to infuse these values into disciplinary practices. All teachers need to build on their own personal styles to design appropriate classroom management systems. Generally, however, there are three primary aspects of this work:

1. All classes must commit to creating a safe, inclusive community where all students and teachers are respected.

2. Disciplinary incidents must be treated as opportunities for growth, restitution and community building (not just "punishment").

3. Behavior management practices must address issues of fairness, equity and cultural awareness.

Learn:
Taking a values-based approach to behavior management and discipline supports the community-building goals embedded in culturally responsive teaching. It also provides students with exposure to a system of justice that values all people and seeks to build connections rather than divisions.

There are several strategies available to teachers to ensure values-based behavior management:

Student-generated agreements and contracts establish shared ownership of classroom norms.

Zero indifference (not zero tolerance) means never letting disrespectful conduct go by as though nothing has happened, but does not require automatic suspension, expulsion or other punishments that take kids out of class.

Restorative justice emphasizes building community, repairing harm and restoring relationships rather than simply punishing those who have engaged in misconduct.

Go Deeper:
Culturally responsive teachers shift their behaviors to maintain a values-based approach to classroom management and reduce student push-out. As outlined in A Teacher's Guide to Rerouting the Pipeline, daily classroom management decisions can help divert students from punitive discipline and establish values-based discipline instead.

Classroom teachers can:

1. Adopt a social-emotional lens.

2. Know their students and develop their own cultural competence.

3. Plan and deliver effective student-centered instruction.

4. Move the paradigm from punishment to development.

5. Resist the criminalization of school behavior.

Apply:
Consider what current disciplinary measures you use. How could you implement the use of one of the aforementioned strategies: student-generated agreements, zero indifference, restorative justice and values-based classroom management shifts?

List challenges you might face in using one of the strategies. Identify supportive allies in your building.

Working with a cohort? Share your ideas with the group.
Reflect:
At the start of this professional development module, we identified our objectives.

Let's return to the objectives now:

Identify thoughtful classroom setup and structure that honor student experience

Establish norms for shared inquiry and dialogue

Establish how to create social-emotional learning safety in the classroom

Analyze behavior management practice to ensure value-based components

Take a minute to remind yourself of key ideas from each objective.

Working in a cohort? Share key ideas with the group.

Let's review the critical practices for classroom culture introduced here:

Honoring student experience

Thoughtful classroom setup and structure

Shared inquiry and dialogue

Social and emotional safety

Values-based behavior management

Take a minute to remind yourself of key features of each practice.

Include an action item that you can/will use in your classroom to implement the practice.

Working in a cohort? Fill in the table with a colleague.

Lastly, let's expand on your action plan.

What can you change tomorrow to make your teaching and your classroom culture more culturally responsive? Keep in mind that this change should be something that takes very little (or no) money or outside resources.

What steps will you take to make this change?

To help you plan, finish this sentence, "To honor my students' cultural backgrounds within my classroom culture, I will..."

Identify an ally with whom you can share your plan and who can periodically check in to support your work in this area. Do the same for your ally; be each other's cheerleaders and advocates.

For continued reflection purposes, consider starting a journal where you can jot down thoughts and ideas as you implement Critical Practices for Anti-bias Education. Remember that this work is not in addition to what you already do; rather, it should frame what you currently do so that you can be more inclusive in your work with students.

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Critical Practices for Anti-bias Education: Classroom Culture

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ability to access audio and video on your device; pen and paper; your lesson book for reference throughout; and about one hour. Learn Culture refers to a wide range of identity and community characteristics. Culturally responsive pedagogy engages identities and identity issues across all groups and communities: gender, ability/disability, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, language and nationality.

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The numbers you put to work every year are here-the list of average book prices for 2015 and 2016 to date, produced in partnership with Baker & Taylor. We know this data helps you make sound decisions.

The data, based on figures supplied by Baker & Taylor, shows average list prices for all books (including children's books, young adult books, paperbacks and hardcover editions) that have been sold (not published) during the time frames listed. Separate calculations have been supplied for the school market and the public library market. Averages are calculated by total number of all book sales divided by the number of books sold.

Look for the next iteration in Spring of 2017.

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The numbers you put to work every year are here-the list of average book prices for 2015 and 2016 to date, produced in partnership with Baker & Taylor. We know this data helps you make sound decisions.

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Authentic literature has the power to excite students and foster a love of engaged reading, but it's often challenging for busy teachers to find time to integrate real books into an already jam-packed schedule of daily lessons. H ow can you harness the power of a and get students reading more throughout the day-especially when you're dealing with students of different ages and abilities?

Prioritize balanced literacy in the new year ahead with these 10 ways to incorporate books and reading into many different aspects of elementary, middle AND high school classrooms. (Keep reading to the end to enter our giveaway of popular titles for readers of all ages. What a great way to grow your classroom library!)

When you think of a read aloud, what comes to mind? Often, it's a high quality picture book like by Eric Carle or by Brendan Wenzel. Titles like these allow teachers to model fluency and demonstrate reading practices and skills to pre- and early readers. Plus, it can be just plain fun to share a story like R. L. Stine's with a class of young students who can't yet read it for themselves.

But read alouds have a lot to offer middle and high school students too. They can be especially beneficial to English Language Learners (ELL) at all grade levels, helping them to learn vocabulary, inflection and more. And excerpts from both poetry and novels-where complex language and themes sometimes make comprehension more challenging-lend themselves to read alouds in even upper level courses.

2. Guided Reading Groups

To fully understand the practice of guided reading and how to match your guided reading groups with titles at the right level , check out the work of . Guided reading groups can be used at any grade level, and allow for close teacher observations and assessments. More importantly, they can foster confidence, proficiency and a love of reading among students.

During Reading Workshop, teachers use real books to model and illustrate comprehension strategies and skills to the whole class. If you have a solid collection of authentic literature, it's easy to connect the texts to six strategies: Connecting, Inferring, Predicting, Questioning, Summarizing and Visualizing/Imaging.

Let's say you want to work on by Paul Fleishman and Predicting with your 2 nd grade class. When you have a Comprehension Strategies Collection that includes titles like The Princess and the Pony by Kate Beaton, you have stories already on hand to help teach students how to use clues from the text to think ahead and predict what might happen next.

setting aside structured silent reading time each day

asking students to read at home each night

building classroom libraries filled with fiction and nonfiction titles in a wide variety of genres and interests

Authentic literature is ideal for independent reading at any level because students get to choose any book that interests them. And when students have a voice in their own reading process, they read more-becoming better, more engaged readers in the process.

5. Mentor Texts for Writing Workshop

When teachers use authentic literature to teach about different writing formats, these books are called mentor texts . (The books you use in Reading Workshop to model comprehension strategies are mentor texts too.)

Want to work on memoir writing during a with your 6 th grade class? You might start with a mini lesson featuring Lois Lowry's memoir . Show students which traits and characteristics make this a good example of a memoir, and then have them work independently on their own piece of memoir writing. Conference with students along the way, and allow for share time once the writing is completed.

6. Literature Circles and Book Clubs

7. Author and Genre Studies

When students read authentic literature, there's so much more to explore than just the words and pictures within the pages. Both author and genre studies allow you to group several titles together, giving students the opportunity to make connections between the texts and compare and contrast characters, themes, settings and more.

Fourth grade teacher Jennifer Pastore believes that the best author studies allow students to become better readers and writers by learning from an author's body of work. Author studies let students see how authors get their ideas and see a variety of writing styles, which in turn helps them as writers.

Genre studies, on the other hand, introduce students to a variety of books they might not otherwise choose. You can open your students' minds and expand their reading choices with genre studies in categories like , , , Native American Legends and more.

8. Reading Intervention

All students need books they can read and enjoy. Young gifted readers need books at a high reading level, but with content appropriate for younger kids. Older students who struggle need lower level books that feature more mature themes-and don't appear to be below-level. For example, it's easy to pull in reluctant readers who love sports with Sports Illustrated Kids , a collection of graphic novels featuring full-color, full-action and full-throttle sports stories.

It makes sense to use authentic literature to teach reading skills and comprehension strategies, but don't forget that nonfiction books can be used in place of-or in addition to-textbooks to teach content areas like science, social studies and even math.

In an upper elementary or middle school classroom, for example, a nonfiction book like allows students to understand the Civil Rights Movement by exploring one of its real-life legends. Books like this one are often less intimidating than textbooks, and can help students make more meaningful connections, since the facts are woven within a fascinating story. And because this book is written in verse, teachers have an opportunity to teach history and poetry at the same time.

Students today are inundated with information from the digital world, but online information isn't always accurate. Because of this, it's important for students to work on their inquiry skills. They must be able to validate texts and compare and contrast different information through different modalities and by different authors.

When older students read a book like , there are many different ways they can build background knowledge and better understand the truth about the Taliban through projects beyond the text. Implement standards 7-9 by asking students to further research Malala's true story and analyze web content like The Daily Show Video: Malala Yousafzai Extended Interview . Keep in mind that projects like this one aren't limited to high school students. With books at the right level, elementary and middle school readers can develop their inquiry skills in the same manner.

There's always room to grow and expand your classroom library collection of books to engage students as readers, so we're hosting a giveaway featuring some of our favorite titles for elementary, middle AND high school readers. Enter below for your chance to win!

This giveaway is now closed. Congratulations to the winners!

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10 Ways to Use Authentic Literature in Elementary, Middle AND High School Classrooms

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Authentic literature has the power to excite students and foster a love of engaged reading, but it's often challenging for busy teachers to find time to integrate real books into an already jam-packed schedule of daily lessons. How can you harness the power of a

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Teaching Tolerance's Perspectives for a Diverse America is a literacy-based curriculum that marries anti-bias content with the rigor of the Common Core. http://perspectives.tolerance.org

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By Emily Style

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First published in Listening for All Voices, Oak Knoll School monograph, Summit, NJ, 1988.

Consider how the curriculum functions, insisting with its disciplined structure that there are ways (plural) of seeing. Basic to a liberal arts education is the understanding that there is more than one way to see the world; hence, a balanced program insists that the student enter into the patterning of various disciplines, looking at reality through various "window" frames.

Years ago a Peanuts cartoon illustrated this vividly for me. Schultz's dog Snoopy was pictured sitting at his typewriter, writing the cultural truth "Beauty is only skin deep." When the dog looked in the mirror however, it made more sense (to the dog) to write "Beauty is only fur-deep."

In the following day's comic strip, the bird Woodstock had apparently made a protest; Snoopy responded by shifting the definition to "feather-deep." Woodstock, too, had looked in the mirror and insisted on naming truth in a way that made the most sense to him.

Perhaps the only truth that remains, after such an exchange, is that "Beauty is," still no small truth to expound upon.
Downloadable PDF
For me, the beauty of the classroom gathering lies in its possibilities for seeing new varieties of Beauty. This multiplicity, in turn, enables both students and teachers to be engaged in conversation about an evolving definition of the beautiful. Such dialogue requires the practice of both/and thinking as participants acknowledge the varied experiences of reality which frame individual human perspective.

In considering how the curriculum functions, it is essential to note the connection between eyesight and insight. As the Peanuts cartoon illustrates, no student acquires knowledge in the abstract; learning is always personal. Furthermore, learning never takes place in a vacuum; it is always contextual.

This brief paper will explore the need for curriculum to function both as window and as mirror, in order to reflect and reveal most accurately both a multicultural world and the student herself or himself. If the student is understood as occupying a dwelling of self, education needs to enable the student to look through window frames in order to see the realities of others and into mirrors in order to see her/his own reality reflected. Knowledge of both types of framing is basic to a balanced education which is committed to affirming the essential dialectic between the self and the world. In other words, education engages us in "the great conversation" between various frames of reference.

Theologian Nelle Morton, who taught for years at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, has made a significant contribution to balancing the Western educational emphasis on the importance of the Word, the logos of communication. She suggests that the opening lines to the gospel of John, "In the beginning was the Word," are often understood as the whole truth - when, in fact, they probably more accurately render only half the picture. She illustrates the other half of the dialectic when she insists, "In the beginning is the Hearing."

At this point, I would link hearing and seeing to emphasize a further aspect of shared framing. The delightful truth is that sometimes when we hear another out, glancing through the window of their humanity, we can see our own image reflected in the glass of their window. The window becomes a mirror! And it is the shared humanity of our conversation that most impresses us even as we attend to our different frames of reference.

In her commitment to inclusive seeing, Eudora Welty wrote,

The frame through which I viewed the world changed too, with time. Greater than scene, I came to see, is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being who will never be confined in any frame.

In acknowledging the fluidity of framing, however, it is essential that dialogue about differences not get lost. Sidney Jourard, in his commitment to education as dialogue, once put it this way:

Another person's words are the windows to his or her world, through which I see what it is like to be that person. When another speaks to me in truth, he or she becomes a transparent self, and releases in me an imaginative experience of his or her existence. If he or she cannot speak, if I do not listen, or if I cannot understand then we must remain suspicious strangers to one another, uncognizant of our authentic similarities and differences.

Jourard's statement makes obvious that another person's words will not function as window - if no one hears them or if, for some reason, the words are not even voiced - which is exactly the case in the following narrative poem by New Jersey poet Lew Gardner.

My mother's uncle had a horse.
The best time of a deadly relatives' Sunday
was to walk with him to the stable
and watch him feed the quiet animal,
to give it sugar from my own hand
and jump back away
from the big warm tongue,
to smell the hay and manure, to see
the white horse in the next stall,
with tail and mane like yellow silk.

If my mother and I ran into him
as he and the horse were making their rounds,
buying up the wonderful junk
they heaped and hauled in the wagon,
he'd lift me up to the seat
and let me hold the reins and yell "Giddy-up!"

In the spring of 4th grade,
one afternoon of silent division
we heard a clanking and looked outside.

My great-uncle! I could tell them all
how I had held those reins!
But everyone laughed at the hunched old man,
the obsolete wagon and horse,
the silly, clattering junk.
I did not tell them.
(Copyright © 1973, used with permission.)

While everyone in that fourth grade classroom looks out the same window, they do not all see the same old man. For all but one, their knowledge is "detached" and "objective." And all but one of them suffer (unaware) from the limitation of their detachment. The poem's narrator, on the other hand, is aware of his suffering as he acquires another view of the old man to whom he is intimately connected. Prior to the classroom window experience, the narrator's view had been purely provincial. Now he is forcefully educated during "one afternoon of silent division" to see more than he has before. He sees his great-uncle reduced to being a mere "Other" in the eyes of the others.

But there are more observations to be gleaned from this poetic incident. The child's (understandable) silence means that the others in the classroom remain trapped in their limited, "objective" view of the old man. His otherness, his alien nature, is all they can see. This is a particular shame in the light of the insight of the painter Van Gogh who once asked in a letter to his sister-in-law,

Could it not be that by loving a thing
one sees it better and more truly
than by not loving it?

Recent scholarship (including Howard Gardner's Frames of Mind, Edward De Bono's Six Thinking Hats, and Belenky et al's Women's Ways of Knowing) distinguishes various kinds of knowing. Credit is due to Harvard scholar Carol Gilligan who pioneered attention to the gendered dimension of different ways of seeing in her 1982 book In a Different Voice.

Scholar Peter Elbow has also done important work in naming how the dominance of the "doubting game" in the Western educational tradition obscures the equal, but different, benefits of an empathic approach to something or someone which is seen initially as Other, alien to one's own experience and frame of reference.

In Women's Ways of Knowing and other feminist scholarship, the terms "connected-knowing" and "detached-knowing" are used to clarify the differences between kinds of knowing which have frequently been aligned with traditional gender socialization. Females have been taught the importance of feeling with another in the "care perspective," while males have been taught the importance of thinking critically (against) another in order to protect their own "right(s)" perspective.

Recent scholarship not only increasingly delineates between kinds of knowing, however. It also returns again and again to the basic need for the whole spectrum of thinking/feeling competencies to be taught to all students, regardless of gender and other cultural variables.

To return to the central metaphor of this paper, the need for curriculum to function both as window and as mirror, we need to acknowledge that this perspective is in line with the ancient liberal arts tradition which pursues multiple perspectives (in insisting on a variety of disciplinary paradigms). Intrinsic to this classical perspective is the actuality and validity of differences.

Traditionally, American education has been more comfortable focusing on similarities. Despite our democratic rhetoric, differences have made us uncomfortable. In fact, there are still American educators who pride themselves on being "color-blind," thinking that ignoring "accidental" differences of race or gender or region or class creates the best classroom climate. Promoting such partial seeing is highly problematic for the creation of curriculum which will serve all students adequately.

Perhaps noting the wording of the traditional Golden Rule will clarify the importance of building both windows and mirrors into the educational process. To "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" takes one's own sensibilities and projects them through the window onto the other. Granted, at times when similarities abound, this Rule can lead to ethical decision-making of the highest order. Its strength comes from the knowledge of one's own humanity which we can liken to studying oneself closely in a mirror.

I would suggest, however, that there are times when to "do unto others as they would have you do unto them" is the more appropriate ethical guideline, one which frames a window into the humanity of another whose preference might be very different from one's own. One who is blind to the existence of such difference might, for instance, purchase a gift for another which she herself would like but which, in fact, is highly inappropriate, unwanted, or even resented by the recipient of the gift.

Now, the common sense of needing to provide both windows and mirrors in the curriculum may seem unnecessary to emphasize, and yet recent scholarship on women and men of color attests abundantly to the copious blind spots of the traditional curriculum. White males find, in the house of curriculum, many mirrors to look in, and few windows which frame others' lives. Women and men of color, on the other hand, find almost no mirrors of themselves in the house of curriculum; for them it is often all windows. White males are thereby encouraged to be solipsistic, and the rest of us to feel uncertain that we truly exist. In Western education, the gendered perspective of the white male has presented itself as "universal" for so long that the limitations of this curriculum are often still invisible.

Linda Nochlin asked, in a 1972 essay, this question, "Why have there been no great woman artists?" Think about how the understanding of women's quilts as art has evolved in the last twenty years. Imagine the neglect of a curriculum which teaches a female student to look always through the window at the art done by others while ignoring the art of the quilt made by her own grandmother which is reflected in the mirror of her very own bedroom.

By now it should be obvious that some of the "missing" great women artists were making quilts. But, if what is close to home and reflected in your own mirror is excluded from the very definition of art, your gaze will only see "the windowed half" of art history. Such an education will be unbalanced, incomplete and inaccurate - though pretending to be otherwise.

Consider another example. In the summer of 1987, Sports Illustrated magazine published a photo essay in a special baseball issue which illustrated poet Donald Hall's definition of the sport. In Hall's words, "Baseball is fathers and sons playing catch," and in twelve pages of father-son photos, the magazine pictured this relational (connected-knowing) definition of the sport by featuring some of the faces of the sixty-seven sons (and one grandson) of former major leaguers currently playing organized baseball in the United States.

Then, abruptly, but without any fanfare, the final page of the photo essay switched to the heading Mother & Son. The following words accompanied the essay's last two photos:

The All-American Girls Baseball League was big in the '40s and one of its stars was 5'1" Helen Callaghan. One of Helen's five kids, Casey, grew up to be the Montreal Expos' 5'9" second baseman. If someone tells Casey he throws like a girl, he won't mind.

Unless one's life experience is other-wise, one might never notice that Hall's poetic definition of the sport of baseball excludes half the population from participation by rendering them invisible at the basic definitional level. In other words, girls cannot see themselves mirrored in the line "Baseball is fathers and sons playing catch." It is only a window for them, to others' lives. Even the altered caption of Mother & Son still excludes girls' experience as daughters, sidelining the female-female connection central to their development.

The challenge of integrating women and minority studies into the traditional school curriculum comes at this very basic level. More than half of our culture's population (all girls, and boys from minority groups) are trained and expected to look through windows at others who are viewed as the valid participants in a sport; an exclusionary curriculum, often perpetuated by the unaware, holds no mirrors for the majority of the students. Females are taught their "proper role" as spectators on life's playing field. But that is only half the damage.

At the same time those whose (white male) experience is repeatedly mirrored are narrowly and provincially educated to see themselves (and their own kind) as the only real players on life's stage. Like the disadvantaged fourth-graders who see the old man only as Other, they miss half of what a balanced education should be for all of us:

knowledge of both self and others,

clarification of the known and illumination of the unknown.

All students deserve a curriculum which mirrors their own experience back to them, upon occasion - thus validating it in the public world of the school. But curriculum must also insist upon the fresh air of windows into the experience of others - who also need and deserve the public validation of the school curriculum.

Differences as well as similarities exist. The mathematician and the linguist see the world in different ways. One is not superior to the other; a balanced education encompasses both.

Differences exist. They never melted down into "the melting pot" and, now, in a nuclear age we have no choice but to educate youngsters (and ourselves) to handle them more realistically so as to avoid, at all costs, a foolish nuclear melt-down of all of us. One "sandlot" of encounters with difference is located in classroom curriculum and dynamics. Imagine how students' sense of historical perspective (on sandlot encounters) would shift if the academic subject of history were taught using the definition suggested by South African playwright Athol Fugard at the Georgetown University commencement in June 1984:

I am talking about the living of life at the most mundane level, and what I am saying is that at that level - at the level of our daily lives - one man or woman meeting with another man or woman is finally the central arena of history.

Of course, students' educational diet is not balanced if they see themselves in the mirror all the time. Likewise, democracy's school curriculum is unbalanced if a black student sits in school, year after year, forced to look through the window upon the (validated) experiences of white others while seldom, if ever, having the central mirror held up to the particularities of her or his own experience. Such racial imbalance is harmful as well to white students whose seeing of humanity's different realities is also profoundly obscured.

Such inaccuracy and imbalance diminish the education of all our children. Some students, like the narrator in Gardner's poem, remain subordinated and silent, though their vision is actually wider, while others strut their stuff on the life stage insensitive to other points of view. All of us lose when education is framed this way.

It is limiting and inaccurate to only educate our children provincially when they must live their lives in a global context, facing vast differences and awesome similarities. They must learn early and often about the valid framing of both windows and mirrors for a balanced, ecological sense of their place(s) in the world.

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First published in Listening for All Voices, Oak Knoll School monograph, Summit, NJ, 1988. Consider how the curriculum functions, insisting with its disciplined structure that there are ways (plural) of seeing.

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Power Wealth Affirmations & Financial Freedom Video

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Summer Library Program Multimedia Resources

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4-Minute Overview Video of TeachingBooks.net

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In this brief fall 2015 video, learn how TeachingBooks.net's library of instructional materials can engage readers and deepen thoughts about children's and young adult books. Specifically learn how these resources can be aligned to the titles you're reading; how to share resources with each reader; and how to use this service to support literacy implementation goals.

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As you infuse diverse, inclusive, and culturally relevant materials into fiction and nonfiction reading experiences, this toolkit helps analyze collections, identify and bring to life diverse texts, and encourage reflection on cultural representation. see more

As you infuse diverse, inclusive, and culturally relevant materials into fiction and nonfiction reading experiences, this toolkit helps analyze collections, identify and bring to life diverse texts, and encourage reflection on cultural representation.

Identify exceptional diverse books for all children and teens

Bring culture and race to the forefront of literary conversations with culturally relevant, primary source materials

Facilitate conversations about children's and young adult books by learning the inspiration of these books, directly from the author or illustrator

Analyze and generate reports that examine the genre and cultural inclusion of books in your custom lists and collections

Facilitate student reflection on the cultural representation of the characters, setting, and events in the diverse books each student reads

For historical context, see data on children's and young adult books by and about Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) published since 1985, compiled by the Cooperative Children's Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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As you infuse diverse, inclusive, and culturally relevant materials into fiction and nonfiction reading experiences, this toolkit helps analyze collections, identify and bring to life diverse texts, and encourage reflection on cultural representation.

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Reading recommendations for library people.