As the school librarian for two elementary schools serving a total of 800+ students, I wanted to focus my efforts on creating a more diverse, inclusive reading atmosphere through collection development. In light of today's social, racial, and cultural relations in our country, representing all students in literature and informational text is something that is very important to me. I once read somewhere something to the effect that students want to read about people like themselves. In 2018, the Cooperative Children's Book Center, School of Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison released information they compiled in regards to representation of characters in children's literature. In that infographic you can see that 50% of books depict white characters, 27% feature animals, and the remaining 23% percent represents minority characters. I found that shocking considering the times we live in.
Over the last two years I concentrated on adding strong, female characters and informational texts about women who "broke the mold" to my collections. As a woman and mom of three girls, I definitely saw a lack of representation in that area. Now that I have (and continue to) address that need, it't time to shift my focus on ensuring the collection represents all of my students.
Creating Google alerts didn't proved beneficial in this first week. Alerts focusing on diverse characters in children's books, diverse children's literature, and ESL blogging yielded just 9 results. While an important topic, it's not really a newsworthy topic. So I am not surprised I didn't get a whole lot of new information. So I turned to my Facebook librarian groups to see what they were talking about. As much as I love browsing Pinterest and the internet for teaching ideas, connecting with like-minded professionals through social media has created for me a well-rounded cohort of librarians from all over the world. In one such post I was reminded of Capstone's Reading is for Everyone campaign. (https://www.capstonepub.com/sites/reading_is_for_everyone/about.html)
I first began working with a Capstone rep in the summer of 2019 and after spending some more time on their Reading is for Everyone site, I can't wait to order some more books from them. Over the last year I added some great characters like Buzz Beaker, Molly Mac, Yasmin, and Pedro to our collection, representing the African/African-American, Asian, Muslim, and Latino races. I decided to investigate some more of their characters and am exciting to explore them with my reps in the coming weeks as I prepare my orders for this year!
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