The Importance of Multicultural Literature
Multicultural literature offers teachers and students many opportunities to gain a broader understanding about the world, but it also presents challenges, says the journal article “Heightening Awareness about the Importance of Using Multicultural Literature.” The challenge, it says, is not only obtaining high quality multicultural texts, but the greater challenge may be creating an awareness among teachers of the important role multicultural literature plays in the lives of children.
The research article “Multicultural Literature: The Impact it has on Today’s Students” states that multicultural literature is a tool that educators must embrace to allow their students the opportunity to enrich their knowledge, tolerance, and understanding of others cultures and differences. It also says that classrooms that embrace critical literacy by including multicultural literature promote issues of social justice while encouraging acceptance and tolerance of diversity. For instance, a critical literacy instructional approach “allows both students and teaches to read a text as a record told from one perspective that can be examined from other perspectives,” the article states.
The importance of multicultural literature is even more important with younger children because they receive the majority of their messages through pictures, states another journal article “Heightening Awareness about the Importance of Using Multicultural Literature.” This article makes some excellent points when it asks the questions “if children of color never see themselves in literature, will they feel devalued?” And “if the majority’s culture children never see children of color in literature, will they not develop negative attitudes about children who do not look like them?”
The article continues by saying when students realize the effects of seeing only white people portrayed in books, they begin to empathize with children from unrepresented cultures in children’s literature. The lack of awareness that there is a certain privilege that skin color grants continues to be a problem with both adults and children alike, it adds. Other benefits of multicultural development include a development of vocabulary, stimulating imagination, facilitating empathy, increased knowledge of one’s own heritage, and fostering positive self-concepts and identity.
Lectura Books, a national education book publisher, is the go-to source for Spanish and English bilingual books for Latino English language learners (ELLs) in the country. From working with thousands of children and their parents through award-winning literacy programs offered by The Latino Family Literacy Project, Lectura Books recognizes the big difference multicultural literature makes in shaping the lives and giving confidence to Latino ELLs when they recognize themselves in the stories being told.
The Latino Family Literacy Project, a White House BRIGHT SPOT winner, offers staff development and training workshops to educators for ELL parent involvement. Educators provide the programs to parents at their school in order for parents to establish a regular family reading routine, which helps greatly with vocabulary development, college awareness, and English-language skills. For more information, please contact The Latino Family Literacy Project or Lectura Books.