Multicultural Literature

From reading Bishop's Selecting Literature for a Multicultural Curriculum, I found a few things that really stuck with me. The first of these is the way that people of other cultures are pictured in books. Bishop described how in many books with African American characters, they are pictured as comical, with their hair sticking out in every different direction. Bishop says that African American children who read books like this will have a lowered self esteem because the little girl who is supposed to look like her looks like something to be laughed at. I think this is a really interesting point, and that we should really look closely at how accurate our multicultural literature is when we bring books into our classroom. The other thing that really stuck with me was that multicultural texts rarely portray a current day image of a different culture. For instance, many books about African Americans are about either slavery or the civil rights movement. We should focus on finding books that children can relate to today. Also in class Leslie and I talked about how just because a person looks different does not necessarily mean they partake in a certain culture. For example, I had a friend in high school who had moved here from China when she was 8 years old. I asked her once what her favorite kind of Chinese food was, and she told me that she loves orange chicken from Panda Express. Just because she looks Chinese and even lived there for a period of time didn't mean that every piece of her old culture stayed with her. She lived with her mom and step dad, who was American. I think it is important not to assume people will act a certain way just because they look different from us, and to get to know our students and where they come from.