Anti-Bias Children's Book & A Chat with Marley Dias

PBS recently hosted A Chat with Marley Dias, creator of #1000BlackGirlBooks. Marley's efforts have led to the creation of 1000BlackGirlBooks Resource Guide which speaks directly to educators who are looking for text recommendations to broaden their classroom libraries and use of mentor texts. While Marley's work addresses the need for black female protagonists at the center of children and YA literature, a number of additional resources were shared to broaden the scope of representation and culturally relevant reading material.

I've used some of these resources in the past, but two new resources are helping me to rethink how I frame these discussions in future courses. For the past few years, my students at UW have been mostly white, upper-middle class, monolingual females interested in teaching in urban settings. All of our student teaching experiences take place in culturally and linguistically diverse schools, so they are very much motivated to develop understandings and practices to support culturally responsive teachers. There is a very high likelihood that while my future students may share similar demographic backgrounds, they may be less motivated to embrace these perspectives and have less opportunities to teach in diverse contexts. I plan to be more strategic and explicit in addressing the need to broaden representation, themes, and perspectives--within all classroom contexts. Using 'Mirrors & Windows' to frame this process seems like an encouraging route to take.
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In addition, I am interested in the following analysis activity for selecting anti-bias children's books. While these ideas are integrated throughout our discussions, I imagine that completing this type of analysis would help to connect the ideas and their importance to practice (much as I've seen happen with our picturebook analysis that addresses multimodal meaning-making).

Additional resources to draw from include:

• Booklists from the CCBC
• This ppt resource does a wonderful job of synthesizing and articulating the ideas I've been thinking about with clear examples to help students make connections to their current and future teaching contexts. ​​

Finally, I was most interested in attending this webinar because I've decided my Reading Resolution this year will focus on cultural representations in children's texts focusing on the range of middle elementary readers (with selections on both ends). Here is the list I've compiled so far:
1. Aminas Voice
2. Drita My Homegirl
3. Love
4. Looking Like Me
5. Last Stop on Market Street
6. Cinderelly
7. Amazing Grace
8. My Name is Maria Isabel
9. Claudette Colvin
10.  Ninth Ward
11. Another Brooklyn
12. The Skin I'm In