Critical Multicultural Analysis of Childrens Literature: Mirrors

"Childrens literature is a contested terrain, as is multicultural education. Taken together, they pose a formidable challenge to both classroom teachers and academics.... Rather than deny the inherent conflicts and tensions in the field, in Critical Multicultural Analysis of Childrens Literature: Mirrors, Windows, and Doors, Maria José Botelho and Masha Kabakow Rudman confront, deconstruct, and reconstruct these terrains by proposing a reframing of the field.... Surely all of us - children, teachers, and academics - can benefit from this more expansive understanding of what it means to read books." Sonia Nieto, From the Foreword

Critical multicultural analysis provides a philosophical shift for teaching literature, constructing curriculum, and taking up issues of diversity and social justice. It problematizes childrens literature, offers a way of reading power, explores the complex web of sociopolitical relations, and deconstructs taken-for-granted assumptions about language, meaning, reading, and literature: it is literary study as sociopolitical change.

Bringing a critical lens to the study of multiculturalism in childrens literature, this book prepares teachers, teacher educators, and researchers of childrens literature to analyze the ideological dimensions of reading and studying literature. Each chapter includes recommendations for classroom application, classroom research, and further reading. Helpful end-of-book appendixes include a list of childrens book awards, lists of publishers, diagrams of the power continuum and the theoretical framework of critical multicultural analysis, and lists of selected childrens literature journals and online resources.