The following guidelines for material selection were developed by adopting recommendations from various language arts and multicultural educators: Beilke (1986), Harada (1995), Harris (1991), and Pang, Colvin, Tran, & Yang (1992). They recommend that multicultural literature contain:
From THE EFFECTS OF MULTICULTURAL LITERATURE IN THE CLASSROOM by Maria Boles
•Teach book reading behaviors explicitly: responding to known answer questions
•Make the books come alive for the children. Make the story interactive rather than passive learning.
•Introduce the students to the literature (not just expose). Instead of just reading a multicultural book to the kids, create a sustained engagement with the literature to teach the kids the connections that they can take from the literature and apply to their own lives.
•It should be the routine, not the exception, to use multicultural literature in the classroom
•Rather than attributing an experience or identity to a single aspect such as race or ethnicity, it is important to individualize the experience. No one piece of literature should speak for an entire cultural group (Kruse, 2001)
•It is important to take the time to discuss what you have read as you would with any good piece of literature. Differences should not be minimized nor should stereotypes be perpetuated (Kruse, 2001).
International African American Hispanic American
• Mem Fox • Mildred Taylor •Gary Soto
• Graeme Base • Virginia Hamilton •Pat Mora
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