Using Multicultural Children's Literature to Leverage Student Cultural Competence and Promote Social Justice

Introduction

According to a National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) report in 2019, the total enrollment of minority groups in public elementary and secondary schools is increasing, and schools are becoming much more culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD). The number of White students attending school anticipates decreasing, whereas minority ethnic groups are projected to increase. Therefore, educators need to learn about their students' cultural and linguistic backgrounds and strive to provide curricula that can mirror their diverse cultural and linguistic environments. As classroom teachers encounter students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, scholars advocate including multicultural literature in their school curricula (e.g., Botelho & Rudman, 2009; Cai, 2002). However, multicultural literature was seldom available and rarely used in the United States school curriculum (Chaudhri & Teale, 2013; Crisp et al., 2016).

Although the number of diverse books being published has steadily and gradually increased since 2015, the number is insufficient compared to the CLD student enrollment in school settings. According to the Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC) report in 2019, the number of children’s books depicting minority children as protagonists (23%) lags far behind the number of books with White protagonists and even those with animal or non-human characters (77% as a total). Among minority children’s groups, books about Black/African American (11.9%) and Latinx or Brown skin characters (14.5%) are more available than those about Asian or Asian Americans (8.7%). Accordingly, U.S.-born Asian American children might have often been exposed to literature depicting the dominant culture but marginalizing others’ cultures, including their heritage cultures.

For these reasons, many heritage language (HL) schools in the U.S. provide multicultural literature that mirrors HL learners' cultures and life experiences. The researcher understood that the third-grade students in her Korean HL class were mainly exposed to children’s literature in a South Korean context during their first and second grades. Hence, the researcher believed her students were ready to learn about others’ cultures and life experiences so that they could engage in a deeper understanding of cultural diversity, equity, and social justice through literature. Considering the findings that introducing multicultural literature using a critical literacy framework assists learners in developing diverse perspectives towards sociopolitical issues (e.g., Snow et al., 2018), the researcher included a balanced collection of multicultural literature that contains historical and contemporary representations of diverse ethnic and cultural groups in her third-grade class.

The study is designed to investigate the teacher’s instructional approach and students’ dialogic discourses when they learn about multicultural picturebooks during reading class sessions in an HL classroom. Specifically, this study examines how the teacher's critical literacy instruction helped the students reflect on sociopolitical and sociocultural issues in the stories during multicultural book discussions. The study further explores the students’ oral responses to the multicultural stories to understand cultural diversity, equity, and social justice. The following research questions guided this study.

• 1.

  How does the teacher adopt critical literacy as part of her instruction during multicultural literature discussions to promote the third-grade Korean American students’ understanding of cultural diversity, equity, and social justice?

• 2.

  How do the students engage in the dialogic discourses during their book discussions after learning about stories of different racial and cultural groups?