RM Winter 2016 FLIP

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Reading Matters
You Matter
| 82| Reading Matters | Volume 16 • Winter 2016 |
offer suggestions for both early childhood educators and their
teacher educators. Addressing this issue from both perspectives,
and providing the reader with recommendations for practice,
allows us to contend with theory and practice in dynamic ways.
The Pedagogical Challenge:
Going Beyond the Read-Aloud
As participants of the Barbara A. Sizemore Urban Education
Conference, we collaborated on a poster presentation that
highlighted children’s literature where the main characters
negotiated issues of poverty or homelessness. Our presentation
focused on three realistic fiction picture books: Gettin’ through
Thursday by Melrose Cooper, Those Shoes by Maribeth Boelts,
and The Lunch Thief by Anne Bromley. Gettin’ through Thursday
by Melrose Cooper is about a young boy named André whose
family finds creative ways to make ends meet until payday (Friday).
Those Shoes by Maribeth Boelts features a little boy named
Jeremy who desperately wants a pair of sneakers that almost
all of his classmates have; he saves his money and buys a pair at
the second-hand store but they are too small. Jeremy decides to
anonymously give the too small shoes to a classmate who needs
them more. The Lunch Thief by Anne Bromley is the story of a boy
named Rafael who has his lunch stolen repeatedly. He discovers
that the new boy, Kevin, has been stealing his lunch. Kevin recently
lost his home in a wildfire and is living out of a hotel. By the end
of the story, Rafael decides to share his plentiful lunch with Kevin.
Additionally, our presentation included a handout aimed at
early childhood classroom practitioners. The handout offered
teaching strategies and ideas for using multicultural children’s
literature in urban schools. We supported the strategies and
ideas highlighted in the handout with scholarship addressing
the use of social justice-themed children’s literature to meet
standards-based goals in early childhood classrooms (i.e.
Common Core, see Enriquez & Shulman-Kumin, 2014).
A Pedagogical Challenge for Both
ClassroomTeachers and University
Professors
The discussion following our poster presentation at the
conference led us to further reflect and interrogate our own
practices. We agree that “teachers [and teacher educators] can
use read-alouds to develop children’s background knowledge,
stimulate their interest in high-quality literature, increase
their comprehension skills, and foster critical thinking” (Meller,
Richardson, & Amos Hatch, 2015, p. 102). For instance, a classroom
teacher can facilitate discussion with young learners about a
character who couldn’t afford to buy “those shoes,” a character
whose family had a hard time “gettin’ through Thursdays,”
or a character who stole someone else’s lunch because he
was hungry and homeless. However, we argue that doing
so—as merely an academic exercise in the classroom—does
little to critically engage students (at both levels) with the
issues at hand. Thus, there is a need to go beyond the read-
aloud; a need to “do more” as part of socially-just practices in
education (Wade, 2000; Dever, Sorenson, & Broderick, 2005).
The pedagogical challenge of going beyond a read-aloud—that
is, digging deeper and doing more—is important for two main
reasons. First, it is critical that both early childhood and university
students gain a more nuanced understanding of poverty and
homelessness as a relevant and significant local and global issue.
As noted by Kelley and Darragh (2011), poverty and homelessness
are often misrepresented in realistic fiction children’s picture books:
…These often inaccurate and unrealistic portrayals may
give children false perceptions of the world…Children
reading these books may gain the misunderstanding
that middle- and upper-class families are the norm,
and that all people who are poor do not know how to
manage their money…Moreover, many picture books
that have such characters who are poor fail to identify
the various causes of poverty, such as job loss and low
minimum wage. (p. 266)
Second, it is crucial that we, as teachers and teacher educators,
do not “reinforce the notion that people can pull themselves up
by their bootstraps, and that poverty is an individual problem
that can be solved with some effort by individuals, rather than
poverty is a national, structural, and systemic problem” (Kelley
& Darragh, 2011, p. 277). For these two reasons, it is important
to extend realistic fiction picture books about poverty and
homelessness in a critical and strategic manner that is not diluted
or oblivious to deeper nuances around the topic. So then, what
else, besides a read-aloud and a class discussion, can a teacher and
a teacher educator do with social justice-themed picture books?
Pedagogical Challenge: Going
Beyond a Pedestrian Approach to
Picture Books
A longstanding and growing body of critical literacy scholarship
provides insights for how to create authentic learning experiences
where children are able to walk in the shoes of the characters
from the book. In order to do more and allow students to walk
in the shoes of the characters that they encounter in picture
books, critical literacy scholars remind us that it is important to
model and promote the interrogation about why these social
justice issues occur in both early childhood and teacher education
classrooms. Such interrogation examines how characters and
issues are depicted in realistic fiction picture books. That is,
students can ask questions to challenge stereotypical depictions,
and move toward critical civic engagement. In the following
passage, Short (2011) discusses how to approach issues such
as poverty, via children’s literature in our classrooms:
Instead of a “give the helpless a handout” approach, civic
engagement involves challenging stereotypes of those
who live in poverty, developing an understanding of
those who live in poverty, developing an understanding
of the complex causes of poverty, introducing activists
who work at these causes, and removing the stigma of
poverty. (p. 57)
In both elementary and university classrooms, it is important