I am in TE 448 for many reasons. The main reason I took this class was for professional development, because multicultural literature was an area where I felt my knowledge was lacking. I joined this class to become more familiar with multicultural literature. I wanted to extend my current knowledge about diversity in children’s literature to become a more critical reader. I am now very interested in becoming more acquainted with rich, high quality, authentic literature that I can use in my future classroom along with valid professional resources that I will be able to come back to later on. “Children deserve the best, they deserve, authenticity and truth, and they deserve books of artistic and literary merit.” (Ada, 37)

This class connects to my professional goals in many ways. For myself, as a professional, it helps me get closer to my goal of creating my own beliefs and strategy of how to select authentic literature. It also helps me strengthen my ability to critically read diverse texts. For my future classroom, this class helps me accomplish my goal of creating a classroom community where all students feel, respected and appreciated for who they are.

Issues of diversity play a very important role in literacy teaching and learning because literature has great power to represent a generalization, stereotype or image to children regardless of if it is positive or negative. This means that there is even more pressure on the educator to make sure they are choosing high quality texts that accurately and authentically represents an underrepresented group.


Ignorance is one of the biggest weaknesses in our society. I feel that multicultural education is essential in every classroom and curriculum to help alleviate this problem. It helps students understand and gain an appreciation for underrepresented groups in the world or those groups who are defined by other features of class, race, gender, etc. Multicultural education is important because it helps promote student to appreciate diversity and varying perspectives on social issues. Multicultural literature is beneficial because it offers knowledge and information on different perspective of something than what we aren’t normally used to. As we have learned from reading works by Rudine Sims Bishop, “Students who retain such a perspective, because they have learned to take their privilege as a given and have not been taught to question the status quo, are likely to perpetuate the discrimination and oppression that multicultural education is supposed to eliminate.” (Bishop, 5) Multicultural literature also helps students make a connection to their own lives. Bishop states that “students who do not see any reflections of themselves or who see only distorted or comical ones come to understand that they have little value in society in general and in school in particular.”(Bishop, 5) It applies to all students, whether they can relate and make a personal connection, or learn something new about a different group.

The thing that most concerns me about multicultural literature is that it is very difficult and hard to find “the perfect book.” I feel that there are millions of books which accurately portray an experience, but at the same time, offer a perspective that is degrading to another group. Of course, I will never find a “perfect book.” Instead I will just need to learn to adapt to creating effective lesson plans that offer varying perspectives of issues, which help correct misconceptions and stereotypes.