Final Post

I learned a number of things about children's literature this year in TE 448. The variation of texts used in class was something that really helped me to understand the real meaning to diversity. I thought I knew what it was, and that I was in tune with multiculturalism and the diversity of my own society. However, after seeing aspects of each of these in texts throughout the class, I now know I was not as educated as I thought I was. I thought that diversity was just race, ethnicity, or religion. I thought that multiculturalism was just numerous cultures represented at one time. But I never thought of the things I am about to talk about now.

I think it was a wonderful idea to bring up all of the things we talked about in the last class because of the numerous amount of themes people added to the already created list. I focused a lot more on issues of stereotyping, generalizations, insiders vs. outsiders, conforming to society, cultural traditions, and not to mention critically analyzing through writing and discussions. But there were a lot of things that I wished I would have focused on instead/more- gender issues, sensitivity, language barriers/just language, bias, and issues of inclusion. I did a good job of analyzing most texts based on other classes that I have had, but I never really thought of thinking about gender roles or bias.

A lot of the books also touched on religion which I think is a very important thing to learn about in a classroom. I went to Catholic school from grades k-8, so I learned very basic things- the basis of the following three religions- Islam, Catholicism, and Judaism. I never learned about other religions unless I did so myself. Although these books may not teach about religions, it would be extremely beneficial to be exposed to ideas and aspects of the culture of each religion.

Another thing I did notice although I didn't focus on was gender roles. I think that I picked out the major theme in the story and then just noted the little themes on the side without much of a thought. For example, in "Al Capone Does My Shirts", it would have been very beneficial to not only focus on the aspects of diability in the novel, as I did, but also the fact that the main character with the disability was a girl, or that the relationship with the boy and the mother in the story was strained, as opposed to the male/male relationship he had with his father. Gina pointed this out in class today to my group.



Overall, this class really helped broaden my knowledge of diverse and multicultural literature. Thinking about my future classroom, there is no way that I can imagine not having some of these texts, the ones we read in class and the ones that I read for my final project, in my classroom. I want to expose children to these texts appropriate for their age group as this class did for me.