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Mary K. Gove and Kay Benjamin
- Teachers have too many things to do to spend time searching for authentic, engaging children's literature portraying diverse cultures.
- Remembering and using all these criteria is difficult!
- The ten quick ways are not quick enough.
The above statements were exit-log responses to a class event in a pre-service section of a course on Literature-Based Reading Methods. During this class period, Mary Gove and her students discussed the article "Ten Quick Ways to Analyze Children's Books for Racism and Sexism" (The Council on Interracial Books for Children, 1994). Even though they had read and discussed these important guidelines, Mary decided their responses reflected a lack of understanding of the importance of what Pappas, Keifer, and Levstik (1999) call "culturally relevant teaching as a day-by-day enterprise" (p. 37). Specifically, these undergraduates lacked a disposition and commitment to using multicultural children's literature in their future classrooms.
Mary discovered that her concerns were shared by her colleague, Kay Benjamin. We (Mary and Kay) then decided to collaborate in (1) developing a teaching project that would be taught in Mary's class, and (2) a study in which we collected and analyzed data from the students in the teaching project to determine its impact on them. The overall goal of this teaching project was to create in our pre-service teachers a disposition and commitment toward choosing quality multicultural literature, a commitment they would take with them to their future classrooms. At some point during our discussions, we began to refer to this goal as raising the antennas of our students to the importance of using multicultural literature in the classroom.
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Raising Pre-Service Teachers' Cultural Antennas: Choosing and Using Quality Multicultural Literature