DOI: 10.4324/9780203885208-11
We wrote this book to disturb the scholarly and pedagogical silence around how class, race, and gender work together in children’s literature. We have great respect for the authors and scholars whose work has embraced what has been called multicultural children’s literature. At this point we are especially interested in moving beyond the limited definition of multicultural children’s literature as literature by and/or about people of color. We acknowledge and support a focus on literature with people who have historically, ideologically, and politically been underserved and rendered nearly invisible. We argue that we should analyze how dominant ideologies function in text and images. To accomplish this kind of examination we theorize a critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature, grounded in critical multicultural education, feminist poststructuralism, cultural studies, critical literary theory, critical pedagogy, critical literacies, and critical discourse analysis. This historical, sociopolitical, and narrative lens creates a space for us to problematize the literary category of multicultural children’s literature, taking up the power relation of class alongside race and gender. Our intent is to show how reading power exposes the interlocking systems of classism, sexism, and racism. Critical multicultural analysis leads to reading cultural diversity against these power relations.
Critical multicultural analysis can contribute to the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of ourselves and U.S. society. It alerts us to how text and images in children’s books can position readers in the interests of coercive power relations. Resistant reading practices can also lead us to collective ways of being in the world. In the process of critical multicultural reading, power is located and a site is created for social transformation. Critical multicultural analysis challenges fixed and bounded notions of culture, identity, class, race, gender, and power, and makes visible the social construction of culture, power, genre, focalization, and story closure.
The cultural themes emerge recursively (back and forth) and reflexively (analyzing the analysis) as we read the text collections alongside secondary sources. The characters exercise power within the contexts of family, school, community, and society, showing how they re/organize in response to specific historical and sociopolitical circumstances. The microinteractions between and among characters reveal how they create and recreate culture. The analyses demonstrate that culture is complex and socially constructed; race, class, and gender re/organize family lives and communities; and genres, characters, and story closures are socially made.
The text collections permitted us entry into many cultural experiences. Our analyses of the text collections illustrate the complexities of culture by connecting them to the power relations of class, gender, and race. Reading power expands our understanding of the core dimensions of culture (Dirks, Eley & Ortner, 1994) in the following ways:
- from culture as a shared experience to one that is conflictual and shaped by the power relations of gender, race, and class;
- from culture as a timeless entity to a historically constituted [dynamic] experience; and
- from culture possessing “relative coherence and internal consistency” to “culture as multiple discourses, occasionally coming together in large systemic configuration [e.g., Gee’s Discourse with a Big ‘D’], but more often coexisting within dynamic fields of interaction and conflict.”
(Dirks, Eley & Ortner, 1994: 3–6)
Culture is historically a complex web of power relations enacted at the individual, group, and institutional levels. Critical multicultural analysis of the text collections demonstrates how culture is socially made through genres, story closures, the social processes (responses and re-organizations) among the characters, and books’ focalization. Bronwyn Davies (1993/2003) states:
Poststructuralist theory argues that people are not socialised into the social world, but that they go through a process of subjectification. In socialization theory, the focus is on the process of shaping the individual that is undertaken by others. In poststructuralist theory the focus is on the way each person actively takes up the discourses through which they and others speak/write the world into existence as if they were their own. Through those discourses they are made speaking subjects at the same time as they are subjected to the constitutive force of those discourses.
(Davies, 1993/2003: 13–14)
People are defined in relation to other people: discourses are always defined in relation to other discourses. Critical multicultural analysis is an examination of the process of “doing” society, and in this doing or participation, everyone is an active partner in the “process of subjectification.” The text collections show that adults, young adults, and children are social and political beings, capable of resisting and taking collective action for social change, as well as dominating and colluding with dominant ideologies and practices. The microinteractions among story characters demonstrate them acting and reacting to each other, constructing and reconstructing the worlds in which they live. They are complex actors, utilizing their cultural, linguistic, sociopolitical, and economic capital to create new social relationships and possibilities, and to recreate culture. A complex view of culture and identity shows how these processes are inextricably linked and socially constructed.
The text collections function as genealogies of multiculturalism and power. The power relations of class, race, and gender are implicated in the construction of cultural experiences. In the text collections, class relations are everywhere and expressed in gendered and raced ways. Class describes multiple social relations and experiences, re/organizing family and community structures and responses. In many cases, race and class discourses are inseparable and interdiscursive, that is, they draw on each other. Racism and classism form intergroup and intragroup power relations. There are numerous manifestations of racism, many driven by economic oppression. Reading class shows the deeper dimensions of racism and sexism.
Genres exist in relation to other genres (Bakhtin, 1986; Todorov, 2000). Many of the children’s books that we analyzed are hybrid genres. Genres are social constructs that can become historical evidence and “cultural archives” (Leitch, 1991). They are phenomena of culture and history.
The social identities of the focalizer shape the perspective of the story because perception is relational; it is bound up in the social processes of race, class, and gender and shapes how the reader “sees” the story. For example, in the Mexican American migrant farmworker collection, the Chicana perspective brings the reader up close to the gender roles of women in the stories and interrogates them.
The story closure shapes the meaning of the story. Open story closures invite questioning, where fixed endings confirm the ideology reflected in the text. Historical and sociopolitical conditions are the sources for the plot. Critical multicultural analysis has sociopolitical and pedagogical implications.
In the old days, coal miners often carried a canary with them into the mine to alert them of danger ahead. If the canary collapsed along the way, this would warn the miners of the presence of poisonous gases. Race is the miner’s canary (Guinier & Torres, 2002) and class is the noxious gas. Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres (2002: 12) maintain that the canary is “diagnostic, signaling the need for more systemic critique.” Reading children’s literature through a critical multicultural lens provides a space to analyze how culture and power are inextricably tied. Race, class, and gender are social arrangements that work together and form hierarchical arrangements of social power.
Critical multicultural analysis shows how power is exercised by examining the microinteractions among characters. As readers we can locate power and envision “local democracies” through these analyses. Children’s literature is ethnography (Greene, 1988; Ortner, 1991): It offers the reader great cultural/power detail through the social processes experienced by the characters, providing windows into society. Dominant ideologies are imbued in their construction through discourse.
Children’s literature puts a human face on sociopolitical circumstances and invites readers to consider in which ways they are implicated in coercive power relations. Readers can consider in what ways they can resist classist/racist ideologies and participate in collaborative power. Children’s literature can play a role in informing readers about specific cultural experiences, as well as show how race, class, and gender function together. The texts provide a vantage point to understand social and cultural conditions, and to read beyond the texts. Critical multicultural analysis demonstrates that readers are active in creating our society, and readers are active in creating who they are.
Reading class and its raced and gendered manifestations can lead readers to understanding classism across culture and consider re/organizing across these social lines (Collins, 2000; hooks, 2000). As readers, we can also learn to read along the continuum of how power is exercised. People exercise power according to their perceived place in the world. We can deconstruct reading subject positions offered by the text by reconstructing how power is exercised.
Authors and illustrators have the power to use the transformative nature of art. In other words, although authors are shaped by discourses, they are also in a position to shape discourses. Davies (1993: 197) asserts that “Until we have invented new storylines, new discourses, we are still enmeshed in the old. And even when we invent the new, the old can still claim us, draw us in with their familiarity and the hooks of our old and current unsatisfied desires.” If authors and illustrators embrace the power of art and think about the choices they make as they construct a story, the construction of the literary text can invite the reader to see a deeper view of reality that is often masked by prevailing ideologies and the text’s aesthetic appeal. Eagleton (1976: 18) maintains: “Authentic art always transcends the ideological limits of its time, yielding us insight into the realities which ideology hides from view.” According to John Steinbeck, a writer’s responsibility is to “expos[e] our many grievous faults and failures, with dredging up to the light our dark and dangerous dreams, for the purpose of improvement” as well as “to declare and to celebrate [humans’] proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit” (Reef, 1996: 136). Storylines can offer alternative ways of being in the world.
Authors can explore the narrative strategies available in constructing their stories and think about which narrative structures and focalizers (character perspectives) invite social critique and offer other possibilities for re/organizing how we live as a society. Sociopolitical imagination takes into account the instability of identity, both individual and cultural, and the power structures in which we reside. This kind of writing situates texts within the discursive fields that create us as much as we can them; these narrative strategies, including open story closures, create spaces for deconstruction and reconstruction.
Illustrators can experiment with different ways of rendering the cultural experience described in the text. As our analyses demonstrate, color, line, and the spatial position of the characters shape the reader’s view of the events depicted. Illustrators can create images that challenge the text and create a dialogic, unsettling dominant ideologies.
We agree with James Gee (1999: 1) that it is imperative that we study “how the details of language get recruited, ‘on site,’ to ‘pull off’ specific social activities and social identities (‘memberships’ in various social groups, cultures, and institutions). In the process, we will see that language-in-use is everywhere and always ‘political’.” He defines politics as “anything and anyplace where human social interactions and relationships have implications for how ‘social goods’ are or ought to be distributed … ‘social’ [he] means anything that a group of people believes to be a source of power, status, or worth” (Gee, 1999: 2). The distribution of social goods is raced, classed, and gendered. These power relations are naturalized and normalized, making them invisible and commonsensical.
Critical multicultural analysis can help people re/organize across social lines and link up with people and groups who share a commitment to social justice. Like Gee (1999), we believe that one of the goals of education should be to help children map out the dominant ideologies that have been instrumental in perpetuating social inequities and distributing power in the United States. Critical multicultural analysis helps us map out dominant discourses, the power matrix, and make informed decisions about whether we want to interrupt these social processes or perpetuate them with how we exercise power in our daily lives. It deepens our understanding of these power relations and helps us to become conscious that everything we do is political because it involves and affects other people.
People are forever changed when they become aware or make connections with new understandings. Paulo Freire (1991) maintains:
Reading the world always precedes reading the word, and reading the word implies continually reading the world. As I suggested earlier, this movement from the world to the word and from the word to the world is always present; even the spoken word flows from our reading of the world. In a way, however, we can go further, and say that reading the word is not preceded merely by reading the world, but by a certain form of writing it or re-writing it, that is, of transforming it by means of conscious practical work. For me, this dynamic movement is central to the literacy process.
(Freire, 1991: 144)
Children learn to question the status quo and not to merely master particular discourse practices, but to analyze and resist unequal power relations. Critical pedagogies across the grades can play a key part in this work.
The pedagogical implications have sociopolitical consequence. Language is inherently ideological and all literature is a historical and cultural product. Keeping the history of underrepresentation in children’s literature at the center of literacies teaching is imperative. Teachers should strive to have a culturally diverse collection of books in their classroom libraries. Multiple books about a cultural experience offer a more complex picture of the cultural group, that is, children’s literature as ethnography provides detailed descriptions and diverse perspectives of a situation or condition. Critical multicultural teachers constantly reconsider how they teach speaking, listening, writing, reading, representing, and viewing, and apply literary study as a tool for social change and justice.
The research literature on what is currently known as multicultural children’s literature outlines the benefits of literature that validates the lived experiences of children, recognizes social difference, and contributes to the development of empathy in children and respect and understanding between and among cultures (Duren, 2000; Hinton-Johnson, 2002; Kauffman & Short, 2001; MacPhee, 1997; Norton, 1990; Singer & Smith, 2003). The present corpus of children’s literature must be transformed into a literature that represents the cultural diversity of the United States; otherwise, it will empower only a few children.
First and foremost, readers need to see themselves mirrored in books since, “from reading stories about their own culture, children have opportunities to see how others go through experiences similar to theirs, develop strategies to [name and negotiate] issues in their [lives], and identify themselves with their inherited culture” (Lu, 1998: 2). However, it is identification through representation, the connecting with similar experience, that children can find spaces to name the manifestations of power in their own lives (Cai, 2008). Representation leads to the negotiation of identity. As teachers, we cannot assume that there is a complete alignment between the reader and the cultural representation (Dudley-Marling, 2003). A variety of texts representing the same cultural experience allows children choices for “reading who they are.” In addition, readers need to go beyond themselves to images, ideas, and cultures that are outside their daily realities and vicariously experience another culture. These texts expand children’s understanding of the world, opening the window to a panoramic view of society.
The door represents the reader’s critical engagement with the ideologies of class, race, and gender imbedded in the literature. Mirrors reflect our language use and windows afford expanses to new understandings, whereas doors invite action. We reclaim these metaphors because of their prolific use in the field, and because metaphors are useful for deconstructing old understandings and assumptions and constructing new knowledge (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).
Texts are sites for negotiation. The more we know, the more we are able to interrogate texts. The more we are exposed to multiple experiences, the more we are able to juxtapose what we have lived and read against those experiences. One text and one author cannot do it all; it is the reading of multiple texts and the juxtaposition of these texts against lived experience and secondary sources that is central. Children’s literature can redress injustice as much as reflect it. It can inspire readers to reflect on their lived experience, re-imagine socially just worlds, provide new ways of exercising power, and offer tools for building cultural and historical understanding.
Examining class, race, and gender cross-culturally can be transformative because it helps to demonstrate how class and race connect cultural experience across different historical and sociopolitical circumstances. Cross-cultural perspectives show how cultures are not bounded but are porous and dynamic. All literature can lead to critical multicultural investigations. However, we need to consider the classroom diet of children’s literature. Variety is paramount.
While books that showcase similar cross-cultural experiences (“we are all the same” stories), what we have come to call cultural catalogs (e.g., Ann Morris’s Houses and Homes or Lori Mitchell’s Different Just Like Me), demonstrate similarities across cultures, portraying universality as a human condition and reducing diversity to simplistic terms. The cultural catalogs speak to common human experience, connections that are worthy of consideration, but it is dangerous to begin and end there. The treatment of universal themes tends to oversimplify diversity and reduce it to sameness, obfuscating the social construction of difference, privilege, and power.
Books with social justice as a theme focus on the explicitly rendered sociopolitical issues among individuals, communities, and society. Proponents of this approach select books that have overtly political messages and stimulate conversations with readers about their implications (Harste, Leland, Lewison, Ociepka, & Vasque, 2000). These texts have storylines that reflect the explicit exercise of coercive power and invite critiquing of the microinteractions among characters, reconstructing them toward collaborative power.
Herb Kohl (1995) calls for radical literature. Literature with democratic plots, while instructive, also needs to be problematized. These books are not free of dominant ideologies. While the text may focus on democratic reading subject positions (exercise of collaborative power), readers must examine the multiple ways characters exercise power throughout the story. Radical literature, among other attributes, offers representations of how groups of people organize for social action. However, few of these storylines are available. A Chair for My Mother, by Vera B. Williams, and Magical Hands, by Marjorie Barker, are examples of such books; however, regrettably, few of these stories are available.
More recently, the metafictive devices of postmodern texts (i.e., texts that are self-conscious about their construction) purport to lead children to critical reading (Goldstone, 2004). The teaching of postmodern texts is grounded by genre studies. The textual features are not immune to the nexus of language and power. The metafictive devices shape how the story gets told. For example, while Voices in the Park, by Anthony Browne, offers multiple class perspectives on the same event, its images echo racialized stereotypes. All texts, including postmodern picture books, cultural catalogs, social justice theme books, and radical literature, need to be problematized. They do not guarantee critical responses on the part of readers. These texts do not necessarily foster critical reading: Teachers need to be active in demonstrating how to read all books critically and multiculturally.
Many of these texts are considered controversial and cannot be found in the canon of the basal reader. Controversial storylines recognize diversity, invoke critique, and invite dialogue. All children’s books are cultural products and require critical analysis. Traditionally, adults and children have been socialized to read in particular ways within school settings. These controversial texts might disrupt conventional school literacies practices (i.e., how reading is taught and which texts are used in schools), and replace them with analytical conversations that will enhance the children’s abilities to be independent and discerning readers.
A number of researchers concur that teachers avoid “multicultural children’s literature” because they are unprepared and lack the background and knowledge to feel comfortable engaging in teaching these texts (Cooper & Floyd, 2002; Davis, Brown, Liedel-Rice, & Soeder, 2005; Harris & Willis, 2003; Hinton-Johnson, 2002; Jenkins, 1999). The majority of the teaching force is White, middle-class women who are inexperienced with addressing the complexities of power imbued in these texts. But it is key to awaken a sense of inquiry in teachers who are willing to critically engage with this analytical approach.
Examining and reconsidering the teaching practices of reading is an entry point into critical multicultural analysis. Teaching is a text that can be analyzed. What assumptions about reading, writing, literature, and culture do we hold? All books are culturally coded. A passive stance, that is, one that accepts the authors’ words and illustrators’ images unquestioningly, is not neutral. It maintains the status quo and the explicit messages of the author and/or illustrator, and usurps power from the individual reader as well as the community of readers. Critical multicultural investigations of children’s literature focus on the analysis of power relations as factors in the trends of what gets written and illustrated and what gets published.
Critical multicultural analysis comes from the same family as critical literacies. The “critical” in critical multicultural analysis means keeping the power relations of class, race, and gender at the center of our investigations of children’s literature, thus connecting our reading to sociopolitical and economic justice. “Multicultural” signals the diverse historical and cultural experiences within these power relations. Critical multicultural analysis requires several shifts in the conventional thinking about reading:
How texts are constructed (e.g., generic conventions, focalization, and story closure) positions readers to produce particular meanings. Reading children’s books alongside each other and with secondary sources helps readers resist the reading subject positions constructed by the text and create alternative or resistant readings that support collective worldviews. Critical multicultural analysis offers possibilities for taking up different reading subject positions.
The reading subject positions offered by a critical multicultural analysis are constructed intertextually, by reading the narrative against particular literary and nonliterary texts, and generic considerations. Through these dialogic strategies, the reader challenges class, gender, and race ideologies imbedded in the text, thus exposing the processes whereby these world-views are constructed and rendered natural in texts. Thus, the meaning of texts lies within the space among texts (Bakhtin, 1981), contexts, and the reader(s). Stephens (1992) argues that “… in most modes of narration the representations of interaction between characters and society, whereby a character ‘discovers’ its [sic] own subjectivity, is reproduced on another level in the audience engagement with the text, which is largely on terms determined by the text” (Stephens, 1992: 63–64).
The teaching of literature should begin with social justice. If we are committed to socially just teaching, what kind of literacy practices will take us there? We concur with Nathalie Wooldridge (2001) that critical literacies practices lead to “critically reading our teaching.” She offers a set of questions that help name the sociopolitical implications of our pedagogical decisions:
- What view of knowledge do we present (e.g., who has it? where is it found? what counts as knowledge? what/whose knowledge is seen as valuable?)?
- How else might the lesson have been taught/the aims achieved?
- How do we construct ourselves as teacher in the lesson (e.g., as source of knowledge, as person who controls?)? How are the students constructed (e.g., as passive recipients, as having something done to them?)? What/whose views do we present, and therefore, whose views are not represented or being seen?
- What are the students learning besides particular content? (e.g., about learning, the uses of literacy, what it is to be a student, [what it is to be a teacher], what it is to be poor/[girl/boy/person of color]?)
(Wooldridge, 1991: 267)
We would add: What texts and reading practices do we privilege in our classrooms? What kind of citizens are our literacy practices constructing? How teachers choose to teach children how to read children’s literature will shape the reading subject positions available to them as well as their identity formation.
Critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature creates a site to consider subject positions of dehumanization, collusion, resistance, and agency as they are enacted among characters. Critical multicultural analysis as collaborative practice through dialogue within text circles allows histories and discourses to bump against each other and scaffold children’s understanding of the power relations. While analyzing multiculturalism through children’s literature will not solve social injustice, teachers as facilitators of these critical and collaborative processes help children to engage with texts at a deeper level, contributing to their overall literacy learning (Dietrich & Ralph, 1995; Harris & Willis, 2003; Singer & Smith, 2003) and understanding of themselves and the world (Moller, 2002; Moller & Allen, 2000).
Many teachers are inexperienced with the multiculturalism rendered in children’s literature as well as the power relations of class, race, and gender. Because many teachers lack the background knowledge to feel comfortable in engaging with power, they resist teaching literature that takes them outside their cultural experience (Wollman-Bonilla, 1998). Book clubs (Kooy, 2007; Smith & Strickland, 2001) can create spaces for teachers to experience children’s literature that might be unfamiliar, and to develop background knowledge and language to read and teach literature critically and multiculturally.
Text Circles – Harvey Daniels (2006) challenges teachers to problematize the literature circle structure in the language arts curriculum. He recommends that teachers reconsider the circle roles, consider the explicit teaching of reading strategies and guide the children’s social skills, as well as diversify the texts by bringing in nonfiction. We propose practicing the reading of multiple texts (including everyday texts) alongside each other. Critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature creates spaces for teachers and students, for children to be teachers and for teachers to be learners. Children teach about issues that are relevant to them, providing that they volunteer to do so. Certainly, their contributions to dialogues around literature will expand.
Multiple Texts and Multimodalities – Everyday texts, like children’s literature, are socially constructed and are imbued with dominant worldviews. Using these texts alongside children’s literature will guide children’s critical analysis. Because juxtaposing texts helps amplify ideologies in texts and images responding to children’s books through multimodalities of writing, drama, visual arts, and digital technologies creates opportunities for children to reconstruct texts (Lotherington, 2006; Peterson, Booth & Jupiter, 2009).
Cultural Themes – It is useful for teachers and children to look at the representation of culturally specific themes (e.g., literacy and particular cultural group experience) over time to determine by critical analysis what different meanings and social connotations adhere to the texts above and beyond their language and illustrations. Consider Mitzi Myers’ (1988: 42) provocative question: “What kinds of cultural statements and questions is the work responding to?” For example, the perceptions and realities of working people are rarely explored in children’s literature, and if so, these depictions of labor are “downplayed, camouflaged, obscured, and its significance distorted” (Nikolajeva, 2002: 307). Children can examine work as a cultural theme and take notice of the working conditions of the families as well as how characters exercise power in microinteractions related to their work.
Author Study – The literacy practice of author study can serve as a laboratory. It can refute the notion that the author is the only source of meaning. A critical multicultural analysis of an author’s collection of books locates the discursive threads that are contained in the author’s writings. The multiple texts afford the opportunity to examine themes, endings, characters, and ideologies. Foucault (1984) maintains that the “author-function” points to our society’s fixation with and fear of the “proliferation of meaning,” that is, we associate single meanings with single texts. If we consider the author as an “ideological figure,” as Foucault recommends, the reader can delve deeper into the text and investigate how discourses circulate in the texts. Multiple discourses become apparent and reading subject positions are located.
Text Production – Children can write their own stories as ways of talking back to publishers. These stories can be sites for further deconstruction of the discourses that are responsible for constituting who they are as people. In doing so, these stories become evidence of the dominant discourses circulating in their writing. Bronwyn Davies (2000: 144) proposes: “The texts of [children’s] own speaking and writing [and representing] can then become the material that they use to acquire the skills of deconstruction.” Text production can make visible the discursive practices that are responsible for constituting us. Inviting children to write stories and publish books is a way to “catch language in the act of shaping subjectivities” (Davies, 2000: 142). At the same time, children possess the authority to reflect on these shapings of self, and implore them to respeak, rewrite, and reread themselves and their world.
Subjectivity is a process of becoming. Social transformation can only occur when people develop a critical consciousness of power relations and possibilities for changing or undoing hierarchical social arrangements. Critical multicultural analysis provides a site for deconstruction and reconstruction. This site offers readers cognitive and social flexibility in how readers perceive the world, by questioning and theorizing, and taking up collectively minded worldviews. It is reading literature as a process, with a historical and sociopolitical imagination. It is catching language in the process of reproducing power relations, summoning readers who can be and not be in the world. Our language needs respeaking and rewriting, which will offer new possibilities for selfhood and new ways of being in the world. Critical multicultural analysis can contribute to this process.
We advocate for reading that awakens children to the sociopolitical context of the world. This kind of reading connects books to lived experience and invites readers to develop empathy for others. The practice of locating cultural themes becomes an entry point for considering the social construction of cultural practice and experience. Envisioning how power affects the reader and others and incorporating democratic participation leads to the consistent pattern of reading as if it mattered.
Social transformation is not an armchair activity. Antonia Darder and Gerald Torres (1999: 188) are quick to add that a shift in “theoretical language will not necessarily alter power relations in any given society” but it can give us tools for analyzing “how power is practiced and maintained.” Reading with a critical multicultural lens creates a space for resocializing for social justice. Apprenticing through language and literacies practices are ways we can re-imagine ourselves, our society. Real structural change also needs to take place and as citizens of a democracy we must examine how we help maintain and perpetuate dominant ideologies that are realized in institutional policies and everyday practice. Democracy only exists through citizen participation. Democracy, by definition, cannot mean merely that schools prepare children for the workforce (Gramsci, 2000). It must mean that every “citizen” learns to participate locally, nationally, and globally. Schools can offer the conditions for children to learn democratic participation. Literacy practices, like critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature, can contribute to this process.
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