Diversify LexLiterature
What's our purpose?
Reading should be enjoyable and accessible to everyone. It should be used as a way to learn about others' experiences, but also to validate one's identities. With this project, we aim to provide resources to ensure young children can learn about many identities and see themselves reflected in literature.
Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors
A concept created by Rudine Sims Bishop, explaining the importance of literature validating identities, creating a sense of self, and fostering empathy.
"Our classrooms need to be places where all the children from all the cultures that make up the salad bowl of American society can find their mirrors....If [children from dominant groups] only see reflections of themselves, they will grow up with an exaggerated sense of their own importance and value in the world--a dangerous ethnocentrism."
~ Rudine Sims Bishop
Diversity in Children's Literature in throughout the years
Please take notice that while the percentage of white representation in literature decreases to something closer to reality in 2018, there is minimal increase in representation for different races because that percentage is represented as non-human characters, not other races.