Students deserve stories that better reflect their everyday realities. This book helps educators select and integrate diverse picturebooks that will allow students to respond to their own and others’ stories through a critical literature response framework. It explores the question of “how” we might share diverse picturebooks with young children both for literacy development and for growing a broader sense of citizenship.

Using diverse picturebooks, Angie Zapata offers practical approaches and guiding principles to explore literature through an anti-oppressive lens in the early childhood and elementary classroom. This book is informed by the ethics of integrating diverse children’s picturebooks in the classroom, a desire to cultivate a literature landscape that resists stereotypical representations of racial, linguistic, ethnic, and cultural diversity, and a commitment to recentering critical engagement of diverse picturebooks.

Drawing on NCTE’s position statement, Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children’s and Young Adult Literature, this book will help you turn the teaching of reading of print and illustration into a transformative literacy encounter that nurtures readers and writers who understand the power of stories, especially their own, and who celebrate the diverse histories that shaped them.  Principles in Practice imprint 

225 pp. 2023. Grades PreK–6