Culturally Responsive Literacy | Authentic Texts
How can we know the literature we are choosing for our kids to read are inclusive and diversely authentic?
Cultural responsiveness should be a part of all our repertoires. This lens can provide meaningful considerations when making decisions in any setting and expand our horizons to an empathetic way to look at the world.
As a straight-passing, white-passing Korean woman who comes from a large, diverse, and multiracial family, I am privileged. Work in the inclusive, diverse space has never been an option for me or my family. It is a necessity. Every conversation I grew up with came from a place of deep consideration for all human beings because we had someone in our family who fit the description of the marginalized group in question. I have never known any different, nor would I want to.
“Kids Cannot Be What They Cannot See”
What we consume, specifically in literature and in school, can have massive implications on us. Throughout grade school, my siblings and I never read a story about a family like us. I never once saw myself in any of the texts we read. LGBTQ+ role models were not a thing. Outside of our home, we knew we were not of the many, but of the few.
Culturally diverse visibility, perspective, and representation is important, because kids cannot be what they cannot see.
This is why culturally responsive literacy is so important because the texts our kids get to interact with, explore, and discuss, impact the language they use in conversations, provides validation of utilizing the literature as mirrors of themselves, and creating windows into new understandings and perspectives. We should work to “disrupt the default” with positive, empowering works, perspectives, and representations of culturally diverse people, and consider what is curriculum versus what is reality.
Responsive Reads
When determining what types of cultural texts are out there, it’s important to understand what is authentic, generic, and neutral. Lydia McClanahan has an amazing website called Responsive Reads where she identifies fiction and non-fiction texts, breaking books down by the rings of culture.
Culturally Authentic texts provides readers with authentic cultural experiences and perspectives of a particular group. How they communicate, how they problem solve, what their perceptions are, how they are portrayed, etc. is depicted in a culturally authentic manner.
Culturally generic texts have characters of different identities but are superficial in detail. It provides the mainstream perception of those characters.
Culturally neutral texts have characters of color but that is the extent of that character’s description. There are quality texts that build literacy skills but are still culturally neutral. It is good to know how we are using certain texts.
We should be cognizant that the stories we read from culturally diverse backgrounds should not only be focused on the struggles and tragedies of its characters or taught in a silo. We should be celebrating and highlighting the victorious and successful individuals, regularly. Kids can be what they can see, and stereotypes have a chance to dissipate.
For my middle schoolers, as I was needing to supplement and rebuild nearly all literature within my curriculum, something we enjoyed doing when reading stories and books was to learn about the author beforehand. We learned about who the author was, pondered why they would write a story or book like this, what their life experiences were, during what time period they were writing this story. This helped us reflect and acknowledge beyond the fact that this author was Mexican or that storyteller was LGBTQ+. We normalized writer’s diverse lives and experiences so that we could see their humanness. We could see ourselves in them. We could connect with them in different rings of culture (Hollie, 2017) and learn about what we did not know about cultures.
Learning About and Creating a Diverse Classroom Library
We Need Diverse Books is a great organization that has provided lists of resources for race, equity, anti-racism, and inclusion, as well as places to find diverse books.
Language Validation
The language we read and use plays an important aspect of validating culture. These are some articles regarding the history and meaning of African American Vernacular English, bringing our multilingual learner’s languages into our classrooms, and the impact language has on our psychological and social needs.