We stumbled across this question this week on
Edweek.org. I wonder how many white teachers have thought about this question.
Here’s one piece of advice offered up in the article:
Get the right books into our students’ hands. Children of color need books to be mirrors as well as windows. In most classrooms, there aren’t enough of those mirrors. A survey of children’s literature published in 2015 found that 73.3 percent of the books had a main character who was white, 12.5 percent featured a talking truck or animal, 7.6 percent had an African-American protagonist, and a scant 2.4 percent of the main characters featured were Latino. Still, the right books are out there—check out Scholastic’s We Need Diverse Books catalog for a start.
