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This article discusses pre- and inservice teachers' attitudes and beliefs about children's literature that presents non-mainstream values and experiences. By exploring what teachers explicity label as inappropriate for classroom use and why they do so, Wollman-Bonilla directly identifies teachers' criteria for rejection of literature and describes how these criteria are consciously applied.
When I was in my third year of teaching, a position opened up in my school that allowed me to move from second to sixth grade. As part of my interview I had to teach a social studies lesson to a sixth-grade class. I chose to teach a lesson focusing on racial discrimination, using Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976). I read aloud a powerful section in which the young, Black, female narrator experienced a brutal, humiliating verbal assault, and followed the reading with an open-ended discussion of the text. I used newspaper articles to make the bridge to current racial discrimination. I judged the lesson successful-students were engaged and many offered thoughtful, sensitive reactions to the book, the articles, and peers' comments.
Afterward, the principal told me he was impressed with my courage in reading aloud from Taylor's (1976) powerful and honest book. This surprised me; I hadn't considered my choice courageous. I was simply trying to help the predominantly White sixth-graders recognize and think critically about racism.
Nine years later, I read the same book aloud to a group of students in my graduate class on teaching language arts. When I asked them to respond to what I had read, the first comment was: "Of course, you'd never read this book in a classroom of children." This sort of comment, indicating a desire to avoid addressing sociocultural differences and discrimination has lately become much more common in my classes. As teachers carry out the work of selecting texts for classroom use, many seem to lack the courage to present nonmainstream perspectives and experiences, and they lack faith in children's ability to recognize and handle difficult issues.
TEACHERS' TEXT SELECTION
Every children's book reflects a sociocultural perspective-a set of values and beliefs (Jipson dz Paley, 1991; Luke, Cooke Er Luke, 1986). Further, most texts used in classrooms express the dominant values in a society; mainstream, middleclass values in...