When we started Skylark we wanted our children’s inventory to be as representative and inclusive as possible, and so we asked Dr. Angie Zapata, an expert in diverse children’s books, for advice. Thanks to her expertise, a quick browse of our shelves will give you a sense of the rich and beautiful variety of kids’ picture books presently available. So now we are absolutely thrilled to welcome Angie to Skylark to celebrate the publication of her new book, Deepening Student Engagement with Diverse Picturebooks. This event will be of interest to all educators from Pre-K to 6th Grade.
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.
Featuring 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.
Dr. Angie Zapata, associate professor of Language and Literacies Education at the University of Missouri, is a longtime teacher, teacher educator and researcher. Through collaborative inquiry partnerships with practicing and inservice PK-12 teachers, her research publications highlight classroom experiences featuring picturebooks with diverse representation, and how/what translingual and transmodal literacies are produced in these moments. Dr. Zapata’s research is guided by her experiences growing up bilingual in Texas as a daughter of immigrant parents from Perú, and deep commitments to center anti-oppressive and justice-oriented language and literacies experiences in the classroom that nurture more inclusive schooling experiences for racialized bi/multilingual/multidialectal children and youth.
