Blog post

For my blog post, I wanted to focus on how international children’s literature lacks diversity in the books that are published. Many times when I’m reading a children’s literature book, I rarely see some races come across my eyes and I feel like we don’t emphasize that as a problem. Unfortunately, the same problem happens with international literature and most of it is focuses on a few races. From the article “Diversity in Contemporary Picturebooks” they explain the importance of a child reading and seeing images of kids that are similar to themselves (Koss, 2015). The article says “Picture Books are written artifacts that convey cultural messages and values about society and help children learn about their world” (p. 32). The impact that seeing yourself do something positive in a published book is very big for kids. It’s hard for kids to grow up and read books never coming across a character that they can relate to or someone that looks like them. Kids struggle to have any motivation about their own race from literature because they mostly are not included in most published books. For example, I rarely seen any black kids in books I read growing up until I had to search online for books that I thought I could relate to.

Work cited:

Koss, M. D. (2015). Diversity in contemporary picturebooks: A content analysis. Journal of Children’s Literature, 41(1), 32.