Critical multicultural analysis provides a philosophical shift for teaching literature, constructing curriculum, and taking up issues of diversity and social justice. It problematizes children's literature, offers a way of reading power, explores the complex web of sociopolitical relations, and deconstructs taken-for-granted assumptions about language, meaning, reading, and literature: It is literary study as sociopolitical change.
Bringing a critical lens to the study of multiculturalism in children's literature, this book invites teachers, teacher educators, and researchers of children's literature to analyze the ideological dimensions of reading and studying literature. Critical multicultural analysis offers mirrors for readers to locate themselves in text and image and unveils language use as reflections of power; provides windows or multiple views of society; and, through critical engagement with texts and their lived experiences, opens doors for readers to re-imagine and transform the world.
Each chapter includes recommendations for classroom application, classroom research, and further reading. Helpful end-of-book appendixes include a list of international, national, regional, and culturally specific children's book awards; lists of publishers, organized by conglomerates and small presses; diagrams of the power continuum and the theoretical framework of critical multicultural analysis; and lists of selected children's literature journals and online resources.