Wednesday, December 5, 2012 Last Update:
For Young Latino Readers, an Image Is Missing
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Third-grade students at Bayard Taylor Elementary in Philadelphia. Educators say children need more familiar images.
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PHILADELPHIA —Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times
Like many of his third-grade classmates, Mario
Cortez-Pacheco likes reading the “Magic Tree House” series, about a
brother and a sister who take adventurous trips back in time. He also
loves the popular “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” graphic novels.
But Mario, 8, has noticed something about these and many of the other
books he encounters in his classroom at Bayard Taylor Elementary here:
most of the main characters are white. “I see a lot of people that don’t
have a lot of color,” he said.
Hispanic students now make up nearly a quarter
of the nation’s public school enrollment, according to an analysis of
census data by the Pew Hispanic Center, and are the fastest-growing
segment of the school population. Yet nonwhite Latino children seldom
see themselves in books written for young readers. (Dora the Explorer,
who began as a cartoon character, is an outlier.)
Education experts and teachers who work with large Latino populations
say that the lack of familiar images could be an obstacle as young
readers work to build stamina and deepen their understanding of story
elements like character motivation.
While there are exceptions, including books by Julia Alvarez, Pam Muñoz
Ryan, Alma Flor Ada and Gary Soto, what is available is “not finding its
way into classrooms,” said Patricia Enciso, an associate professor at
Ohio State University. Books commonly read by elementary school children
— those with human characters rather than talking animals or wizards —
include the Junie B. Jones, Cam Jansen, Judy Moody, Stink and Big Nate
series, all of which feature a white protagonist. An occasional
African-American, Asian or Hispanic character may pop up in a supporting
role, but these books depict a predominantly white, suburban milieu.
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| At Bayard Taylor Elementary in Philadelphia, three-quarters of the students are Hispanic. |
“Kids do have a different kind of connection when they see a character
that looks like them or they experience a plot or a theme that relates
to something they’ve experienced in their lives,” said Jane Fleming, an
assistant professor at the Erikson Institute, a graduate school in early
childhood development in Chicago.
She and Sandy Ruvalcaba Carrillo, an elementary school teacher in
Chicago who works with students who speak languages other than English
at home, reviewed 250 book series aimed at second to fourth graders and
found just two that featured a Latino main character.
The Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, which compiles statistics about
the race of authors and characters in children’s books published each
year, found that in 2011, just over 3 percent of the 3,400 books reviewed were written by or about Latinos, a proportion that has not changed much in a decade.
As schools across the country implement the Common Core — national
standards for what students should learn in English and math — many
teachers are questioning whether nonwhite students are seeing themselves
reflected in their reading.
For the early elementary grades, lists of suggested books contain some
written by African-American authors about black characters, but few by
Latino writers or featuring Hispanic characters. Now, in response to
concerns registered by the Southern Poverty Law Center and others, the
architects of the Common Core are developing a more diverse supplemental
list. “We have really taken a careful look, and really think there is a
problem,” said Susan Pimentel, one of the lead writers of the standards
for English language and literacy. “We are determined to make this
right.”
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