We Need Diverse Books Because . . .

If someone had taken

that book out of my hand

said You're too old for this

maybe

I'd never have believed

that someone who looked like me

could be in the pages of the book

that someone who looked like me

had a story.

-Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

I have been following the We Need Diverse Books campaign and wanted to connect with my students regarding diversity in our library. I decided to create an activity for seventh graders that would allow us to talk a little about what being diverse means to us, as well as looking at some of the resources available in our collection.

In order to facilitate a discussion, I had the students start with a Circle Map. Each Thinking Map has a thinking process that students must go through when completing it. A Circle Map is meant to help define a word or concept. I created a map with "diverse" in the center and students were asked to define it using synonyms and/or words that remind them of diversity. After a short period, students shared their ideas with their shoulder partners and then we shared as a class, adding to our own maps and checking for words we already had written down.

Following the mapping process, I displayed a series of book covers and asked the students to decide if they thought each one was diverse or not and tell why. This was a fascinating look into how kids view book covers and diversity. We discussed how sometimes it is possible to discover diverse attributes from the cover alone and how we often have to look beyond the cover to find out more before we decide.

After our discussions, students wrote exit tickets that are now displayed on a bulletin board in the library answering the prompt, "#Weneeddiversebooks Because." The answers vary from not wanting to be "bored" by the same types of books, to wanting to read a variety of genres, to wanting to see myself, to wanting to learn about other cultures. In other words, the students viewed diversity through a variety of lenses and then responded with their personal viewpoint.

 I am planning to follow up this activity with a series of displays that will help the students see diversity in all of the forms they mentioned, as well as other views. As we continue through the year, I'm hoping that my students will have the opportunity to experience both windows and mirrors in the books they choose from our library.