Guessing Geisel: A Mock Geisel Blog: Beginning Readers, Diversity and Reading Motivation

Gigi Pagliarulo

This week's guest contributor is Gigi Pagliarulo, a librarian for the Denver Public Library. Gigi is especially interested in youth services, early literacy, and issues of diversity and multiculturalism within children's literature and programming, has served on the steering committee of Colorado Libraries for Early Literacy, and the CLEL Bell Picture Book Award Selection Committee.

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Guessing Geisel + #WeNeedDiverseBooks = #WeNeedDiverseBeginning Readers! Over the last few years, I’ve written for Guessing Geisel about a variety of issues related to diversity and beginning readers, including why we need diverse beginning readers, #EverydayDiversity and #OwnVoices.

Learning to read isn’t an easy or natural process for humans. While we evolved to talk and communicate orally, reading and writing require existing neural pathways to be repurposed in order to connect several different areas of the brain. Children need to connect how a word looks with how it sounds and what it means and then do it over and over again, stringing words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs. This is hard work and requires that children have the motivation to persist through the inevitable struggles and discomfort of the process of learning how to read.

This reading motivation comes from several areas, including choice and personal relevance. Kids who can self-select books that reflect their interests and life experiences demonstrate more reading motivation. This is where diversity and equity in beginning readers come into play. When we review Rudine Sims Bishop’s essential piece that outlines children’s need for books to be both windows and mirrors, we can understand that seeing oneself reflected in the pages of a book (or conversely never or rarely seeing oneself reflected while reading) could strongly affect children’s reading motivation. As the International Literacy Association writes in a 2018 Literacy Leadership Brief, “For students to recognize their own communities in the books they are taught or self-select is critical to the personal engagement that drives deeper literacy.” That personal engagement is the foundational factor in reading motivation.

The more choices available to children of diverse, self-reflective and high-quality books available, the greater the likelihood that more children will find the reading motivation they need to support their developing literacy. Unfortunately, as my prior blogs have discussed, research and experience has shown a continued paucity of children’s literature by and about people of color, people with disabilities and LGBTQ+ folks. There are but a few published each year, so here are recommendations for all the diverse, high-quality beginning readers published in 2019. If you find more, please post them in the comments. And as always, I want to remind the publishing industry that #WeNeedMoreDiverseBeginningReaders by #OwnVoices authors, and I need your help!

Here are three ways to take action to let publishers know you want more diverse and #OwnVoices titles:

Going to a library conference? Stop by publisher booths and ask a rep for their favorite upcoming diverse and #OwnVoices titles.
If you do any purchasing at your library, contact your vendor and publisher reps and ask specifically for diverse and #OwnVoices.
Use social media to cheer on publishers who put out diverse and #OwnVoices titles, and let them you know want more.

Andrew & Ana series by Christine Platt, illustrated by Sharon Sordo*