Multicultural Professional Review

Lu, Mei-Yu. Multicultural Children's Literature in the Elementary Classroom. ERIC Digest. ERIC Clearinghouse on Reading English and Communication Bloomington IN. 1998.


While searching for professional reviews I came across a critical review in the Eric Digest reviewing multicultural children's literature in the elementary classroom. I became intrigued because much of what the article was talking about had to do with the importance and criteria that needs to be found within books to be labeled multicultural. I found that these criteria strongly related to the books I chose to review. One of my favorite quotes is "Jenkins and Austin (1987) suggest that cultural understanding can be reached in many ways, such as by making friends with people from different cultures." This was strongly seen as a similar characteristic throughout many African American literature reviewed. The review also spoke about these multicultural pieces of literature "taking individuals or a group of people whose stories take place in a specific historical and physical setting". Again I learned that there truly was meaning behind why each of these reviewed books seemed to take place in the past. This was later revealed to serve as a significant stereotype decreaser.

Finally, one of my other favorite quote was as follows, "Exposure to quality multicultural literature also helps children appreciate the idiosyncrasies of other ethnic groups, eliminate cultural ethnocentrism, and develop multiple perspectives." I agree with this statement and see it to be something very important when deciding to have multicultural literature in a classroom environment.

The link to this and other alike reviews is http://www.ericdigests.org/1999-2/literature.htm. I found that this is a positive and informational critical review of multicultural literature.