Literature That Reflects the World
Literature That Reflects the World
Laura Jiménez is working to disrupt the traditional primary and secondary school reading curriculum, “one teacher at a time”
When Laura M. Jiménez finally learned to read at age 11—she’d been held back by dyslexia—she was smitten. She devoured Judy Blume, the Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew, who “was always getting conked on the head,” as Jiménez recalls. “I worried she was going to get a concussion.”
“I had a not great childhood,” says Jiménez, who is Latinx and a lesbian and grew up in Long Beach, Calif. “Reading was an escape, a place to hide. I read more than I did homework. I hardly ever read what was assigned in school.”
What was missing from the books she was assigned in school, such as The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird, was anyone who looked like her, or shared any part of her identity. Instead, says Jiménez, there were soul-crushing negative stereotypes—drug lords, prostitutes, wacky Speedy Gonzales characters, closeted gay people. “The message is that your story isn’t valued, that you don’t belong in school,” Jiménez says. “I learned that school was not my place.”
And yet, as Jiménez would discover later, school was her place. Now, as a senior lecturer and scholar of literacy and children’s literature, Jiménez is a leader in a growing movement to bring more diverse writers, as well as books and stories about complex characters who are Black, Indigenous, people of color, LGBTQIA+, and from other marginalized and underrepresented groups, into the nation’s elementary and secondary school classrooms.
“We need to have a literature that reflects the world,” says Jiménez, who has a PhD in educational technology and educational psychology from Michigan State University and also serves as BU Wheelock’s associate dean for equity, diversity, and inclusion.
The nation’s demographics are changing rapidly, and a majority of public school students are now nonwhite. And yet the standardized English Language Arts curriculum that teachers are expected to follow in schools across the country still relies heavily on white authors writing about white people, say Jiménez and other educators and scholars.
“If you’re still focused on Tuck Everlasting—or on Shakespeare or Steinbeck—you’re sending the message that marginalized voices, marginalized history, and marginalized stories aren’t important,” Jiménez says.
She and other educators aren’t suggesting that the classics be discarded: “We’re saying there are other great books.”
Jiménez cites research showing that kids who are given a choice of books tend to read more—and read more carefully. That was certainly true for her. She waxes rhapsodic about the card catalogue in her old branch library in Long Beach. “I loved, loved, loved the card catalogue, because you could browse,” she says.
A Book is a Window, or a Mirror
Jiménez teaches literacy and children’s literature to undergraduate and graduate students who are aspiring teachers, or teacher candidates, as they’re called, and classroom teachers who come to BU Wheelock for additional training and certification. She approaches teaching—and her critical analysis of literacy and children’s literature—through what she and other educators describe as an intersectional social justice lens.
Explaining how the term applies to elementary and secondary school classrooms, Jiménez writes in a January 2021 article for Language Arts Lessons, the journal for the National Council of Teachers of English, “Teacher candidates must learn to recognize, appreciate and celebrate identities that are different from their own across multiple matrices of race, ethnicity, language, gender, sexuality, ability, religion and class.”
“Intersectionality—the term was coined by scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw—recognizes that we all have multiple facets to our identities,” she writes.
Books that authentically represent diverse characters are valuable for all young readers, says Jiménez, and can teach white children about people who are different from them. In her article, Jiménez cites the work of Rudine Sims Bishop, an Ohio State University professor emerita, who, in a 1990 article about the lack of authentic representation of African Americans in children’s literature, suggested that books can be windows for readers into real or imagined worlds, sliding doors allowing readers to visit those worlds, or mirrors reflecting the reader’s world. “Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation,” Bishop wrote.
The metaphor is more relevant than ever today, says Jiménez. “Because readers bring their identities and life experiences into their transactions with texts,” she writes, “a book can be a window for one reader and a mirror for another.” It follows, she adds, that “teachers’ expertise and understanding of the students and the literature is essential.”
“Because readers bring their identities and life experiences into their transactions with texts, a book can be a window for one reader and a mirror for another.”–Laura Jiménez
Jiménez teaches and recommends children’s books referred to as #OwnVoices, which was developed on Twitter and promotes kidlit by authors from marginalized or underrepresented groups writing about people like themselves. Such books include The Parker Inheritance by Varian Johnson and Ivy Aberdeen’s Letter to the World by Ashley Herring Blake.
Jiménez has her own requirements for these books: They must show “marginalized individuals as whole people, leading complex lives that do not adhere to the dominant white narrative,” she writes in her article. They must also push back against biased narratives about marginalized communities, be relevant to the students reading them, promote deep engagement, and address literacy skills and standards.
It’s a lot to ask from a book, says Jiménez. However, when she brings a book into the classroom, she writes, “I’m using the most precious resource there is in education—time,” and she wants to be sure the book is worthy of everyone’s time.
Disrupting the Reading Curriculum
The nation’s teachers are 80 percent white and, says Jiménez, the majority of her BU Wheelock students are white, middle-class women. “These are people who want to be teachers because they loved school,” she says. “The system is literally made for them. How do I convince them that this thing that was really good for them needs to change, and that they’re the ones who have to change it?”
Her students, especially the millennials, end up embracing the literature she introduces to them. “They’ve grown up in a world where, although they were not taught in school about oppressive systems, they’ve lived through it,” she says. “They grew up with Ferguson. They saw it on social media.”
Jiménez wants to disrupt the traditional whiteness-centered reading curriculum “teacher by teacher. We’re asking them to teach anti-oppression in the classroom,” she says. “It’s a really scary time for teachers to be doing that.”
She is referring to the latest culture wars playing out in Texas, Virginia, Washington, D.C., New Hampshire, and other states across the country, with conservative Republicans at the national, state, and local levels taking steps to block curriculums in primary and secondary schools that emphasize systemic racism. Their targets include books and teaching they deem focused on identity, and the nation’s racist history.
“We’re trying to figure out if these things go through, how can teachers work around them,” Jiménez says.
Changing or even just expanding the reading curriculum has long been an uphill battle. When her students enter their own classrooms, they often experience pushback from the school bureaucracy, Jiménez says. “They’ll say they don’t have time for new books—that if you’re going to add something, then you have to give something up,” she says. But teachers have some autonomy in individual classrooms, and Jiménez sees part of her role as helping her former students navigate bureaucracies and avoid “getting swallowed up by a system that doesn’t support their ideas.”
For Jiménez, some of the opposition has become personal. She analyzes and recommends graphic novels for children on her blog, Booktoss. Her followers include teachers, children’s librarians, and other scholars. Writing about being a Latinx lesbian who wants to disrupt the status quo, she has grown accustomed to getting bashed and bullied on social media. But in 2018, after she criticized a new graphic novel for being overtly racist and Islamophobic—the publisher subsequently pulled the book amid the loud outcry—a letter loaded with obscene, hate-filled death threats against her arrived via snail mail in her BU mailbox. BU administrators and security officials responded immediately, says Jiménez, and went to great lengths to ensure her safety.
Jiménez shut down her blog for almost six months, but eventually decided she was not going to be silenced. “You can just say, ‘Fine, it’s not worth it, I’m going away,’ or you can take all the precautions you need and keep moving forward,” she says, adding that she has been strongly supported by her colleagues, other scholars, and teachers, as well as her family.
Among several other projects, Jiménez and other BU Wheelock faculty members are exploring a partnership with 826 Boston, a widely admired nonprofit youth writing program in Roxbury, Mass. “They teach writing like nobody’s business,” says Jiménez. The idea is for BU Wheelock students to learn from 826 Boston about teaching creative writing, and for 826 Boston to learn more about reading children’s literature.
It fits with Jiménez’s mission, for kids from marginalized and underrepresented groups to have access to the literature she believes they deserve: high-quality books that will help them become lifelong readers, like her. Kids might love a book because it surprises them, Jiménez writes on Booktoss, “or because it reflects them in ways that they have never seen before, provides them respite from their everyday lives, or shows them things they never knew or imagined.”
