Featuring Difference

In April, Margy Burns Knight and I spend six days in Philadelphia-area schools, presenting on the five books she wrote and I illustrated: the two Talking Walls titles; Who Belongs Here: An American Story; Welcoming Babies; and Africa Is Not A Country. As all these books concern the diversity of human experience - in culture, language, race, religion, etc. - Margy and I use every opportunity to address the topic of difference in a positive light.

We often begin our talks with information about ourselves as children. Some students in these Philadelphia suburban schools can see themselves in Margy's story of being raised in nearby Villanova and, by her description, "never going anywhere except school, church, the library and the grocery store." Her extensive international experience didn't happen until she was an adult.

Other students can identify with my story of living in the U.S. until age seven, when our family moved to South Korea and I began to learn two languages and two cultures. They or their parents may have been born in another country and moved to the U.S. 

In some classes, we open with the slide I use here on my blog, of me celebrating my eighth birthday in Seoul with Korean friends. I start speaking in Korean, telling a little about my childhood experience. 

Then, still speaking Korean, I say, "If you can understand what I'm saying, please come to the front of the room." Seated students watch mystified as a few of their classmates stand and move forward to join me. Sometimes one or several of the students interpret, telling their classmates what I'd said in Korean. 

We count from one to five in Korean, then ask for volunteers who can count to five in any language other than English. Proud students stand to demonstrate their skill in Farsi, Chinese, Arabic, French, Spanish, Hindi and many other languages.

Teachers often tell us what a special moment this is for their non-majority, bilingual students, many of whom started out in ESOL classes. For once, their difference puts them in the center rather than on the fringe. For a moment, their bicultural and bilingual upbringing is recognized as something special and valuable.

Universal Questions

It's been a busy spring, chock full of travel and school visits. Now that I'm finally getting to catch my breath and take a look back, I find I've made numerous discoveries in the exploration of race and culture through children's books. 

In January and February, author Margy Burns Knight and I 

worked  at Longley Elementary School in Lewiston, Maine, as part of a family literacy project sponsored by the Harwood Center for Community Partnerships at Bates College. 

Lewiston's population is a mixture of Franco-American families who have been there for generations and recently-arrived families from Somalia, as well as other ethnic and cultural heritages. 

We led Longley's third grade students in writing and illustrating books about "family treasures" - the activities, traditions and celebrations shared in their families. First, Margy and I met with the Bates College education students who would be assisting the Longley third graders with their project. We coached them in preparation for a Story Swap evening for the elementary students and their family members. 

We started with a list of possible topics: games, wishes, jokes and riddles, folk tales, lullabies and songs, food, holidays and celebrations, and journeys. We encouraged the college students to share something from their own lives, followed by a question to evoke a story from the third graders and their family members. It was challenging to devise questions for a diverse audience that indicated a respect for all stories as having equal value.

For instance, one of the college students tried this prompt: "I went to a concert by my favorite band recently. Do you go to music concerts?" That helped the group see that the questions needed to be open-ended so that they encouraged stories rather than yes or no answers. They

also needed to be free from cultural and other assumptions. Music concerts might be outside the experience of an adult Somali whose background included war and a refugee camp, or the experience of any third grader. 

We suggested that the college students use memories from their own childhoods, followed by a universal question such as "What makes your family laugh?"

The resulting Story Swap was a delightful evening full of lively exchanges among the Bates students, the Longley students, and their families, topped off with a shared meal of pizza. 

The month of work that followed produced proud student authors, a collection of stories, and an opportunity for families to share literacy while preserving their traditions.

Africa Is Not a Country

I illustrated Africa is Not a Country in 2000. These days, it’s suddenly current again. The election postmortem accusation by a McCain staffer that Governor Sarah Palin thought that the continent was one country made the national news, and denials and counter attacks kept the media feeding on the story.

Some professed shock – nobody could be that misinformed! – but in my experience, it’s not that surprising. I’ve met a number of perfectly intelligent adults, including a teacher or two, who’ve reacted to the book's title with a puzzled, “It’s not?!”

It’s not that people are completely unaware of the countries of Africa. Most Americans could probably name six or seven of the fifty-three. The problem is that we’re just not paying attention.

Our habit of lumping all the countries together as one place, Africa, blinds us to the extraordinary richness and diversity of the continent. In a September interview on "Meet the Press," former president Bill Clinton suggested that we should “have a cessation in the use of the word 'Africa' for just eighteen months while America learns that Africa is a continent.”

The twin historical scourges of slavery and colonialism have a lingering legacy, often unconscious, in our failure to recognize the peoples of Africa in their full humanity, dignity and value. This plays out in contemporary news, where we hear much of warfare in Darfur and the eastern Congo, and the devastation of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, but little about, for instance, the extraordinary success of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, or the South African convening of The Elders by Nelson Mandela, Graca Machel and Desmond Tutu.

When I visited South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe in 1998, I was deeply stirred not by war and devastation but by the museum tour of Robben Island where Mandela spent sixteen years, the World Heritage site of Great Zimbabwe National Monument, and the warm friendliness of people I met while traveling who gave me directions and shared their snacks with me.

As we could see in internet photos last week, the citizens of Kenya and of countries all over the African continent watched our election with tremendous excitement. They’re very aware of us. Students I met in Zimbabwe knew all the names of U.S. presidents. We can help our own students join the world community by offering them better information about the countries and peoples of the African continent.

For more information:
"What We Want Children to Learn About Africa" by Margy Burns Knight in Teaching for Change

"I Didn't Know There Were Cities in Africa!" by Brenda Randolph and Elizabeth DeMulder for Teaching Tolerance