In the United States, a majority-white children's publishing industry is increasingly marketing books labeled as "antiracist," which may inadvertently center the comfort of white children, often at the expense of BIPOC children. This article proposes a critical "white" literacy approach and uses it to analyze two children's…

This article asks: How is peacemaking represented in the Jane Addams Children's Book Award (JACBA) collection of children's book awardees (2015-2021)? The authors sought to build on previous scholarship that has examined JACBA, including Taber's (2015) study of JACBA for older readers and Colabucci and Napoli's (2017) study of JACBA's books for…

African American children's literature is a subcategory of diverse books that has benefited from critical theoretical research as well as historical and contemporary social movements. More recently, activist bloggers and online movements have extended the work of activist librarians and critically conscious educators and parents. These individual…

Rudine Sims Bishop (1990) emphasized that children need to see themselves as well as others reflected in the books available to them. For children who are deaf, images of themselves that are "distorted or laughable or inaccurate" (Bishop, 1997) negatively impact their self-esteem and reinforce their marginalized status. The portrayals of…

The existence of transgender children is not new. However, for over 100 years, Western culture has worked to restrict the gender expressions and gender identities of children. This forces them into a binary model of gender understanding. This critical content analysis examined the ways that transgender children within picturebooks can both conform…

Children's literature scholars have written about the importance of color in the visual texts of picturebooks: Color can establish mood, provide clues to the emotional states of characters, highlight particular objects in illustrations, and signal links between characters and/or objects (e.g., Lewis, 2001; Moebius, 1986; Nodelman, 1988). However,…

LGBTQ+ identities complicate the ways in which #OwnVoices can be deployed in literary analysis and author studies. Recognizing LGBTQ+ identities in literature is about more than just the text; it is about the visibility and success of LGBTQ+ authors as well. Through a discussion of reader response theory and politics of recognition, the author…

Sharing literature representative of students' diverse experiences opens up conversations, invites inquiry, and develops empathy (Ward & Warren, 2020). It is well documented, however, that these books can be challenging to locate in schools, libraries, and bookstores (Bickmore, Xu, & Sheridan, 2017; Crisp et al., 2016; Jipson & Paley,…

Racism impacts various facets of the lives of people of color (POC) in the United States, spanning across historical and contemporary contexts. Chinese Americans, as an ethnic group historically excluded from entering the United States and denied naturalized citizenship, have endured distinctive and enduring forms of racism that are…

This article examines the pedagogical potential of art-based, early critical literacy as a space in which young bilingual children can explore the issues of human diversity and uniqueness. Adopting a qualitative case study approach, this study focused on 12 five-year-old children of Mexican origin at a charter school located in Texas.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion has long been the focus of educational scholarship. This study explores the potential of wordless books with protagonists of color for children to access portraits of diverse characters and engage with various stories. To expand the existing body of literature on diversity in picturebooks, this study offers two…

Recently, an awareness of the value of representation has demanded an expanded canon of texts that includes those concerning children with illnesses. Research shows that reading such texts to children with illnesses or disabilities has proven validating, comforting, and helpful in the development of a positive self-image (Goddard, 2011). This…

Historically, early lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer-inclusive (LGBTQ+) picturebooks deployed representations of (in)human characters (i.e., birds, bunnies, shapeshifters, and more) to open readers to queer subjects (Young, 2019). While useful for expanding conceptions of queer life, such a move has had unintended consequences. The…

In this article, we argue that picturebooks about food production, consumption, and distribution can provide rich opportunities for early childhood educators to facilitate critical conversations about culture, power, social action, and justice with their students.

Body image is a broad, multidimensional construct that encompasses an individual's perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about their own body, most often in relation to its physical appearance (Cash & Pruzinsky, 1990; Schilder, 2013; Thompson et al., 1999). Until relatively recently, the majority of body image and body-dissatisfaction research…