Immigrants Who Have Changed the Course of History: Contemporary Picturebooks of Border Crossers

Introduction

The opening epigraph illuminates the authors’ belief in the power of diverse children’s literature, literature that can enhance young children’s exposure to the greater world outside their lived experiences. An exposure that can inform, expand, and create empathy in young children. Too often, however, young children are denied these opportunities as different affinity groups seek to prevent their access to reading materials deemed controversial for the child reader.

The last few years have seen an aggressive book-banning drive, particularly at the K-12 education levels. These book-banning efforts are heavily politically motivated and seem to be spreading across the United States (Dallacqua, 2022; Spilka, 2022). PEN America, an organization founded by creatives in 1922, tracks all books banned in libraries and classrooms across the United States, keeping a catalog of these titles in their Index of School Book Bans (PEN American). Friedman and Johnson (2022) reported that for books banned in the 2021-2022 school year, 40% portrayed protagonists or prominent secondary characters of color, 21% were titles with issues of race and racism, and 9% were either biography, autobiography, or memoir. These alarming percentages, as many as 70% of all books banned in k-12 schools, ascertain the importance of sharing good literature across education spaces, and equipping teachers and parents with the tools to repel the far-reaching effects of current book ban efforts. The International Literacy Association (2018) determined that the “promise of literature as a pathway into new worlds and as a potentially transformative experience for students cannot be underestimated” (p. 7). Hence, this chapter echoes the importance of ensuring that young readers are given the opportunity to quality reading materials, particularly children’s literature.

Beginning with a short overview of immigrants and their experiences in the USA, this chapter presents a brief review of critical literacy and how it is employed across the three-lenses framework: Reader Lens, Evaluative Lens, and Instructional Lens to interrogate children’s literature. Utilizing the tenets of critical literacy, the chapter advocates for teacher readers to read for their enjoyment and discovery before delving deeper to interrogate the texts for instructional usage and integration. Morrell (2017) posited that a critical literacy framework “requires that teachers be positioned as intellectuals and agents of change” (p. 458). Thus, the chapter focuses on how teachers can use this framework to select and enjoy quality literature before thinking of integrating them in their classrooms.

Using the three-lenses approach as a framework for delving more deeply into literature explorations, teacher readers first engage with the text, evaluate its content, then determine how they can use the text in their curriculum. The chapter then describes how the framework can be used with a text set of seven picturebooks, all portraying experiences of immigrants to the United States. Each story presents the biography of individuals whose work and lives have made a positive contribution to the United States. The goal of the chapter is to provide a way forward for teachers to critically engage with children’s literature as readers, before immediately moving to strategize how to integrate them in their curricula.