The Importance of Diversifying Classroom Literature

All across America, classrooms have welcomed an increasing number of students from different cultural backgrounds and races. One can only hope that the education system diversifies its curriculum to keep up with the reality.

By fall of 2017, out of the 50.7 million students enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools, 24.1 million were White, 7.7 million were Black, 13.6 million were Hispanic, 2.6 million were Asian, 185,000 were Pacific Islander, half a million were American Indian/Alaska Native, and 2 million were of Two or more races (National Center of Education Statistics). Reports continue to show that the number of colored and Black students in public schools only continue to increase whereas more than three-fourths of the teachers working at these schools are white. It is very important that given the lack of diversity among the faculty, the increasingly diverse student body is able to see themselves represented in some way in education.

Start Lighthouse is a non-profit organization located in the Bronx which supports life-long literacy through a two-generational approach. As an organization, we have increasingly worked towards this goal of diversifying education. Our non-profit plays a significant role in the community by creating access for students through customized literacy kits, literacy programming with a racial justice lens, and fundamental community workshops for families. Start Lighthouse’s resources assist schools in their pursuit of a more diversified educational system which pertains to students of all backgrounds.

While speaking to Start Lighthouse’s Co-Founder Anya Morales and Director of Literacy Yackira Rodolis on their experiences teaching in the classroom, they described the importance of decolonizing our educational system. Yackira currently teaches first-grade in the Bronx and has been teaching for nearly a decade. Anya has taught English to students in grades 3–8 within the Bronx. They both noticed that their students were disengaged with the commonly used curriculum which includes books that do not represent any sense of cultural diversity. Yackira currently uses Success For All which she noted was slightly dated. Yet, it has been instrumental in helping her kids learn how to read while being inclusive for children of color.

Anya believes that “students can learn better when they are able to see themselves in education and connect to it…if they can’t see themselves in school and see themselves in what they are learning why would that be relevant to them.” Anya highlighted the importance of diversifying the existing school curriculum. According to Yackira, the literacy kits were a key reason why she joined Start Lighthouse, “One of the guiding principles for our customized literacy kits is to allow children to see themselves in these books and that’s something that was missing when I was growing up. I love books, but I never felt like I could relate to some of the characters.”

Thus, literature is an effective way to achieve this, allowing students to see themselves in what they read will spark their interest in the classroom. Anya commented on how much more engaging her English classroom was when she got her kids to read James McBrides’ The Color of Water or an excerpt from Ta-Nehisi-Coates’s Between the World and Me. “I was just really surprised as to why we were not teaching more stuff like this,” she commented, “I had kids who would never speak in class suddenly be super into it because they saw themselves in these texts.”

The classroom should be a haven for these kids to grow and explore themselves as people, and the curriculum should be able to support them in this endeavour. While teaching at a Montessori Preschool, Yackira noticed a lack of literacy materials geared towards minority students. “When I was in that preschool I noticed that kids from all over the world came to the school, and we only had books that showed Caucasian students…from there I figured there has to be something else,” she mentioned. Anya and Yackira both joined Start Lighthouse in hopes of creating a more inclusive curriculum for the classroom.

And so far, Start Lighthouse has made a lot of progress, Anya notes how difficult it is to switch out the curriculum. That is why Start Lighthouse is here. Our curriculum is designed to meet both national and state standards and is designed to meet the diverse needs of all our students. It is imperative to note that a diversified curriculum is not just for students of color but also for white students who need to break away from their stigmatized beliefs.

In these times of division, Start Lighthouse can help to usher classrooms into a unified culture through our aim to decolonize education.