Creating dialogic space around purposeful selection for reading and teaching diverse children’s literature

Diverse children’s literature can support understandings of our world as culturally, linguistically, and socially rich. It can cultivate empathy and understanding, and open a dialogic space of possibilities. In this article, we examine how purposefully selected children’s literature prepares needed conditions for dialogic space: difference in what is already known, and what is presented; multiplicity of many and other ways of interpreting and connecting; and uncertainty as there is no definitive or “right” answer for personal meaning-making. We show how purposefully selecting diverse children’s literature can create dialogic space in two classroom contexts. First, as Christina, a Black female teacher educator and librarian, teaches in a third-grade classroom of primarily Black students. Second, as she teaches a graduate-level teacher course on diverse children’s literature to mostly White pre-and-in-service teachers. We elucidate ways purposeful selection of diverse literature is a first step to engaging with critical inquiry and opening dialogic space.