Multicultural Friendship Stories and Activities for Children Ages 5‐14

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (1999), "Multicultural Friendship Stories and Activities for Children Ages 5‐14", Library Review, Vol. 48 No. 6, pp. 46-47. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.1999.48.6.46.2

Children′s literature has always had purposive and ideological connotations, as well as plainly being for entertainment, education and the imagination. “Situation” books, whether written expressly to deal with things like racial conflict or simply being used for that purpose, play an important role in children′s reading, and often represent key social and emotional issues, turning (depending on your point of view) children′s literature either into an ideological device or confirming its central role in the sociology of reading. Such books as Multicultural Friendship Stories come somewhere in between. It confirms that many of the “best” children′s books are not written to be purposive? and socially aware, although some of these (like the work of Virginia Hamilton and Betsy Byars, Anne Fine and Bette Greene, Ezra Jack Keats and William Steig) can be used as such. Patricia Roberts is a former education professor from California State University at Sacramento, and has written two other works (on alphabet books and humour) for this series from Scarecrow, which now numbers 14 items, mainly for the US market.

Her guiding principle is that friendship can help to overcome multicultural differences, and that children′s reading (divided here into two categories, 5‐8 and 9‐14, and into three themes, family friendships, community neighbourhood and school friendships, and friendships around the world) plays an important part in this. Over 200 works are cited and described in the bibliography, and about 60 of these are discussed for their potential for story‐telling and activities in the library and classroom. Nearly all the 60 are US publications/writers, and there is an emphasis on themes of direct interest to US librarians and educators (such as African and Asian and Hispanic and Jewish American heritage and issues). Most useful for professionals in other countries will be the wide and imaginative range of activities generated by these works ‐‐ role play, pantomime, buzz groups, diaries, games, charts, Venn diagrams, top ten lists, bulletin boards, news items, origami, poems stuck to tee‐shirts, interviews, covering the whole age group. Issues like racial conflict, relationships, identity, myth are examined, some in ways more suited to teaching in English or drama or current affairs classes by teachers than in the library/media centre. For professionals, then, lots of ideas on how to use books, but the challenge for them of putting together their own list from books available in their own culture. As for the wider ideal of international peace, that′s an ideological stance worth taking if you want to drive things in that direction.