Children's books perpetuate stereotypes and dominant worldviews, requiring education students to practice digging deeper into evaluating children's literature. This session will sow the seeds of critical consciousness, focusing on revamped lesson plans informed by critical information literacy. Revamped lessons were created to help students evaluate representations of BIPOC characters in children's literature. In this interactive workshop, attendees will discuss and participate in lesson activities, including identifying types of representation for BIPOC characters to avoid single story narratives and using demographic surveys and children's literature diversity statistics to recognize and critique power structures in the publishing industry.
Participants will be able to:
- Teach critical information literacy concepts when working with children's literature
- Adapt this model of information literacy instruction to their own work with children's literature in order to cultivate critical consciousness in their students
