Spreading Awareness of Diversity and Social Justice Through Reading

Reilly Mahan discusses her approach to learning about diversity through readings on Native American culture and experiences. This method has allowed he to engage her students in real conversation about real struggles that are happening all over the nation and the world.

In my literature classes and in teaching reading classes, the texts that you pick are very important. They’re probably your first step in starting a lesson. The demographics of my school are very diverse, and I was realizing that these classic texts, that I was used to and that I had grown up with, were not reflective of my students.

As part of social justice there’s definitely a couple layers you can get into and that’s kind of when I talk to my kids about You start at the first layer of loving and respecting everyone and seeing the all of the ways that people can live in this world and how people can be in this world, and knowing and respecting that.

Part of it is the classic literacy quote: “A book can be a window, a mirror or a sliding glass door” meaning that when kids are reading literature, they are either seeing themselves in a text, they’re able to view someone else’s world in a text, or they’re able to fully be immersed and step through that sliding glass door into somebody else’s world and experience that second hand. If your literature is not doing that on one of those three levels for all of your students, then something is being left behind.

The next layer would be asking “what are we going to do about that?” and “how does that affect people in their daily lives?” For example, for social studies in fourth grade, we generally start with Native American tribes, which can feel kind a bit contrived if you’re not going into who these people are and what are they experiencing now.

It’s fun to learn about teepees and totem poles as kids, but we don’t want our kids growing up in a world where they don’t realize that Native Americans still exist in a beautiful array of different cultures and communities and tribes all over the US, and all over the world. We want them to understand that they have 1000s of broken treaties from the US government throughout history, we want them to understand what’s happening on their reservations and things that, historically speaking, have affected them for hundreds of years.

Usually what I do with my kids, is we start with fun books like “Frybread: A Native American Family Story.” Even this has a good starting place for discussions. Frybread, even though it’s part of many Native American family’s traditions now, it also stemmed from the Trail of Tears and their being placed on reservations and taken away from all their indigenous foods, having to then be supplemented with flour and yeast and cornmeal and other stuff that wasn’t as nutritious. Just one kid’s book about a family baking frybread can go into so much painful yet important history that fourth graders can and should be able to digest, understand, and talk about.

We could take that and we could talk about something like the Dakota Access Pipeline, the young water protectors, and kids from the Lakota tribes who are doing the most that they can to protect their water and their life source. We can read the absolutely gorgeous book called “Water Protectors” and talk about what they are doing now, what they are still fighting for, and how that we can be a part of supporting them in that.

It’s just realizing that it’s so much more than history, it’s our current world experience, it’s our current America and what it looks like right now. It’s a lot, but it’s something that kids are so much more enthralled with and so much more engaged with. It’s so much more meaningful to talk about main ideas, details, and author’s purpose with real techniques that actually mean something.