Two Professors Critique the Representations of Africans and African Americans in Picture Books

Abstract

The authors examined the sociocultural representations of black children in picture books. Three critical perspectives were used to examine 23 picture books containing black characters. Questions used in this critical analysis were derived from sociocultural implications of implicit messages within texts, critical literacy, and cultural and social reader response theories. Our aim was to determine what stories are being told and how two adults, one black and one white, interpret these stories. We also considered the importance of analyzing these picture books when using them in elementary classrooms. We found that our different cultural and racial backgrounds influenced our response to a number of the books, clearly pointing to the advantage of discussing children's books with colleagues of different races.

Acknowledgments

Wendy M. Smith-D’Arezzo is associate professor and chair of the teacher education department at Loyola University Maryland. Her research interests are in the areas of children's literature, particularly literature that represents marginalized populations, and teacher preparation.

Margaret Musgrove is associate professor of writing and director of Loyola Women's Center at Loyola University Maryland. She is the author of two picture books and has a research interest in the area of children's literature for African American children from an African American perspective.

Notes

1. Rosenblatt (1968/1995) has described two different types of reading that all readers engage in: aesthetic reading, or reading for pleasure and enjoyment; and efferent reading, or reading to gain knowledge. She describes the experiences of a student in an English class today. The student is functioning on two “separate and distinct planes” (p. 56). On one plane, the student learns traditional ideas about literature that the teacher presents in class. “On the other plane, he reads the literature and reacts to it personally, perhaps never expressing that reaction or even paying much attention to it” (p. 56). In order to be able to understand a piece of literature, whether it be a novel, or a poem, the student's knowledge about authors, literary history, and types of literature will be useless if “he has not been led primarily to seek in literature a vital personal experience” (p. 57). This response to the text, where meaning is derived through a combination of what is said on the page and what is coming from the reader's personal response, is the transactional meaning, or the reader response perspective.