Transacting With Text

Central to this course is a focus on culturally diverse literature, while making a space for healthy cultural identity where all children have representation and an opportunity to see themselves on the pages of the books they read. This practice invites positive self-image and provides exemplars for healthy social emotional development surrounding students’ individual cultural Identity.

Participants explore a variety of culturally diverse children’s literature and authors that inspire deeper thinking, supports a broader understanding of cultures and content, provides a space for inquiry and opportunities for rich conversations. These transactions, with a wide variety of mindfully selected diverse literary models, demonstrate how the readers themselves are alike and how they are different culturally from the literature that is introduced.

This practice and inspiring modelling of literature across the curriculum strengthens the classroom’s literary landscape and bridges understanding within those welcome differences, making way for progressive and informed pedagogy correlating to the ELA State Standards. By providing practical applications course participants and their students discover opportunities to strive for healthy racial identity and in the process disrupt racism through deeper understanding.

Guided by The PLN Frameworks, The Five Reading, Writing, and Talking Processes and The Four Lenses of Learning, participants explore the impact of providing current literature whose focus is on the application and the implementation in each participants’ classroom, center or school. Discussions and demonstrations focus on the study of culturally diverse and rich texts that may invite mind shifts as course content and experiences expand and inform our young readers and writers.