Storybooks for Revolution: Using Children's Literature to Lead Children's Understanding of Social Justice

It began bright and early at 7 am on a Thursday where most of the Children's staff traveled to the VG Conference and gathered for the start of the two day ALSC virtual conference! After fumbling around with the tech for a bit, we were able to log on a bit late to our first session. Ahh the joys of online workshops and presentations when dealing with tech issues, which may seem frustrating, but there was a very good reason for holding this conference online.

Originally, the conference was supposed to be held in the beautiful state of North Carolina, but in the wake of their ruling on transgender bathroom usage, ALSC pulled the conference in protest and thus gave us the 2016 ALSC Virtual Conference, so I like to think that our technical difficulties proved to be a form of protest and contributed to the cause of equality and social justice for all, which was the topic of the first session: Story Books for Revolution  Using Children's Literature to Lead Children's Understanding of Social Justice presented by a Child Development expert, Kathleen Gallagher from the University of Nebraska at Kerney.

This session highlighted tools and ideas for working with families in our diverse communities and how we can strengthen our communities by overcoming biases that may divide our communities and by building a healthy awareness of these differences, we can build a brighter future for the children of our communities. This goal can be achieved through an anti-biased education and an understanding of how children and adults understand social justice, and how adults can support children's understanding.

As public librarians, we are in an inherently anti-bias profession in that we work to serve all of the members of our community equally and this lends itself to incorporating anti-bias education approach to early childhood education in the way that we connect children with books and resources. 

Which aim towards the four goals of anti-bias education for children:

• Demonstrate self-awareness, confidence, family pride and positive social identities
• Express comfort and joy with human diversity
• Recognize unfairness
• Demonstrate empowerment and the skills to act against prejudice or discriminatory actions 

This seems like lofty goals for early learning, but early childhood is the most important time in a child's development to recognize and learn about these differences. This approach is bolstered by an understanding of the way children understand social justice through brain development, emotional literacy and social cognition. 

Children's brains are wired for relationships and there is rapid neural development in children's brains when they are very young, so it is extremely important to expose them to diversity and differences in a positive way before they are three years old. Stress and trauma can lead to stunted brain development, which means if they experience bias and a negative experience of diversity, children are under the risk of experiencing this as a trauma.

Emotional literacy is where the child gains emotional experiences of how emotions feel and how to express them, emotional recognition of self vs others, and emotional responding where children learn that there is a cause and effect for different emotions. 

Understanding how their actions cause different emotions in themselves and others is essential in developing ethics later in life. It is usually encouraged to teach children empathy where a child can understand how another feels, but Gallagher suggests to take it a step further and teach compassion, where one is motivated to act to lessen the suffering of others. 

Social cognition consists of where children notice differences and if adults don't talk about differences, it can project that there is something wrong with differences. If a misunderstanding of differences arise, it can lead to a negative bias against those who are "different." Here are the stages of social conditioning:

• Infants and toddlers (birth to 3) Big question is WHAT? 
• Language learning, pattern recognition, motivated by safety and security

• Preschoolers (3-5)Big question WHY?
• Curious, problem solvers,classify/order everything - spend entire day describing things on characteristics then they see the difference (we must talk about it or they don’t know what the difference means) They put things in order so they begin to have bias (boys don’t play this game etc.) We should talk about differences

Primary Years (5-8) Big Question HOW?

Meaning making, rule following, equality seeking - fairness 

By taking these stages into account, we can support children's understanding and increase cultural competencies in several ways:

• Develop children's identities and self-esteem
• Helping children feel comfortable with difference
• Create awareness of bias and stereotypes
• Providing children with tools to respond appropriately to bias

We can do these things through culturally responsive programming where it is child and family centered, having diversity in our collections, and storytimes. By choosing books where the focus is a good story, but also has diverse characters and family situations, it can bring awareness to differences.

As librarians, I see much of our work is to provide equal access to our resources and facilities to all people regardless of income, religion, sexual orientation, and any other thing that divides humanity. This means that we as librarians should be unbiased in the terms of the resources we develop and who we serve and it is only natural to uphold this philosophy in all that we do, especially when serving children and their families.