Building on Windows and Mirrors: Encouraging the Disruption of Single Stories Through Children’s Literature

Abstract

Multicultural children’s literature can assist elementary teachers in teaching diverse students effectively, but how do teachers learn to critically consider what texts they select and the effects those choices have on their students? In this article, we draw on our own experiences as teacher educators to illustrate the conceptual tools we offer our students to complete such a task. By combining Bishop’s idea of books as windows and mirrors with Adichie’s idea of the single story, we argue that pre-service teachers can learn to understand the importance of diverse representations, recognize single stories that circulate in our world, disrupt those single stories with additional perspectives, and evaluate the stories in that expanded set with attention to issues of power and equity. We illustrate how this set of tools is particularly helpful for considering historical events and figures as well as more general cultural narratives across content areas and genres.

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CHRISTINA M. TSCHIDA, CAITLIN L. RYAN & ANNE SWENSON TICKNOR
Building on Windows
and Mirrors: Encouraging the
Disruption of “Single Stories”
Through Children’s Literature
Tschida, Ryan, and Ticknor combine
conceptual tools to guide preservice
teachers to make diverse and equitable
choices in classroom literature selections.
WHEN OUR MOSTLY WHITE, middle class, female
undergraduate preservice students enter our respec-
tive social studies, language arts, and reading methods
courses, they usually have not yet been asked to think
critically about the curriculum that they will be respon-
sible for teaching to their future students and the implica-
tions for equity that arise as a result. Although we teach
in different subject areas, we are all committed to guiding
our students through this kind of critique, particularly as
it relates to the images and messages that these future
teachers will send their diverse elementary school pupils
about themselves and the world around them. We also
recognize that one of the primary conduits for sending
these messages to students is through the children’s litera-
ture and other media included within their elementary
school classrooms and libraries.
We know that we are not alone in facing this challenge.
Scholars of children’s literature have long stressed the
need for turning a critical eye to the stories we tell, who
is doing the telling, and who gets left out (e.g., Bishop,
1990a; Dyson & Genishi, 1994; Fox & Short, 2003). Such
scholars have dened multicultural literature (Harris,
1992; Hillard, 1995; Yokota, 1993), encouraged pre- and
in-service teachers to become familiar with diverse titles
(Hefin & Barksdale-Ladd, 2001; Hermann-Wilmarth,
2007; Lazar & Offenberg, 2011; Nathenson-Mejia &
Escamilla, 2003; Swartz, 2003), and shared the power
of exploring diverse texts with children (Copenhaver-
Johnson, Bowman, & Johnson, 2007; DeNicolo & Franquiz,
2006; Enciso, 2003; Jones, 2013; Ryan, Patraw, & Bednar,
2013; Souto-Manning, 2009; Tyson, 1999). In spite of
these efforts, however, authors and illustrators represent-
ing diverse races, classes, religions, sexualities, abilities,
and other areas of marginalization, when published at all
(Cooperative Children’s Book Center, n.d.), are routinely
left out of classrooms (American Library Association,
2009; McNair, 2008). This means that for most students in
the United States, the literature they encounter in school
consists mainly of White, middle class representations.
Furthermore, some books that include particular cultural
groups may be written from outsider perspectives and
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therefore do not always represent a reality of those groups’
lived experiences (Reese, 2007).
The question then becomes how to guide preservice
teachers in considering the texts that are available and
how to effectively mobilize those texts in their classrooms
to create a more complex and authentic picture of the
diverse lives of their students and the diverse world of
us all. Book awards, multicultural booklists, and other
reference materials are certainly a good start, but they do
not provide preservice teachers with abstract, conceptual
tools to help guide a continual questioning of the texts in
their curricula and classrooms. In this article, we look at
two particular lenses that have been helpful for motivating
and guiding our students as they consider the need for and
uses of diverse literature. The rst, discussed by children’s
literature scholars for some time, is the idea of texts
serving as windows and mirrors (Bishop, 1990a). A second,
more recent contribution (that our students have found
particularly helpful) is Adichie’s (2009) warning about
the dangers of the single story. Not only are both concepts
useful when we work with our students, but we have
also found that when brought together, they stretch and
reinforce each other in productive ways that support our
students’ attempts at making their book selections more
critical and equitable. In this article, we begin by discuss-
ing Bishop’s concept of windows and mirrors and connect-
ing it to Adichie’s concept of the single story. We then
illustrate how the recursive relationship we create between
these two ideas provides a tool that supports our students
as they learn to make text selections for their classrooms
that provide more diverse representations for all of their
students. Finally, to illustrate this point, we give examples
of how we put these ideas into our teaching by sharing
activities and groups of texts that we have used with our
students to help them move beyond the single stories that
they often hold of historical events, historical gures, and
cultural narratives.
Windows and Mirrors
When children cannot nd themselves reected in
the books they read, or when the images they see are
distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful
lesson about how they are devalued in the society of
which they are a part. (Bishop, 1990b, p. 557)
The concept of a book acting as a mirror implies that
readers see something of themselves in the text. Such a
book reects back to readers portions of their identities,
cultures, or experiences. When readers are able to nd
themselves in a text, they are therefore validated; their
experiences are not so unique or strange as to never be
spoken or experienced by others. This inclusion, in turn,
connects readers even more strongly to the larger world
of books. The reality for many readers, however, is that
they do not see reections of themselves in children’s
literature. In 1965, Larrick drew attention to the fact that
millions of “nonwhite children [were] learning to read and
to understand the American way of life in books which
either omit[ed] them entirely or scarcely mention[ed] them”
(p. 63). For children from marginalized groups, this “near
invisibility suggested that books and literature, while often
pleasurable,were in some sense apart from them” (Bishop,
2012, p. 9). This disparity of mirrors in books also impacts
readers who do see themselves; for if all children see
are “reections of themselves, they will grow up with an
exaggerated sense of their own importance and value in the
world—a dangerous ethnocentrism” (Bishop, 1990a, p. x).
To move readers beyond this ethnocentrism to view worlds
that are not their own, books must also act as windows,
allowing for a vicarious experience to supersede the limits
of the readers’ own lives and identities and spend time
observing those of others. Children from marginalized
cultural groups must have opportunities to see themselves
reected in literature, just as readers from all social/
cultural groups must be given windows offering views of
the world around them, not only imaginary worlds but also
reality. These readers need books that show them their
place in our multicultural world and teach them about the
connections between all humans. Books are sometimes
the only place where readers may meet people who are not
like themselves, who offer alternative worldviews. What
readers may nd is that when the lighting is just right, a
window can also be a mirror (Bishop, 1990a). Literature
can transform human experience and reect it back to us,
and in that reection, we can see our own lives as part of
the larger human experience.
In recent years, literature has become a central component
in the curricula in elementary classrooms, making the
question of what students read important. “Literature
functions as a major socializing agent. It tells students
who and what their society and culture values, what kinds
of behaviors are acceptable and appropriate, and what it
means to be a decent human being” (Bishop, 1990b, p.
561). For too long, readers from marginalized groups have
found their search for self-afrmation in literature futile,
and those who see only mirrors in the literature will “see
no need for change; thus, current societal attitudes and
wrongs [will remain] entrenched for yet another genera-
tion” (Bishop, 1990b, p. 561). For these reasons, Bishop
argues, all readers need to experience both books that are
mirrors for their own lives and books that are windows to
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the lives of others. The signicance of providing students
with a host of books that represent both windows and
mirrors cannot be more important in our world today.
Using Windows and Mirrors With Preservice Teachers
Because all “children have a right to books that reect
their own images and books that open less familiar words
to them” (Bishop, 2012, p. 9), the implication for us as
teacher educators is to help our students recognize litera-
ture’s role in this process and learn to evaluate books that
can do such work for their future students. One way we
help our students see how books can act as windows and
mirrors for readers is through a self-analysis of the litera-
ture they have read. That means our students rst need
an understanding of culture. We ask them to consider how
race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social class, religion,
geography, language, age, family structure, and so forth
work to make them who they are. Our discussion centers
on how unique we are in the ways that these aspects of
our culture intersect to shape our identities. Once we have
this base to build on, we ask them to make a list of books
they remember reading when they were young. Next, we
introduce Bishop’s concept of windows and mirrors, and
in small groups, the students discuss how their list of
books could be viewed through this lens. Students look
for books that were mirrors and identify which parts of
themselves were reected in those books. They examine
their list for books that acted as windows, opening them
to new worldviews or people. One last, yet very important,
step is having them identify the parts of their identity that
they never saw represented in the literature they read as
children. They are also able to hear from other students
about what parts of their identities were never reected
back to them in this way. Our students begin to see the
power of books and stories to send messages about who we
are and where we belong.
This moves us nicely into sharing the power of litera-
ture, stories, and media to shape the way children see
themselves. We have our students view a segment of the
documentary A Girl Like Me (Reel Works Teen Filmmak-
ing & David, 2005) where Kiri Davis repeats an experi-
ment conducted in the 1940s in which Kenneth and Mamie
Clark studied color preferences of African American
children when selecting dolls to play with. When Davis
repeated the experiment, 15 out of 21 children chose the
White doll over the Black one, despite the fact that they
were identical except for skin color. The children associ-
ated White with being “pretty” or “good” and Black with
being “ugly” or “bad” in both experiments. Our students
are sometimes uncomfortable with the reality of the video,
but it becomes a powerful tool to begin a discussion on how
images and representations in literature (or lack of them)
shape children’s beliefs about who is good and who is bad,
who counts and who does not, and whose experiences are
deemed more important than others’. We encourage our
students to think about the messages they want to send to
their students with and through books and how thought-
ful teaching with thoughtfully selected texts can help them
expand and question these messages.
The Danger of the Single Story
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem
with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that
they are incomplete. They make one story become the
only story. (Adichie, 2009, para. 24)
Novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie grew up in eastern
Nigeria. During her 2009 TED Talk, she explained how
she learned to read and write at an early age, modeling
her stories after the characters and events she read about
in the British and American books available to her in
her home on a university campus. Through this reading,
she formed what she calls a “single story” about books;
namely, they were places where people like her and the
communities in which she lived could not exist. It was
only later, when Adichie discovered African books, that
she recognized the limits this monocultural reading had
on her sense of who could be included in literature. This
realization caused her to experience a mental shift in her
understanding of literature and its power. She explains in
her talk, “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of
another person, but to make it the denitive story of that
person” (para. 19). Who decides which stories are told, who
tells them, when are they told, and how are they told are
all part of this power.
Adichie (2009) believes single stories are created when we
show a people or an event as only one thing, over and over
again, training us to see in this limited way. Over time,
these single stories become so much a part of our lives that
we are often unaware of the ways in which they operate.
These stories then become commonsense narratives in our
We encourage our students to think
about the messages they want to send to
their students with and through books
and how thoughtful teaching with
thoughtfully selected texts can help them
expand and question these messages.
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thinking; they become the denitive way that we view a
particular person, a group of people, or a set of circum-
stances, reducing that person or thing to a single perspec-
tive on who we think “they” are. It is only by disrupting
single stories with narratives told from other perspectives
that we form a more nuanced picture of the people, issues,
or ideas at hand.
Using the Single Stor y With Preservice Teachers
To help students with this idea, we try to make students’
own single stories visible within our methods classrooms.
For example, when asked to sketch what comes to mind
when they hear the term Native American or Indian, the
vast majority of our students struggle to produce anything
other than a tepee, bows and arrows, feathers, drums, or
maybe jewelry or a headband. After students have sketched
and shared, we often ask them, “OK, so who drew an
eighth-grade basketball player? Who drew a chemist? Who
drew an accountant?” Only a few of our students, primarily
those who are Native Americans themselves, have produced
contemporary images that moved beyond the stereotypical
portrayals. For the rest, the sequenced looks of confusion
and then recognition that move across their faces indicate
that they have seen their own single story in operation.
Once preservice teachers understand how single stories
work in their own thinking, they can then critically
examine the books they will use in their classrooms
through this lens. They apply Adichie’s ideas, rst by
recognizing the single stories that circulate and then by
thinking through how
a range of additional
books might create a
gamut of perspectives
that w il l complicate
and disrupt those
single stories. By using
this lens, teachers are
able to see that they
do not need to give up entirely the kinds of understandings
and stories that they may be most accustomed to. Rather,
this perspective encourages them to recognize the limits of
that more comfortable understanding and then add to those
a multiplicity that results in a more nuanced and complex
understanding of historical events, people, and situations. It
is an additive model. When our students have the opportu-
nity to consider, identify, and name those single stories of
history or current cultural narratives, it helps them see
the need for multiple and nonstereotypical stories. When
scaffolded in this way, students begin to recognize the
extensive areas where they have limited perspectives, and
they acknowledge the need to disrupt their future students’
single stories in similar ways. We provide more specic
examples of how this works with our students—and ways it
could work with all teachers—in the sections to follow.
Combining These Two Lenses
When Working With Students
While helping students understand that one story can
never be the only story about historical events and people
or cultural narratives, simply adding multiple perspectives
to the books used within their classrooms is only part of
the solution. In our work with preservice teachers, we nd
Bishop’s (1990a) idea of windows and mirrors and Adichie’s
(2009) concept of single stories both helpful in guiding our
students to think more critically about texts, but what we
have come to see more recently is the recursive relation-
ship between these two tools. Bishop’s idea of windows and
mirrors provides an important rst step that helps our
students, and indeed all readers, begin to acknowledge
the difference between self and others. By thinking about
who traditionally experiences mirrors when reading and
who tends to nd only windows when they open a book,
our mostly White, female, middle class students can see
how their lives have been validated in ways that other
readers with more marginalized identities do not get to
experience. At the same time, our students with differ-
ent backgrounds often nd satisfaction in their more
mainstream classmates’ dawning realizations as well as
validation of their own feelings of marginalization within
the children’s literature they remember from their elemen-
tary school days.
However, it is after we introduce Adichie’s (2009) concept
of the single story that our students’ normative shared
experiences nally get named. By focusing on multiplic-
ity, all students’ stories are allowed to be layers within a
larger, more complete narrative, not given primacy but
still validated as real and important. In this way, expand-
ing a single story means looking through many of Bishop’s
(1990a) windows into many different “rooms” of experience.
In other words, by bringing single stories to the concept of
windows and mirrors, we are asking students to complicate
the picture of the other and expand what gets seen. We
ask them to look in greater, more complex detail at what it
means to know and to know about an experience outside of
When our students have the opportunity to consider, identify, and
name those single stories of history or current cultural narratives, it
helps them see the need for multiple and nonstereotypical stories.
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your own life. This is important for all readers to do, but
it is especially important for our preservice teachers (not
to mention children) in the majority culture so they cease
being satised with stereotypical or universalized portraits
of more marginalized groups.
One of the other things that the single story helps us do
with our students is to move beyond a focus on individual
identication, encouraged by windows and mirrors, and
instead focus on the larger picture of the world we know
around us. This is particularly helpful for texts other than
contemporary realistic ction that are used in classrooms,
including historical ction, informational texts, and
primary source documents. An approach that allows
reection on this breadth of genres becomes particularly
important in our era of the Common Core State Standards
where students are encouraged to read a wide variety of
nonction texts across content areas.
As students explore an expanded set of perspectives on a
single topic through a variety of diverse texts, however, it
remains important to reconsider the concept of windows
and mirrors to highlight issues of power, voice, and equity.
In the gamut of texts acting as diverse windows that
teachers may add as a result of Adichie’s (2009) advice,
we still must consider which windows we can see through
more easily, which windows are boarded up so we struggle
to see what lies beyond, and which windows remain hard to
nd. Thus, it is not enough to simply offer multiple perspec-
tives through additional texts; our students must be critical
of the ways, even within multicultural literature, that
single stories get taken up, circulated, reinforced, resisted,
or challenged. They still must ask who is being reected
and who is being learned about in this new, expanded
set of texts, as well as what the effects of these arrange-
ments might be for individual readers. This helps move
the additive model away from simple relativism where all
stories are equal and instead invites a critical examination
of the sources of those different stories and the implications
for their circulation among readers.
This critical examination of perspective is especially
important in content areas such as social studies where
historical events and gures take on mythic status and
where a few surface facts often stand in as common sense
for the complete historical record. In these cases, using
diverse and authentic children’s literature to disrupt the
single story infused with the critical reection encouraged
by windows and mirrors is essential in fostering critical
approaches and deeper understanding of this set of diverse
perspectives. Three examples we use in our work with
preservice teachers follow.
Christopher Columbus: Hero, Villain, or Both?
When we (Christina and Caitlin) ask our preservice
teachers what they know about Columbus, we predictably
hear the words “In fourteen hundred ninety-two, Columbus
sailed the ocean blue” or some vague references to the
Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Most of our students
remember little about Columbus other than his “discov-
ery” of America. A few might challenge whether someone
can actually discover a place where people had already
been living for thousands of years, and someone may even
quietly voice the idea that Columbus was rather forceful
or cruel in his treatment of the native people he encoun-
tered, but these situations remain rare. Our work when
dealing with topics such as Columbus and the “discovery”
of America, then, means helping our students develop a
deeper understanding of the consequences of European
conquest in the Western hemisphere and expand the single
story that so many of them hold of this time period and the
historical gures involved.
Because historical events are typically written about in
informational texts, historical ction, or primary source
documents, students are less likely to nd the lens of
windows and mirrors a good starting point for understand-
ing issues of power and voice. Instead, we begin with the
lens of the single story. We juxtapose select passages from
Stephen Krensky’s (1991) Christopher Columbus with
sections of Encounter by Jane Yolen (1996). Students are
able to compare the single story of Columbus presented in
Krensky’s biography with the same historical events as
recounted by a ctional Taino Indian child from the island
of San Salvador in Yolen’s text. When seeing these text
excerpts from each book side by side, our students are struck
by the limited single story that they have of Columbus.
Some even begin questioning why they never before heard
(or even thought about!) the perspectives of the other people
involved. Having a second story nally makes visible the
partial, constrained nature of what had previously passed as
the “real” story, often for the rst time.
To further complicate their dissonance, we continue to
discuss authorship and representation in these various
stories. We talk about how Yolen, a White woman, used
primary source information to construct her ctionalized
account of the event from the point of view of the Taino
people, and we discuss the implications of this event being
told from the perspective of an outsider. That leads us to
consider whose voices are not heard in these two texts.
Specically, our students begin to realize that even with
these expanded stories, they have not heard from the
perspective of any indigenous people. This is when we
introduce the book A Coyote Columbus Story by Thomas
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King (2002), a Native American author and scholar born
to a Cherokee father and a mother of Greek and German
descent. Reading this book along with scholarship on Native
American literature by Native American scholars (Seale &
Slapin, 2005) allows us to discuss the ner points of what
an authentic representation brings to and what outsider
representations distort in the stories we share. Therefore,
our discussion of this historical event, which our students
assumed they knew well, moves from confusion and disillu-
sionment to insight and understanding, and then eventu-
ally to recognition of the power of texts to not only shape
the story of a historical event or a people but also, in the
process, to marginalize others through a particular telling
of that story. In this case, we argue that it is necessary but
not sufcient to simply add diverse perspectives through
multiple texts; we must then reexamine these multiple texts
with Bishop’s (1990a) windows and mirrors to see which
windows are missing or which mirrors may be reecting
distorted images. (See Table 1 for particular titles.)
Was Rosa Parks Really Just Tired?
Like most American students, my (Christina’s) students
come to their elementary social studies methods course
able to identify a few key players in the Civil Rights
Movement. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks
remain at the top of the list. Students insist that they
know a great deal about these historical gures from
the repeated attention to their stories in public school
curricula, especially during Black History Month.
When asked to write what they know about Rosa Parks,
however, they continually lock her into a single story as
the “bus woman” who would not move because she was
tired from a long day of work. In their accounts, she was
a sweet, older lady who was arrested after she refused to
give up her seat to a White person because she realized
that she should have rights, too. What they understand as
a spontaneous act of courage then sparked the Montgom-
ery Bus Boycott. When presented with primary source
documents, such as the famous photo of her being nger-
printed, her arrest record, and excerpts from her biogra-
phy or interviews, my students must reconcile their
single story with additional facts. These texts explain,
for example, that at the time of her arrest, Parks was
only 42, she had had a previous run in with the same
bus driver 13 years earlier, she was only one of several
Black women in Montgomery to be arrested for violating
the segregated busing policy in 1955, had been attending
antisegregation workshops for several years prior to her
arrest, and had been working closely with other activists
to bring this discriminatory situation to a head. With this
new information, students frequently express frustration
with the version of the story that they learned in school.
They feel robbed of knowing what they now consider the
truth about this historical gure and the events of this
pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement.
By adding additional texts, such as biographies from
different perspectives, her own words, and primary source
documents, my students come to see that the story of Rosa
Parks is really a story about the activism of the African
American people of Montgomery, Alabama, and their
courageous, community-based struggle. (See Table 1 for
particular titles.) This does not mean that we diminish
the bravery of Parks as an individual movement leader; “it
places her, however, in the midst of a consciously planned
movement for social change” (Kohl, 2007, p. 171). When
her story is expanded to one of a social movement and a
community’s refusal to be moved, it becomes possible to see
mirrorlike connections to many different communities and
movements. It also becomes possible to consider who might
be invested in the perpetuation of the more limited single
story and who benets from its continual circulation.
Who Makes a Family?
In addition to narratives about historical gures and
events, we also carry single stories about cultural
narratives. These relate to the way the world works or
how things are “supposed” to be. These kinds of stories
tell students who they are and who they should be; these
stories make some ways of being in the world more accept-
able and others less so. They provide a very limited set
of mirrors and windows. Therefore, they have powerful
consequences for how children feel about themselves and
how they operate in the world around them. One way we
learn about these kinds of single stories is through the
narratives we read in fairy tales. In my (Anne’s) elemen-
tary literacy methods course, I explore this idea with my
students. First, I read aloud a traditional, mainstream
American version of Cinderella, such as Cinderella by
Kinoku Craft (2000) and then ask my students to construct
a story map of the literary elements. They easily talk about
how kindhearted, beautiful Cinderella lived with a wicked
stepmother and mean stepsisters before being rescued by
a handsome prince to live happily ever after. This is their
single story of this tale. Then, I hand out several additional
picture books that are other versions of this Cinderella
story. (See Table 2 for particular titles.) I ask them to read
these and construct another story map to compare and
contrast against the rst Cinderella text. Quickly, students
realize that the second text they are reading is not the
“traditional” tale in terms of theme, characters, perspec-
tives, cultural elements, or a happy ending. With the
addition of multiple texts, my students start to understand
how other versions of the story are possible and how these
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TAB LE 1
Texts we use to disrupt historical single stories
Single Story Books Online Sources
Christopher
Columbus
and European
conquest in
the Western
hemisphere
King, T. (2002). A Coyote Columbus story. (W.K.
Monkman, Illus.). Toronto, ON, Canada: Groundwood.
Krensky, S. (1991). Christopher Columbus. (N. Green,
Illus.). New York, NY: Random House.
Littlechild, G. (2003). This land is my land. San Francisco,
CA: Children’s Book Press.
Yolen, J. (1996). Encounter. (D. Shannon, Illus.). San
Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace.
Zinn, H. (2007). A young people’s history of the United
States: Vol. 1. Columbus to the Spanish–American War.
New York, NY: Seven Stories.
McGrath, S. (2013). The truth about
Christopher Columbus and America [Web
log post]. Retrieved from http://suite101.
com/a/the-truth-about-christopher-
columbus-and-america-a157365
Minster, C. (2013). The truth about
Christopher Columbus. Retrieved from
http://latinamericanhistory.about.
com/od/thevoyagesofcolumbus/
a/09columbustruth.htm
Primary source documents, such as
journal entries from Columbus or his
letter to the King and Queen of Spain at
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/
columbus1.asp and http://www.fordham.
Rosa Parks and
the Civil Rights
Movement
Brinkley, D. (2000). Rosa Parks: A life. New York,
NY: Penguin.
Celsi, T. (1991). Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus
Boycott. Brookfield, CT: Millbrook.
Giovanni, N. (2005). Rosa. (B. Collier, Illus.). New York,
NY: Henry Holt.
Kohl, H. (2007). The politics of children’s literature:
What’s wrong with the Rosa Parks myth? In W. Au, B.
Bigelow, & S. Karp (Eds.), Rethinking our classrooms: Vol.
1. Teaching for equity and justice (Rev. ed., pp. 168–171).
Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools.
Nobleman, M.T. (2002). Rosa Parks. Milwaukee, WI:
World Almanac Library.
Parks, R. (with Haskins, J.). (1992). Rosa Parks: My story.
New York, NY: Dial.
Parks, R. (with Reed, G.J.). (1996). Dear Mrs. Parks: A
dialogue with today’s youth. New York, NY: Lee & Low.
Reynolds, A. (2010). Back of the bus. (F. Cooper, Illus.).
New York, NY: Philomel.
Ringgold, F. (1999). If a bus could talk: The story of Rosa
Parks. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Primary source documents, such as her
arrest record, letters, and photographs
found at http://www.archives.gov/
education/lessons/rosa-parks and http://
www.loc.gov/index.html
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TAB LE 2
Texts we use to disrupt cultural narratives
Cinderella Example Family Example
Climo, S. (1996). The Irish cinderlad. (L.
Krupinski, Illus.). New York, NY: Harper-
Trophy.
Cole, B. (1987). Prince Cinders. New York,
NY: Putnam & Grosset.
Hickox, R. (1998). The golden sandal: A
Middle Eastern Cinderella story. (W. Hillen-
brand, Illus.). New York, NY: Holiday
House.
Jackson, E. (1994). Cinder Edna. (K.
O’Malley, Illus.). New York, NY: Lothrop,
Lee & Shepard.
Johnston, T. (1998). Bigfoot Cinderrrrrella. (J.
Warhola, Illus.). New York, NY: Puffin.
Louie, A.-L. (1982). Yeh-Shen: A Cinderella
story from China. (E. Young, Illus.). New
York, NY: Puffin.
Lowell, S. (2000). Cindy Ellen: A wild
Western Cinderella. (J. Manning, Illus.).
New York, NY: Joanna Cotler.
Martin, R. (1992). The rough-face girl. (D.
Shannon, Illus.). New York, NY: Putnam &
Grosset.
Minters, F. (1994). Cinder-Elly. (G.B. Karas,
Illus.). New York, NY: Puffin.
San Souci, R.D. (1998). Cendrillon: A
Caribbean Cinderella. (B. Pinkney, Illus.).
New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
San Souci, R.D. (2009). Cinderella skeleton.
(D. Catrow, Illus.). Orlando, FL: Harcourt.
Schroeder, A. (1997). Smoky Mountain Rose:
An Appalachian Cinderella. (B.D. Sneed,
Illus.). New York, NY: Puffin.
Shaskan, T.S. (2012). Seriously, Cinderella is
so annoying! The story of Cinderella as told by
the wicked stepmother. (G. Guerlais, Illus.).
Mankato, MN: Picture Window.
Boelts, M. (2007). Those shoes. (N.Z. Jones, Illus.). Somerville, MA: Candlewick.
Bunting, E. (1991). Fly away home. (R. Himler, Illus.). New York, NY: Clarion.
Bunting, E. (1994). Smoky night. (D. Diaz, Illus.). San Diego, CA: Voyager.
Cohn, D. (2002). ¡Si, se puede !/Yes, we can ! (F. Delgado, Illus.). El Paso, TX:
Cinco Puntos.
Cooper, M. (1998). Gettin’ through Thursday. (N. Bennett, Illus.). New York,
NY: Lee & Low.
Cottin, M. (2006). The black book of colors. (R. Faría, Illus.; E. Amado,
Trans.). Berkeley, CA: Groundwood.
de Haan, L., & Nijland, S. (2000). King and king. Berkeley, CA: Tricycle.
Elwin, R., & Paulse, M. (1990). Asha’s mums. (D. Lee, Illus.). Toronto, ON,
Canada: Three O’Clock Press.
González, R. (2005). Antonio’s card/La tarjeta de Antonio. (C.C. Álvarez,
Illus.). San Francisco, CA: Children’s Book Press.
Hazen, B.S. (1979). Tight times. (T.S. Hyman, Illus.). New York, NY: Puffin.
Heide, F.P., & Gilliland, J.H. (1990). The day of Ahmed’s secret. (T. Lewin,
Illus.). New York, NY: Lothrop, Lee & Shepard.
Kilodavis, C. (2011). My princess boy: A mom’s story about a young boy who
loves to dress up. (S. DeSimone, Illus.). New York, NY: Aladdin.
Parr, T. (2003). The family book. New York, NY: Little, Brown.
Parr, T. (2007). We belong together: A book about adoption and families.
New York, NY: Little, Brown.
Pérez, A.I. (2000). My ver y own room/Mi propio cuartito. (M.C. Gonzalez,
Illus.). San Francisco, CA: Children’s Book Press.
Polacco, P. (2009). In our mothers’ house. New York, NY: Philomel.
Richardson, J., & Parnell, P. (2005). And Tango makes three. (H. Cole, Illus.).
New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
Williams, V.B. (1982). A chair for my mother. New York, NY: Greenwillow.
Woodson, J. (2002). Our Gracie aunt. (J.J. Muth, Illus.). New York, NY:
Hyperion.
Woodson, J. (2002). Visiting day. (J.E. Ransome, Illus.). New York, NY:
Scholastic.
º––
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other versions represent additional windows and mirrors
by showing ways of living in the world that are left out of
the more traditional tale.
Yet, cultural narratives are perpetuated by much more
than just fairy tales. When thinking about children’s real
lives as represented in realistic ction, single stories about
a range of experiences are fairly common. For example, the
limited single story of what “family” is becomes readily
apparent when disrupted by using the tools of windows
and mirrors and then expanded through the addition of
multiple perspectives. To do this, I rst ask my students to
read common and popular picture books with main charac-
ters who have a traditional family structure of mom, dad,
siblings, and dog. We discuss how the families represented
in the text are similar to or different from their own
families. Many students share that they saw their families
reected in the text, whereas other students share that
their families were not represented and give counterexam-
ples of how their families include stepparents, additional
siblings, and/or adoptions. Next, I ask students to read
picture books with main characters who have much more
diverse family structures, including same-gender parents,
single parents, adopted children, and grandparents. By
rst noticing the ways the more common single story of
family circulates, by questioning who is represented in
those texts and who is left out, and by adding layers of
family structures represented in more diverse children’s
books, the single story of “family” is disrupted and
expanded. (See Table 2 for particular titles.) Such a method
can even be used for cultural narratives outside of families.
In this way, we have explored ideas such as immigration,
perspectives on labor, conict and war, poverty and class,
and disabilities.
Conclusion
We are committed to providing our preservice teachers
with conceptual tools that will guide them to make
diverse and equitable choices in the literature they have
on the bookshelves in their classrooms and the texts
they use in their teaching. Such practices assure that
all readers have access to windows and mirrors, thereby
helping create the kinds of classrooms that all children
deserve. By guiding our preservice teacher students
through a process using common single stories that they
hold, we are able to ensure their ability to do such work
in their own classrooms. Using windows and mirrors to
rst highlight the power of being included or excluded
from the representations around you, adding the single
story concept to name the reductive and limited stories
of historical events, people, or cultural narratives, and
expanding these with multiple layers of diverse perspec-
tives seems to be a particularly helpful process because it
allows our students to apply this conceptual tool to a wide
range of areas. This includes texts across a variety of
content areas and a range of genres.
Another advantage of combining these tools is that it
becomes less intimidating for our students to revisit
the expanded text set through the lens of windows
and mirrors with issues of equity in mind to examine
it for issues of power. The combination of these tools,
therefore, is nonthreatening and yet still critical, a
balance that is important for our mostly White, female,
middle class students to have. The additive model of the
single story frame helps make issues of text selection
accessible and practical, while the critical layer helps
their selections remain accountable. This second step
adds an element of social justice to their process because
it helps them think about individual the experiences of
people around the world who are inequitably positioned
(Ticknor, 2012) relative to one another. Importantly,
our students also nd this multistep process empower-
ing because they truly want to better serve their diverse
students; they are just not always sure how best to do
so. After these experiences in their preservice teacher
program, they trust that these lenses give them tools
they can use to be better teachers. They often leave our
classes saying that reading and teaching a more diverse
set of children’s literature is the thing they are most
excited to do in their own classrooms.
For us as well as for our students, it may seem much
easier to maintain our single stories, keeping them on
a shelf neat and organized, but that perpetuates stereo-
types and marginalizes the lived experiences of those
who do not nd characters like themselves in books, who
do not have a voice in how (or whose) history is told, and
who wonder why they do not t in the stories they hear
in school. The work required of teachers in our diverse
society involves taking those single stories down off the
shelf, adding to them a range of other stories that make
historical events, people, and cultural narratives messy,
more complex, and more validating to all students. �
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37
Christina M. Tschida is an assistant professor in the Department of
Elementary Education and Middle Grades Education at East Carolina
University, Greenville, North Carolina, where she teaches social studies
methods and curriculum planning courses. Her research interests include
online teaching and learning, social studies instruction, culturally responsive
teaching, and issues of preservice teacher identity. email: t schidac@ ecu.edu
Caitlin L. Ryan is an assistant professor in the Depar tment of Literacy
Studies , English Education, and History Education at East Carolina
University, Greenville, North Carolina, where she teaches undergraduate
reading methods courses. Her research investigates relationships among
children’s literature, literacy, social positioning, and educational equity in
elementary schools, particularly in relation to issues of gender and sexuality.
email: ryanca@ ecu.edu
Anne Swenson Ticknor is an assistant professor in the Depar tment of
Literacy Studies, E nglish Education, and History Education at East Carolina
University, Greenville, North Carolina. She teaches literac y methods courses
for undergraduate students and literacy courses for graduate students in
the Reading Education program. Her research focuses on literacy practices
related to identity of preservice elementary literacy teacher s. email:
ticknora@ecu.edu
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Children’s Literature Cited Continued
Pinkney, Illus.). New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.
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Illus.). Mankato, MN: Picture Window.
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