Cultural Connections: Celebrating Diversity with Picture Books and Poetry
Saturday, April 9, 2016, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM
Colorado Convention Center, Room 109/111/113
This session weaves together the perspectives of scholars, authors, and librarians to consider how we celebrate diversity in the materials we select, programs we plan, and children we serve. We’ll consider practical strategies for valuing the diverse cultural fabric of our communities while pairing diverse genres like picture books and poetry to build deeper literacy, too. We’ll provide print and digital resources for diversity programming while incorporating required reading skills (e.g., CCSS) in meaningful ways.
At the end of this session, participants will:
1: Be able to investigate and discuss dimensions of diversity in your community.
2: Be able to implement a five-step strategy for introducing and connecting picture books and poetry to build literacy skills.
3: Know fifty titles of diverse picture books and fifty diverse poems/poetry books and the authors who create them.
The session organizer(s) identified this session as appropriate for:
Level 1: People with no previous knowledge of the topic.
This session will have: Medium interaction: single speaker/panel with questions or audience participation throughout
Handouts: Download 1 Download 2
Track: Invent
Tags: Serving Youth, Children's Literature, Children's Services, Diversity, Programming/Services, Readers' Advisory
Presenters
Nancy Bo Flood, Author
Boyds Mills Press, Honesdale, PA
Nancy Bo Flood is a former research psychologist who studied brain development and also worked as a teacher and counselor of children and families. She has lived all around the world and currently resides in the Navajo Nation in Arizona. Her works for children includes fiction, nonfiction and poetry about diverse cultures.
Marianne Follis, Senior Librarian
Valley Ranch (Irving) Public Library, Irving, TX
Dr. Marianne Crandall Follis has been a public youth services librarian for the past 11 years, and is currently the Senior Librarian at the Valley Ranch (Irving) Public Library in the Dallas, TX area. Her days are spent doing everything from leading lapsit storytimes, to experimenting with digital technology in the Teen Digital Media Center. She is involved in TLA and ALA and both YALSA and ALSC.
Sylvia Vardell, Professor
Texas Woman's University, Dallas, TX
Sylvia Vardell is Professor in the School of Library and Information Studies at Texas Woman's University and has authored or co-authored more than 100 published articles, more than 25 book chapters and given more than 150 presentations at national and international conferences. She authored or co-edited Poetry Aloud Here!, The Poetry Teacher's Book of Lists, The Poetry Friday Anthology series (with Janet Wong) and maintains the PoetryForChildren blog and poetry column for Book Links magazine.
Janet Wong, Author & Publisher
Pomelo Books, Princeton, NJ
Janet Wong is a graduate of Yale Law School and former lawyer who switched careers and became a children's poet. Her dramatic career change has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN's Paula Zahn Show, and Radical Sabbatical. She is the author of 30 books for children and teens on a wide variety of subjects, including writing and revision, dumpster diving, diversity, and chess.
Ally Garcia, Outreach & Youth Services Manager/Adult Program Coordinator
Clearview Library District, Windsor, CO
My name is Ally Garcia and I am the Outreach & Youth Services Manager as well as the adult program coordinator at the Clearview Library District in Windsor, Colorado. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California where I attended Library school at UCLA and worked as an Academic and a Public Librarian for several years.