Bridge the Gap!

Nathenson-Mejía, Sally, Escamilla, Kathy. Connecting With Latino Children: Bridging Cultural Gaps with Children's Literature. Bilingual Research Journal. Washington: Spring 2003. Vol. 27, Iss. 1; pg. 101, 18 pgs

In the article I chose, it spoke of the importance of teacher’s relating to their students that are of different racial and ethnic backgrounds from their own by educating themselves on other cultures, and being able to provide their students with literature that they could relate to. A project was conducted for teachers-to-be to find quality multicultural literature for their classrooms and begin to create cultural connections between the literature they found, as well as their students. It focused solely on Latino/Latina literature, but strongly emphasized that teachers could use this method of finding quality pieces of multicultural literature to educate themselves on any race or ethnicity that they are unfamiliar with.

The four main goals of the project were as follows:

1. Create cultural connections between teacher candidates and their students.
2. Create connections between the books and children's lives (personal connections).
3. Enhance the verbal skills and abilities of their students in both Spanish and English.
4. Utilize literature to teach skills and strategies in reading and writing (Nathenson-Mejía).

The outcome of the project went rather well in terms of the teachers-to-be educating themselves on cultures different from their own, and were able to find quality literature to help their own understanding. In addition, passing this literature along to their students of both Latino and non-Latino descent helped them to feel as though they were included, as their language was integrated into the pages of the books their peers were reading. The results were documented as follows:

“The children's enthusiasm and the teacher candidate's reflection demonstrate that personal connections created by culturally familiar literature can be an effective means of engaging students in reading and writing” (Nathenson-Mejía).

As future teachers, it is imperative that we educate ourselves on different cultures so our future students feel as though they are understood. By finding multicultural literature that we can use to educate ourselves, and in turn have it in our classrooms for our students to find, we are doing a great service to ourselves and making students feel as though they belong.