Critical Literacy: African American Children's literature

Critical Literacy: African American Children’s literature
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Critical literacy African American children
Critical literacy helps people to read text in an active and reflective approach as they seek to get textual meaning. Critical literacy plays an important role in children’s literature, as readers have the chance to change their world, and goes beyond merely teaching children and extends to integrating critical thinking skills. African American children’s literature represents the history and cultural aspects of African American. This typically seeks to celebrate the strength of the community in light of continuous struggles from the establishment as well as nurture black children in their cultural context. This paper explores critical literacy and its application to African American children’s literature.
Critical literacy of African American and multi cultural literature takes into account the growing importance of children’s literature in shaping children’s books. For a long time, children literature had white characters, and in most cases books those chosen tended to be flawed (Bishop, 2012). Even tough, the number of books with black characters still remains a small percentage, the number has increased substantially since the 1970’s arising of out the relevance of critical literacy. Nonetheless, the outside view of black characters in children’s books in the 1960’s and 1970’s failed to capture the situation of the African American community. Emergence of African American literature focusing on the community’s world view and cultural traditions is vital in understanding critical literacy.
Multicultural writing on children’s literature has highlighted the role of power in writing not just for the African American audience, but also other communities including Latin Americans and Native Americans. In essence, increased focus on multicultural education extends to the intersection of power, race and culture, arousing debate on issues surrounding the matter. The power to narrate, represent and self determine shows that critical literacy has had a positive impact towards growing acceptance of African American literature (Ching, 2005). The author goes on to point out that those in power fear the role of the word is to influence. Thus, the critical analysis of African American children’s literature should look into whether the literature is culturally conscious, has social conscience or represents the melting point.
Arising out of the need to show how multiculturalism in children’s books play an important role in redefining education is the notion that children should be familiar with books reflecting their own images. The main forms of literature adopted in America tend to ignore children reflection in their works, but through critical literacy African American writers now highlight on the need to show pos...