It was the first time that he had seen a book about that Islamic holiday, says Callahan. \u201cHe saw himself in that book in a way he hadn\u2019t before. And that was powerful.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is considerable power in children\u2019s books. It\u2019s a formative power, especially in the case of picture books for younger children, with their rapidly developing intellects and personalities.<\/p>\n
So what\u2019s the formative impact on children of color when most picture books \u2014 as many as 90 percent \u2014 are all about white people? And if you want to lay hands on one of the relatively few books that feature diverse characters, what happens when the local library catalog can\u2019t help you find them? And what if that library doesn\u2019t even know which races or cultures are represented in its children\u2019s book collection?<\/p>\n
Krista Aronson, associate professor of psychology at Bates, has devoted considerable time and thought to such questions. And she has an answer.<\/p>\n
As part of a team including Callahan, Bates humanities librarian Christina Bell, and noted children\u2019s author-illustrator Anne Sibley O\u2019Brien, Aronson has created the Diverse BookFinder project:<\/a> a three-fold set of resources that bring new accessibility to the world of diverse children\u2019s books:<\/p>\n The team behind the Diverse BookFinder project: from left, Christina Bell, humanities librarian; Brenna Callahan ’15, Maine Campus Compact civic leadership post-baccalaureate fellow; Krista Aronson, associate professor of psychology; and Anne Sibley O’Brien, author and illustrator. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n The Diverse BookFinder project, which recently received a grant of $250,000<\/a> from\u00a0the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, is a \u201cpotential game-changer\u201d for parents, librarians, and teachers \u2014 anyone seeking diverse children\u2019s books, says Cheryl Klein, a member of the Bates project\u2019s advisory board and the editorial director for Lee and Low Books, which specializes in multicultural children’s titles.<\/p>\n Aronson, who is biracial, studies how people, particularly the young, come to understand social constructs like race, and how such understanding affects interactions and psychological well-being.<\/p>\n Her dissertation at the University of Michigan focused on identity development among African American teenagers and the role that parents play in the socialization process. The size of the black community in Ann Arbor ensured she\u2019d have a substantial pool of research subjects.<\/p>\n But when Aronson joined the Bates faculty, in 2003, that meant a move to the nation\u2019s whitest state and therefore different directions for her research. The inspiration for one new direction came from one of her daughters, Sophia, and Sophia\u2019s relationships with white and Somali children at school.<\/p>\n When Sophia was about 6, \u201cshe was bringing home difficult questions around the topics of race and immigration that she was being asked by her friends,\u201d says Aronson, \u201cwhich gave me insight into some of the issues they were grappling with.\u201d<\/p>\n For Krista Aronson, an inspiration for a new direction for her research came from her daughter’s relationships with white and Somali children at school. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n Aronson discovered psychological research in England exploring how picture books affect children\u2019s attitudes towards refugee children. Experiments had shown that when children take in stories about different groups of children getting along well, they in turn tend to get along better with peers who are different from them.<\/p>\n Collaborating with Rupert Brown, a prominent social psychologist who studies prejudice and stereotyping, Aronson sought to follow up on and localize that prior research by studying children\u2019s responses to books portraying interactions between white and Somali children in Lewiston.<\/p>\n But no such children\u2019s books existed. So one of Aronson\u2019s thesis students, Elizabeth Ellman \u201910, created stories under the guidance of two Mainers known for making diverse children\u2019s books, writer Margy Burns Knight and illustrator-writer Anne Sibley O\u2019Brien. O\u2019Brien illustrated the stories for the research.<\/p>\n “These books mattered. They could actually shift children\u2019s perceptions.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Conducted in winter 2010 with support from the college\u2019s Harward Center, Aronson\u2019s experiment confirmed that so-called cross-group picture books can indeed promote better relationships among diverse kids. \u201cIt was a wonderful learning experience for me and my students, and the community,\u201d Aronson says. She and O\u2019Brien went on to give a series of public workshops on the study.<\/p>\n Raised in South Korea by white American medical missionaries, and deeply impressed by her experiences there, O\u2019Brien has made it her mission to use children\u2019s literature, as she says, to \u201cexplore and celebrate human difference.\u201d She has illustrated 32 children\u2019s books and written 14 of those books, including I\u2019m New Here<\/em>, a picture book about immigrant children that was a Kirkus Reviews<\/em> Best Book of 2015.<\/p>\n Author and illustrator Anne Sibley O’Brien talks about the Picture Book Collection in Ladd Library during the college’s 2017 Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cThe work with Krista was like, \u2018Eureka!\u2019\u201d O\u2019Brien says, because it provided \u201cdata that proved what I was betting on: that these books mattered<\/em> that much, and that they could actually shift children\u2019s perceptions.\u201d<\/p>\n That early work, Aronson says, \u201cgot me thinking about picture books more broadly. I wanted to see what we could do with the books that are out there.\u201d And, she wondered, \u201cWhat is<\/em> out there?\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cAnd that\u2019s how Annie and I started collecting the picture books.\u201d<\/p>\n For both Ladd Library and the team that created the library\u2019s Picture Book Collection, \u201cit was an early decision that we needed to make this usable for as many people as possible,\u201d says the library\u2019s Christina Bell.<\/p>\n From Aronson\u2019s perspective, as a researcher seeking to translate her work for the public, \u201cit\u2019s important that these books don\u2019t just sit in my lab and get utilized when I teach, or pulled off the shelf to analyze and then shoved back on there. I want my work to have meaning beyond, perhaps, the scholarly or the academic.\u201d<\/p>\n The fact that the books of the Picture Book Collection circulate makes the collection nationally unique. Collections of diverse children\u2019s books are not unheard of, but access to them is restricted. Books in the Bates collection, on the other hand, may be checked out in person by anyone with a Bates ID or Ladd courtesy card, or remotely via interlibrary loan.<\/p>\n If access to the collection is straightforward, building the collection was anything but. \u201cWhen we started this project I had no idea that it was going to be so difficult,\u201d Aronson says.<\/p>\n The paucity of books depicting people of color is \u201ca crisis for all of our children.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n For one thing, diverse picture books continue to constitute a small fraction of all children\u2019s titles. Ten to 14 percent of picture books that are published annually feature people of color, \u201cand that number has not budged since the late 1960s,\u201d Aronson says.<\/p>\n Yet, even as the proportion of diverse children\u2019s books hasn\u2019t budged, the proportion of diverse children has blossomed in the U.S., as O\u2019Brien points out. The paucity of books depicting people of color, she says, is \u201ca crisis for all of our children, because it\u2019s not healthy or useful for white children to only see reflections of themselves,\u201d or for children of color not to see themselves in books.<\/p>\n \u201cIt doesn\u2019t help build relationships, and it doesn\u2019t help them function in the world that they\u2019re entering.\u201d<\/p>\n The Bates team’s book search led them to 111 publisher websites plus online resources including the I\u2019m Your Neighbor<\/a> website; online lists of titles, including World Full of Color<\/a>; the database of Baker and Taylor, an important book distributor; and a list provided by the Cooperative Children\u2019s Book Center, the site of a major diverse book collection at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison.<\/p>\n The search is a dynamic, grassroots process. \u201cI learn of new publishers all the time,\u201d Aronson says, \u201cand people bring titles to me,\u201d including a parent whose daughter had worked on thesis with Aronson, and who, at Commencement, recommended a book that she proceeded to add.<\/p>\n The Bates team is taking its quest for picture book accessibility to a new plane with the online Diverse BookFinder.<\/a> Because, after all, how valuable is a book that you can\u2019t find?<\/p>\n The online Diverse BookFinder website allows users to search books by title, racial group depicted, where the story takes place, and the narrative message within.<\/p><\/div>\n If you go to your local library looking for multicultural picture books, it\u2019s possible that the catalog won\u2019t recognize the search terms that make most sense to you. Say you\u2019re looking for The Sandwich Swap<\/em>, a book about two best friends, one white and one Arab American, who have a falling-out over their lunches (peanut butter and jelly vs. hummus).<\/p>\n You might use a search term like \u201cArab American\u201d to find it. And you would come up blank. In the catalogs of the Library of Congress and WorldCat, the word \u201cArab\u201d does not appear in entries for The Sandwich Swap<\/em> (whose author, by the way, is the queen of Jordan), although the book\u2019s various subject headings do include \u201cfood habits.\u201d<\/p>\n Traditional library cataloging doesn\u2019t tend to indicate the race or ethnicity of the people in a book, Bell explains. \u201cIt will document in a line or so, very generally, what\u2019s happening in the story, but there\u2019s no indication of who is represented in the book.\u201d<\/p>\n Even publishers themselves don\u2019t necessarily make findable their own books featuring people of color. \u201cIt seems as though some, when they enter books, just don\u2019t want to use any race, cultural, or ethnic labels,\u201d Aronson says.<\/p>\n As they amassed the collection, Aronson, O\u2019Brien, and Callahan identified and refined nine recurring categories that the DBF associates with diverse books.<\/p>\n The nine categories reflect various narrative messages that a given book is designed to convey. For example, \u201cCross Group\u201d books like Anna McQuinn\u2019s My Friend Jamal<\/em> portray interactions of characters across racial or cultural difference, while \u201cAny Child\u201d books tell stories about characters of color where race, culture, or ethnicity are incidental to the plot.<\/p>\n More than a publicly searchable collection of diverse children\u2019s books, the Diverse BookFinder also makes a book\u2019s narrative messages searchable, thanks to a unique search language that include these nine narrative categories:<\/p>\n Example: Lola Reads to Leo<\/em> by Anna McQuinn<\/p>\n Example: My Friend Jamal<\/em> by Anna McQuinn<\/p>\n Examples: Hana Hashimoto, Sixth Violin<\/em> by Chieri Uegaki; Red Kite, Blue Kite<\/em> by Ji-li Jiang<\/p>\n Examples: Going to Mecca<\/em> by Na\u2019ima Robert; Shades of People<\/em> by Shelley Rotner<\/p>\n Example: Hope\u2019s Gift<\/em> by Kelly Starling Lyons<\/p>\n Examples: The Orphan and the Polar Bear <\/em>by Sakiasi Qaunaq; Beauty and the Beast <\/em>by H. Chuku Lee<\/p>\n Example: Side by Side: The Story of Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez<\/em> by Monica Brown<\/p>\n 12 Days of New York<\/em> by Tonya Bolden; Read All About It<\/em> by Laura Bush and Jenna Bush Hager<\/p>\n Examples: The Good Garden: How One Family Went from Hunger to Having Enough <\/em>by Katie Smith Milway<\/p>\n <\/div>\n The team, supported during this phase of the project by library cataloging consultant Deborah Tomaras, also created other code sets that indicate where stories take place and what racial or cultural groups the characters represent. The racial-variables coding is unique to the DBF, and Brenna Callahan herself coded the collection’s first 600 books and then wrote about that work for her senior thesis, with Aronson as her adviser.<\/p>\n Deployed in tandem with existing finding aids, the DBF promises to \u201creally help people just cut through to what they\u2019re after \u2014 which is the Holy Grail of publishing,\u201d says Klein of Lee and Low Books.<\/p>\n Interested in diverse children’s books through her literacy work with schoolchildren, interdisciplinary major Brenna Callahan ’15 made Diverse BookFinder research central to her senior thesis, with Krista Aronson as her adviser. Callahan is now an AmeriCorps VISTA Fellow at Bates. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n Alongside the Picture Book Collection and the Diverse BookFinder, the third piece of the project has been piloted and will be developed as funding becomes available: an online tool that can analyze a given collection of books for representational balance.<\/p>\n The same coding that helps individual users find a book or two via the DBF also allows wholesale analysis of a particular collection or grouping of books \u2014 in a library, say, or in a publisher\u2019s new releases for a given year \u2014 to reveal what messages the collection is sending and how it might be improved.<\/p>\n \u201cOne library that we did this with,\u201d Aronson says, \u201clearned that 2.4 percent of their books featured human characters of color, and that 65 percent of this small proportion were African American characters\u201d \u2014 though 19 percent of the population served by the library was Asian.<\/p>\n On most Sundays, Aronson and her team members meet for tea and snacks, vetting new titles for the collection and plotting out objectives for the near- and longer terms.<\/p>\n Krista Aronson poses in Ladd Library with her daughter Hope, age 2.<\/p><\/div>\n Specifically, they\u2019re pondering how or whether to represent book quality <\/em>in the search language (\u201cI can\u2019t tell you that every book we have is of high quality,\u201d says a diplomatic Aronson) and, perhaps more important, how to broaden their system\u2019s definition of diversity.<\/p>\n In some ways, \u201cthis is one of the biggest public humanities projects Bates has ever taken on.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cIt made the most sense to start with racial and ethnic diversity because that\u2019s where the idea was grounded originally,\u201d Aronson explains, referring to her cross-group research. But now, with a robust methodology in place, they can think about bringing in other dimensions of diversity.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve talked about gender diversity, sexuality, orientation,\u201d says Bell. \u201cWe\u2019ve talked about socioeconomic diversity, and immigration and refugees.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, the Diverse BookFinder is as impressive for its potential as for what it has already made possible. \u201cThis is not made for an internal audience, and this is not made wholly and completely for scholarship,\u201d Bell says. It\u2019s about \u201cmaking important work usable, accessible, findable for everybody.\u201d<\/p>\n In some ways, she adds, \u201cthis is one of the biggest public humanities projects Bates has ever taken on.\u201d<\/p>\n\n
![\"E2-170818_Picture_Books_Ladd_0186\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/09\/E2-170818_Picture_Books_Ladd_0186-900x600.jpg\")
<\/a>Book learning<\/h3>\n
![\"For](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/09\/E2-170523_Picture_Books_Aronson_0911-PGJ-900x600.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Author](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/09\/170116_MLK_Children_Ladd_0025-900x600.jpg\")
<\/a>First up: the Picture Book Collection<\/h3>\n
Next: the Diverse BookFinder<\/h3>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/09\/Screen-Shot-2017-09-25-at-3.22.43-PM-copy-861x900.jpg\")
<\/a>\n\t+<\/span>How the Diverse BookFinder makes book messages searchable<\/a>\n\t<\/h5>
Nine narrative categories<\/h5>\n
![\"E2-everychild-lola](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/09\/E2-everychild-lola-reads-mres-260x300.jpg\")
Any Child<\/strong>: Stories that depict characters of color but do not make race, ethnicity, or culture part of the plot. Any Child books can be identified as books whose characters\u2019 race could be changed without changing the story line.<\/p>\n
\n![\"E2-cross](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/09\/E2-cross-group-myfriendjamal-226x300.jpg\")
Cross Group<\/strong>: Stories that portray interactions of named characters across racial or cultural difference, including those depicting same-age and cross-age friendships; the interactions depicted can be positive, negative, hostile, or ambiguous.<\/p>\n
\n![\"E2-beautiful-life-Hana-Hashimoto\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/09\/E2-beautiful-life-Hana-Hashimoto-271x300.jpg\")
Beautiful Life<\/strong>: Stories about a particular racial or cultural group experience that take readers into the everyday world of characters in countries around the world, with specific cultural components such as language, food, celebrations, and traditions.<\/p>\n
\n![\"E2-concept-Going](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/09\/E2-concept-Going-to-mecca-238x300.jpg\")
Race\/Culture Concepts<\/strong>: Books that explore and compare specific aspects of human difference, inviting children to consider new perspectives related to racial, ethnic, or cultural identity.<\/p>\n
\n![\"E2-oppression-hopes](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/09\/E2-oppression-hopes-gift-81YfPn-OBcL-244x300.jpg\")
Oppression<\/strong>: Stories of prejudice, mistreatment, and discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or culture, such as stories focused on slavery, the civil rights movement, or internment.<\/p>\n
\n![\"E2-folklore-C9y-recUIAAZl5c\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/09\/E2-folklore-C9y-recUIAAZl5c-200x300.jpg\")
Folklore<\/strong>: Myths, legends, folk, and fairy tales that are set in a particular cultural context, introducing readers to traditions, activities, languages, and values.<\/p>\n
\n![\"E2-bio-SidebySide_jkt_Des2\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/09\/E2-bio-SidebySide_jkt_Des2-300x300.jpg\")
Biography<\/strong>: Nonfiction presentations, narrative or non-narrative, about the life of a particular person or group of people from a historical or contemporary perspective.<\/p>\n
\n![\"E2-INCIDENTAL-12](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/09\/E2-INCIDENTAL-12-DAYS-images-239x300.jpg\")
Incidental<\/strong>: Stories that depict a diverse group of non-primary characters, or books with a diverse cast of background characters and a white protagonist.<\/p>\n
\n![\"E2-info-goodgardenlarge\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/09\/E2-info-goodgardenlarge-226x300.jpg\")
Informational<\/strong>: Nonfiction books presenting factual information, with or without a storyline; may be encyclopedic. Diverse communities are depicted but culture is not always central to the content.<\/p>\n
\n![\"Brenna](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/09\/web-140722_Brenna_Callahan_0102-1-900x600.jpg\")
<\/a>The messages within<\/h3>\n
![\"Krista](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/09\/E2-170818_Picture_Books_Ladd_0811-pgj-copy-678x900.jpg\")
<\/a>
![\"During](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2017\/09\/E2-170523_Picture_Books_Aronson_0610-pgj-900x600.jpg\")
<\/a>