Crossing Cultural Borders: 6 Categories

Every weekday (and the occasional weekend day) thru the end of August, we will be exploring these topics at Shen’s Blog:

Week 1 (starting 7/16) - Stranger in a Strange Land: Americans Traveling to Other Cultures
Week 2 (starting 7/23) – Re-landscaping the Hero's Journey: The Connection Between Fantasy Stories and Multicultural Literature
Week 3 (starting 7/30) - Becoming American: Immigration Stories
(8/6 thru 8/12 is a hiatus)
Week 4 (starting 8/13) - The Hyphenated American Experience: Voices of Americans Who Look Like "The Other"
Week 5 (starting 8/20) - Writing What You Don't Know: Creating Characters and Stories Outside of One's Ethnicity and Culture
Week 6 (starting 8/27) - The Future

This list is based on an inspiring “Writing Crossing Cultural Boundaries” session given by Jeanne Wakatsuki and James Houston. I've revised and expanded their original list to accommodate multicultural children's literature.

The scope of multicultural literature for children is so broad that I had to really narrow down the topics. While comments about all types of multicultural literature are welcome, the focus for the next six weeks will be mostly American-centric fictional stories, which is already a huge list.

Many of these books I will blog about I've read myself, but some of them I found in a library database (Novelist K-8) or listed in this recently published book: Crossing Boundaries with Children's Books edited by Doris Gebel. I would love to hear about other resources for multicultural children’s lit.

So every Monday for the next six weeks, a topic overview will be provided and during the remaining weekdays, we will delve into examples from children's literature.

We want to know what multicultural books you have read, your multicultural experiences and what you are thinking, so please feel free to comment!