Introduction: Literature as a Means to Facilitate Personal Response and Inquiry

International and multicultural literature has the power to evoke strong personal connections that pull readers into the text to experience both familiar and new worlds. As teachers and librarians facilitate children’s response to literature, readers see themselves reflected in the text and learn more about their own world and the world of others.

While some sort of initial response to literature is an automatic reaction to reading, sharing those responses with others or using them as a platform for inquiry and dialogue may not be as natural. How can teachers and librarians facilitate response to literature and encourage thoughtful discussion? In what ways do children respond to international and multicultural literature? In this issue of WOW Stories: Connections from the Classroom we present five vignettes that share how these educators brought international or multicultural literature into their classrooms and facilitated children’s inquiry and response.

Teachers and librarians play a central role in bringing children together with international and multicultural literature and in creating spaces where personal connections and response are encouraged. To do so these teachers and librarians must themselves be comfortable with allowing children to develop personal interpretations. Our first vignette discusses how one group of teachers in Mauritius worked together to reframe their conception of inquiry so that students would be allowed to pursue individual interests through a text set. In the second vignette, these same authors share the difficulties they had getting students to respond to literature in a culture that does not value such forms of response.

The third vignette discusses students learning to respond to literature, as first graders explored multicultural literature and began to move beyond superficial connections. The fourth vignette also describes students who are new to responding to literature, when as Spanish Language Learners, they take on the task of reading folk tales from around the world and holding literature discussions in their new language. Our last vignette describes how literature about immigration evoked strong personal connections for a group of middle school English Language Learners.

As you read these vignettes, think about how you connect children and adolescents with literature in ways that promote intercultural understandings and consider sharing your innovative practices by submitting a vignette to WOW Stories. We are interested in descriptions of interactions with literature in classrooms and libraries from preschool through secondary levels. See our call for manuscripts and author guidelines for more information.

Janine Schall
Editor