Register today for an in-person workshop presented by Kathy G. Short and Dorea Kleker, University of Arizona, with participating authors, Rajani LaRocca and Carol Kim. For more information or to register, visit https://cercll.regfox.com/institutestoriesglobal. Registration closes May 31, 2022.
Join us for a two-day workshop to engage in experiences and books that invite children to immerse themselves in global cultures. In this interactive workshop, you will explore new global books for your work with children and participate in engagements with these books. You will also interact with several children’s authors who will join us to talk about their global books. Participants will receive copies of their picturebooks along with booklists and other materials.
Our work is framed around encouraging children to balance an understanding of their cultural locations and loyalties with a reflective openness to new ways of thinking and being in the world. This open mindedness can be created by inviting children into story worlds where they can experience the ways people live, feel, and think in global cultures. As children develop empathy and knowledge, they come to know their home cultures and the world beyond home. One challenge is to dig below the surface of a culture (e.g. food and festivals) to connect with deeper cultural values, including the significance of language. Through engagements with books, we can challenge children to engage with story as a means of bridging divides and creating intercultural understanding.
Kathy G. Short is a professor and endowed chair of global children’s literature in the UArizona College of Education with a focus on dialogue and inquiry and is Director of Worlds of Words: Center of Global Literacies and Literatures. She has worked extensively with teachers all over the world on literature-based approaches and has authored many books and articles, including Creating Classrooms for Authors and Inquirers and Teaching Globally: Reading the World through Literature. She served as President of the National Council of Teachers of English and the US Board of Books for Young People.
Dorea Kleker is an early childhood teacher, educator and lecturer at the University of Arizona. Working with students and teachers across a wide variety of educational contexts in both the U.S. and Latin America, her work focuses on global and multicultural children’s literature, literacy and play to develop intercultural understanding, and the use of literature to actively engage children as inquirers across all content areas.
Carol Kim believes books and words have a magical ability to change the world for the better, and she writes for children with the hope of spreading some of that magic. She is the author of the picture book biography, King Sejong Invents the Alphabet, as well as 20 fiction and nonfiction books for the educational market. Carol relishes unearthing real-life stories and little-known facts to share with young readers. She lives in Austin, Texas with her family.
Rajani LaRocca was born in India, raised in Kentucky and lives in the Boston area, where she practices medicine and writes books for young people, including Red, White, and Whole (2021), Seven Golden Rings (2020), Bracelets for Bina’s Brothers (2021),Where Three Oceans Meet (2021), I’ll Go and Come Back (2022), and more. She’s always been an omnivorous reader, and now is an omnivorous writer of fiction and nonfiction, novels and picture books, prose and poetry. She finds inspiration in her family, her childhood, the natural world, math, science,and just about everywhere she looks.
Questions? Contact: dkleker@arizona.edu or shortk@arizona.edu
➣ Register here.
A small number of scholarships are available for fulltime teachers and fulltime graduate students. These cover registration, and/or hotel for people participating in both days of the institute. Lodging scholarships are for the nights of June 1 and 2 for individuals traveling more than 130 miles to get to the University of Arizona; they are for June 2 only, for people coming from between 60 and130 miles away. To apply for a scholarship, submit a completed scholarship application form by the deadline of May 20. We will verify eligibility, and our committee will select recipients before we make award notifications on May 25.
This institute is organized and sponsored by the Center for Educational Resources in Culture, Language and Literacy (CERCLL) and Worlds of Words.
The increasing global mobility and multilingualism of our world are playing out in interesting ways in recent books for children. Some of these books focus on children learning to speak English or on English-speakers struggling to pronounce a child’s name. Still others naturally integrate multiple languages in a translingual book where characters weave additional languages into their dialogue, drawing from the multiple languages they speak and understand. Another trend is an increase in bilingual books with the entire text in two languages. Continue reading 
The lack of books depicting contemporary global cultures has been an issue for many years with historical fiction, traditional literature and fantasy dominating the global books published in the U.S. This over-representation of history and traditions often results in stereotypes and misconceptions of these cultures as set back in time or no longer existing in the contemporary world. The recent emergence of picturebooks with contemporary depictions is thus a positive trend in providing books that invite children to make connections between their own culture and global cultures in today’s world. 
WOW Currents for this month highlights the trends in global books published and/or distributed in the U.S. between Summer 2021 and 2022. Each year, we examine the new books published in that period of time and check out review sources and awards to identify books we believe will be of most interest to K-12 educators for use in their contexts. This process allows us to update the 
