Six recommendations for publishers and curriculum decision-makers to improve representational balance¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

The report closes with six actions for those who create, publish, and select children's books: "Challenge dominant norms and singular perspectives"; "Expand publisher and educator definitions of cultural relevance"; "Ask a new set of questions about representation"; "Consider how texts sit in conversation with one another"; "Expand educator choice in curated materials"; and "Provide professional learning to all curriculum decision-makers, including authors and developers." These follow directly from the finding that people, cultures, and topics of color are most often given limited representation in otherwise high-quality-rated curricula. The report directs decision-makers to its online tool to go "beyond superficial understandings of what it means to be culturally relevant."

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Use of the Tool for Representational Balance in Books or similar critical questioning of texts before selection

Constraints¶

• The report explicitly opposes text removal as a response, calling it "a form of censorship and is harmful to children," and notes publishers face pressures leading to self-censorship in a political moment where 44 states have taken steps to limit how race is discussed in schools

Target Learners¶

• K-8 students in ELA classrooms

Target Learning Goals¶

• Access to rich, diverse, and complex representations of people, cultures, and historical and social topics

Affordances¶

• Representational Balance Framework

Claims¶

Related Strategies¶

• Liberation Literature and Counter-Narratives
• Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors

Examples¶

• Tool for Representational Balance in Books: EdTrust's 10-criterion rubric for judging representation in a book

Key Sources¶

• Tanji Reed Marshall, Ph.D., and William H. Rodick, Ph.D. (2023). The Search for More: Complex Racial and Ethnic Representation in Grade School Books. The Education Trust. https://edtrust.org/booktool