Do I See Me? Learning with Diversity Audits

Capitol Hill Day School (CHDS), an independent, progressive school serving children from pre-K to eighth grade, was founded in the fall of 1968 as a direct response to the race riots in D.C. earlier that spring. The parents who founded our school wanted neighborhood children to have a racially integrated learning environment where students could learn by doing hands-on projects and that would take advantage of the educational offerings of Washington's museums, parks, history, and professional experts across science and government. Fifty years later, field experiences (field trips) and project-based learning are still central to each CHDS student's learning.

Over the course of the 2018-2019 school year, CHDS marked our school's fiftieth anniversary in several ways that highlighted our past and present achievements around equity and diversity, while creating opportunities to examine our practices and ask ourselves "What can we do better?" "Where can we dig deeper?" In the last week of February, as part of our school-wide celebration of Black History Month, we set aside time for inter-grade project-based learning that centered the year 1968 as a springboard to examine racial equity and how it's improved—and hasn't!—in the fifty years since our school was founded.

Creating a Workshop

When an administrator who shares both my passion for children's literature and my commitment to the We Need Diverse Books movement approached me about creating a hands-on workshop for second, third, and fourth graders that would highlight inequitable racial representation in books published for children, I was excited to jump right into planning. I worked with one of our art teachers, Katharine Smith, to design a forty-five-minute, hands-on workshop of mixed-grade groups. It was important to plan an activity that would be engaging and developmentally appropriate for students across grade and ability levels, and that would maximize the time we had together. We determined that an age-appropriate approach to data collection would be to create a graphic organizer for students to quickly and simply tally which of three categories were depicted on the cover image: white people, people of color (PoC), or non-human/other (vehicles, animals, landscape, etc.). If a white human and/or a non-human AND a PoC appeared together on the cover, we decided the tally mark could go to the PoC column.

Working in mixed-grade pairs, one student would call out which column each book's cover fit into, while the other student tallied the findings. Because we'd average all the numbers and look at percentages, it didn't matter whether some of the student pairings moved more quickly or slowly. At the end of a set period of time, the students would reconvene at the tables where Katharine and I could offer some help with math to find the percentages and dig into the data for a few minutes. We'd then process our findings and have students share responses. In order to prepare students to be able to jump right in, we created some materials for their homeroom teachers to use in their classrooms to build background knowledge prior to our workshop.

In addition to these background materials that helped to frame and provide more context for the workshop, we also sought some relevant children's books to use with students in this work. Since the whole school was looking at the year 1968 and how the Black experience had changed -or not- since then, we wanted to find some examples of children's books published that year that depicted Black protagonists on the cover. Unfortunately, there was not much to pick from; To Be a Slave, by Julius Lester and illustrated by Tom Feelings, wasn't a good fit for the age group. We noted that one of the most famous picture books published in 1968, Corduroy, was about a child of color, but as with so many books, rather than showing the human protagonist the cover featured the stuffed bear. We settled on using A Letter for Amy by Ezra Jack Keats because nearly all the students were already familiar with the author's A Snowy Day. Using this well-known text as a backdrop enabled us to draw attention to not only how Keats' work as a White Jewish man was groundbreaking in terms of representation, but also provided an opportunity to talk about the concepts of allyship and #ownvoices.

The Diversity Audit Workshop

With students and materials prepped and ready to go, Katharine and I looked forward to inviting groups of students in on the days of the workshops. The students were excited too and it all went smoothly as planned. Before diving into the work of examining book and tallying who or what appeared on the covers, Katharine and I spent just a few minutes activating the seeds of prior knowledge we'd planted though the materials we created for their homeroom teachers- using a few images including infographics from publisher Lee and Low showing the findings of the multicultural publishing statistics shared by the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Cooperative Children's Book Center. We asked students to first reflect silently on the prompt, "Do I See Me?" (in books, on TV, in video games, in toys) before giving them the opportunity to share. Students' responses at this stage included pointing out that no bi-or-multiracial representation is accounted for in these data sets, perhaps, as one student noted "maybe there really aren't even one percent of kids' books published about us?"

Katharine and I quickly modeled for students how we wanted them to collect data and had students pair off and determine which of them would tally first, and which would call first. We limited the students to one corner of the library (containing picture books, easy readers, and chapter books) for ease of management and also because these books tend to have images of the story's protagonists on the cover. We then set a timer for fifteen minutes and the students got to work in pairs. At the end of the allotted time, we reconvened to average students' findings, convert these findings into percentages of representation, and most importantly, discuss students' reactions. After each group collected their data, we tallied results and did the math to convert the number of tally marks in each column to a percentage of the total number of books examined by that group. Working in pairs, the groups sampled between 657 and 1,259 books during their hands-on research. Students noted that chapter book and easy reader series like Magic Tree House or Elephant and Piggie definitely impacted our percentages for White Human and Animal or Non-Human covers. When pressed to reflect further, students commented that having more series books with protagonists of color would help bump these percentages significantly.

Other Ideas

You might be thinking, "But, I don't have the luxury of three days set aside for school-wide project-based learning workshop time, or the blessing of school administrators who care passionately about the same issues I do!" You might be thinking, "I don't have time! I need to shelve books, select titles for a book order, flip a display, create a summer reading list, and finish my lesson plans!"

That's okay! The beauty of this work is that there are many ways to accomplish the goals of a diversity audit in small pieces that you can integrate into all of the daily, weekly, and monthly tasks a school librarian tackles on the job. For example, the next time you are pulling books off the shelves and arranging them for a display, notice how many of the covers depict non-white humans. You can also keep the diversity audit framework in mind as you select books to order, gather resources for teacher, pick books to book talk, and as you create summer reading lists. You can also have students do mini-audits of just one section of the library—or even just one shelf—and ask "What is the racial representation?" "Is it equitable?" "What are the gaps, and how could we fill them?"

In the months following the Do I See Me workshop, I've continued in my library classes and lessons to build on the concepts introduced during these forty-five-minute workshops. Students are comfortable and excited talking about the impacts of both positive and negative representation and ally-ship. We explored "identity as metadata" during a series of lessons in which we searched our online catalog and compared numbers of hits using terms including the names of holidays, (ex. Divali and Hanukkah vs. Christmas) and subject headings such as African Americans–Biographies, prompting conversations about "whiteness as default," as students noted that White Americans was not a subject heading while Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans are.

I have found myself reflexively auditing my displays, collection development, readers advisory, lesson plans, and nearly every aspect of my practice as a result of taking on this project with students...I hope you do, too.

Further Reading

Friebel, Jenna. "The Benefits & Limits of Diversity Audits." Reading while White blog (January 7, 2019). http://readingwhilewhite.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-benefits-limits-of-diversity-audits.html.

Jensen, Karen. "Diversity Auditing 101: How to Evaluate Your Collection." School Library Journal (October 23, 2018). https://www.slj.com/?detailStory=diversity-auditing-101-how-to-evaluate-collection.

Jensen, Karen. "Beyond the Collection Diversity Audit." Teen Librarian Toolbox (March 20, 2019). http://www.teenlibrariantoolbox.com/2019/03/beyond-the-collection-diversity-audit-inclusion-is-more-than-a-book-why-we-should-be-auditing-all-of-our-library-services-for-inclusion-and-best-practices/

Mancuso-Mohsen, Joy. "Equity through the School Library." Medium.com (January 24, 2019). https://medium.com/everylibrary/equity-in-the-school-library-fdaec84b7b68.