Pedagogy And Practice: Using Children’s Literature To Discuss Race, Identity, And Black Experiences In The Elementary School Classroom

This thesis aims to explore and produce educational material for teaching about race, racism, and identity in the elementary school classroom. In this work, I combine two Honors thesis options and present both a project and an academic paper. The curricular resources I created are informed by my research. My guiding research question was: how can elementary school teachers effectively teach students about race? In order to answer this question, I surveyed scholarly literature on teaching and then created publicly-available teacher resources. I began by researching pedagogical approaches to teaching about race in elementary school, specifically for grades three through five. The research consisted primarily of reading articles, books, and reputable websites to find information about instructional strategies for approaching critical classroom conversations connected to race. Based on this research, I created curricular resources for teachers including a set of guiding questions for evaluating literature, a text set focused on Black experiences and identities, a series of in-depth analyses of books in my text set, a lesson plan, and a website that compiles all of my work. My aim is to equip myself and other teachers to engage students in restorative conversations about identity and race.