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The metaphors of mirrors, windows, and doors have had an enduring affiliation with multicultural children's literature. Since metaphors structure how we think and what we do, in this article, these metaphors' possibilities and limits for book selection and analysis are considered.
THE METAPHORS OF mirrors, windows, and doors have an enduring affiliation with multicultural children's literature. Bishop's (1990a, 1990b) long-standing proposal has guided the teaching of these texts in K-12 classrooms. Bishop maintained that children's books can serve as mirrors of students' cultural identities and experiences. They also can function as windows into other cultural circumstances through the characters' perspectives and experiences. The readers' imagination can transform the window into a "sliding glass door" as they step into worlds created by the texts' words and/or images. Because literature can affirm and diversify readers' lived experiences, Bishop claimed, this text-reader interaction can deepen and expand their understanding of multicultural communities and societies.
Other scholars made similar recommendations during the 1980s and 1990s. For example, as Bishop (1990b) noted, Lester wrote about books as mirrors as he tried to understand his observations of older women's avid reading of mysteries at a library in New York City. Through his love for mysteries, too, he noticed that these texts were the only "literary genre in which old[er] women [were] treated with dignity, respect, and love" (Lester, 1984, as cited in Bishop, 1990b). These readers had found their mirrors. Four years later, Style (1988/1996) advanced curriculum as windows and mirrors-that is, the curriculum could reflect students' particular lived experiences and provide windows into their shared humanity. In 1990, Cox and Galda connected these metaphors with multicultural literature and its potential to resonate with underrepresented communities by reflecting and affirming cultural experiences and, for white children, offering "a multicultural vista that juxtaposes the familiar and the less familiar" (p. 582). In Canada, Bainbridge et al. (1999) alluded to these metaphors as they recommended multicultural picturebooks as insider and outsider perspectives of cultural communities. It was Bishop, though, who proposed the sliding glass door metaphor that fosters a way of thinking about social engagement inspired by these representations. These three metaphors have shaped the theorizing and teaching of multicultural children's literature for the past four decades. Metaphors do social work.
Lakoff...