Mirrors & Windows: When Living Books Are Not Enough (Video)

Mirrors & Windows: When Living Books Are Not Enough (Video) | Heritage Mom

source: https://heritagemom.com/index.php/2020/06/23/mirrors-windows-when-living-books-are-not-enough-video/

A mirror is a story that reflects your own culture and helps build your identity. A window is a resource that offers you a view into someone else's experience. There is a shortage of living books featuring black & brown characters, yet it is incredibly unhealthy for children to solely read about the lives of white fictional characters, the trials and contributions of white historic figures, and the struggles and triumphs of slaves, former slaves, and the poor, ignorant, or down-trodden.

For the Charlotte Mason Inspired Online conference, I discussed how we can stay true to Charlotte Mason's principles while creating mirrors and windows for all children to see themselves and others reflected in their school books. And the conference organizers, Ana Willis & Tatiana Adurias, were kind enough to make my talk public so that more families can be encouraged by this much-needed discussion. I hope you are inspired and blessed by my words!

Click photo below to watch the full video:

Links to resources & quotes mentioned in video (More Coming Soon!)

"Even when portrayals of diverse characters by majority-group authors are respectfully and accurately done, there's an extra degree of nuance and authority that comes with writing from lived experience. Those books that are #OwnVoices have an added richness to them precisely because the author shares an identity with the character. The author has the deepest possible understanding of the intricacies, the joys, the difficulties, the pride, the frustration, and every other possible facet of that particular life - because the author has actually lived it."

- Kayla Whaley, Senior Editor of

"There was nobody who looked like me anywhere. There was nobody that looked like me in school, there was nobody that looked like me in the movies, there was nobody who looked like me on tv or in the magazines. And most importantly, there was nobody that looked like me in the books that I loved...How could I create any vision to share with the world when I had never even looked at myself?...My books are the books I wish I had when I was a child."

, author of

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon

"The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story...The consequence of the single story is this: it robs people of dignity. It makes the recognition of our equal humanity difficult."

The Danger of a Single Story

TED Talk

"Perhaps the gravest defect in school curricula is that they fail to give a comprehensive, intelligent and interesting introduction to history. To leave off or even to begin with the history of our own country is fatal. We cannot live sanely unless we know that other peoples are as we are with a difference, that their history is as ours, with a difference, that they too have been represented by their poets and their artists, that they too have their literature and their national life. We have been asleep and our awaking is rather terrible."

"Children must have books, living books; the best are not too good for them; anything less than the best is not good enough"

"Amazingly, whether the topic was Fibonacci numbers, ocean currents, or the Battle of Actium, truly great writing grabbed young readers in the earlier Golden Age of Youth Literature, when such narrative books were the norm, and publishers esteemed the humanness of their readers (ala the Judeo-Christian ethic) through creamy paper, generous spacing, and....drumroll, please...breathtaking,

hand-made

, evocative, artistic illustrations. Ah, a

living book!

Even the topics covered were of admirable breadth and depth. That high-water mark has not been matched, so we rescue and read."

, LivingBooksLady.com

Please let me know in the comments if there was anything else that I mentioned and should add here!

You can find me on Instagram @heritagemomblog.

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