Children's literature

Hello everyone,

My writing family is writing about children’s literature from the 1960’s to the present from different perspectives. In a nutshell, we would like to know how children’s literature in picture books has changed from the 1960’s until today in terms of its inclusion of minority characters and their representation. Also, we want to know more about “immigrant” characters and how these fit or are excluded from picture books. Moreover, I am quite interested to know more about the different ways in which the lack of positive representations of minority children affects identity and cultural formation. This topic is fascinating to me and I am excited about being part of it. However, getting to this point has not been easy mainly because we have three different disciplines (history, social work, and library and information science) to combine and the brainstorming process to come up with an idea that satisfies everyone is challenging.

After we decided on the topic that we were going to write about, I feel that our meetings have been quite productive. We usually meet twice a week for about two hours each day with clear goals to achieve during the meeting and this helps us to remain focused on our tasks. I really appreciate everyone’s efforts in my family because thanks to their cooperation, we have been able to make significant progress on our research. Not only has our group been very effective, but also we have been able to know more about each other’s lives and interests and I am very grateful for that.

Overall, I feel that getting started on an interdisciplinary topic is the most challenging part of it, but once one has, the process becomes very enjoyable.

Thanks for reading, 

Maria P.