Mirrors and Windows Through Literature Featuring Arabs, Arab Americans, and People of Islamic Faith
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This column seeks to increase opportunities for literature featuring Arabs, Arab Americans, and people of Islamic faith to serve as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors for readers.MY INTENT WITH this column is to support teachers' selection and use of literature featuring Arabs, Arab Americans, and people of Islamic faith. The inspiration for this focus came from two students I taught in recent children's literature courses. The first was an undergraduate preservice teacher education student who wrote in her end-of-semester reflection,When I read the book Habibi [by Naomi Shihab Nye, 2008], I realized how my childhood lacked Palestinian representation and how I really wish I could've read books with Palestinian characters. It was the most beautiful thing being able to read the Arabic words I know and about the foods I know from my own culture in those books by Nye.As a Christian Arab American woman, this exceptional student was just now, in her junior year in college, encountering the comforting pleasures of children's literature that offered mirrored experiences of her lived heritage. The following semester, in my graduate multicultural literature course, a student shared that he gave a book we were reading-Shooting Kabul by N.H. Senzai (2011)- to his young Muslim niece. My student felt the book had the potential to offer his niece a respectful and engaging representation of her faith in a book that simultaneously offered a quality literary and engaging reader experience.Although I include a broad range of diversity in my literature courses, authors from historically underrepresented groups unfortunately remain underrepresented in today's publishing world (Horning, Lindgren, & Schliesman, 2014). One way this situation manifests itself in my undergraduate course is through my authors/illustrators project. I require preservice teachers to research and present to their class authors and illustrators from underrepresented groups.1 In order to help students move from essentializing authors (or illustrators) or their characters, student teams select a combination of three authors and/or illustrators and read a minimum of 25 picturebooks, illustrated nonfiction, or poetry collections, or three novels or longer nonfiction works by an author.The team that chooses to focus on authors/illustrators with Arab, Arab American, and/or Muslim perspectives (and, incidentally, the team that selects gay/lesbian perspectives) has a difficult time finding individual author/illustrators with enough quality books. Repeatedly, students select award-winning Palestinian American author and poet Naomi Shihab Nye, as one of the few English-language youth literature authors with an extensive body of work that includes Arab and Arab American perspectives, or Canadian author Rukhsana Khan because she is one of the only Muslim authors with a significant picturebook collection in English. Others who write for children seldom have more than two or three picturebooks each, although Australian Muslim Randa Abdel-Fattah has written a number of novels featuring Muslim characters.To encourage increased use of books featuring these perspectives, I will lay out my theoretical rationale and highlight some informative professional resources, including Al-Hazza and Bucher's (2008a) invaluable Books About the Middle East: Selecting and Using Them With Children and Adolescents. I will close by sharing some of my personal favorites among newer literature publications.Theoretical GroundingSince I started teaching children's literature at the university level, I have drawn on the work of Rudine Sims Bishop (1990) to support my own growth as a literature teacher and scholar. Oft cited is her simple, yet profound, metaphor of literature's potential to offer mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors for readers:Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.042 | 0.011 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".