Towell and Smilan, and Hellman

The Towell and Smilan article seemed more or less a reiteration of what we have been discussing in class. The ideas for implementing methods of teaching visual literacy in a class room with a multicultural picture book component was perhaps the most useful aspect of the article for me. What was most interesting for me, though, was how the Trinidadian teachers involved in the workshop brought in their own unique dialect. Not in the workshop, but in the classroom, the teachers seemed to be very conscious of bringing in local culture to better engage the students. They still valued the importance of speaking proper English, as part of becoming a global citizen, but the importance of local and cultural community was still kept as a very important component of literacy and education. The teachers' value on heritage and cultural identity in education reminded me of what some of those in linguistics study, which is the way a culture and community forms the language. If one studies a language, they inevitable learn, and must learn, about the community it evolved from. The importance of retaining cultural literacy is then essential to education, if we are to teach communication and the ability to understand the ideas of others. The article also brought up the role and importance of thinking by analogy, a skill that I've always found a valuable way to learn and relate knowledge. In terms of multicultural children's literature, analogy can be a useful tool to help students relate to the book and to other cultures.
    
Hellman's article gave the titles to a few books I'm really interested in getting for my own pleasure, like the Black and White book that was mentioned, which dealt with reader-constructed narrative. The freedom she described in the character of the postmodern children's book appealed to me, much in the way I think it does to today's children and even adults. We live in a layered society, where the partitions that once dictated the differences and values between things like low and high art, cultures, and ages have been done away with and are now part of a more unified conglomeration. In this state, education finds itself in the midst of intertextual and cross-cultural reality. And because of all that the current now offers, we have the ability to pick and choose, which is what some of the postmodern children's book incorporate into the framework of the story. Like the books, this age is meta, self-reflective and referential. Because of their unique quality in being able to deal with many multifaceted themes at once, the perspectives that are sometimes neglected, like multiculturalism, have an opportunity to be involved int he mash-up of everything else.