Developing Intercultural Understanding Through Global Children’s Literature

Literature provides an opportunity for children to “live through” and experience many ways of thinking and living in the world. Valuing the role that global literature can play, however, is quite different from actually successfully offering these opportunities in the classroom. The context for our inquiry was a small K–5 public school in a large urban district with a culturally and linguistically diverse population from a working-class neighborhood. Research and theory on intercultural understanding, learning, and competence supported us in looking at the children’s talk. Intercultural understanding as knowledge focuses on knowledge about the world and how it works, including people, events, places, issues, and societal systems. Although perspectives receive the most emphasis in intercultural understanding, some knowledge about the world is necessary for students to talk with each other, make connections across contexts, and develop deep understandings from literature.