Ossining Schools Work to Diversify Texts, Expand Collections

With the Ossining School District’s increasingly diverse student population and focus on achieving educational equity, one of its priorities is to make sure its literature collections have an appropriate balance of what an old metaphor describes as “windows and mirrors.”

Students need to look through windows into other people’s worlds and into mirrors to see their own reflections.

“As our population changes every year, you have to reflect on who your children are in your community and curate building and classroom libraries that reflect who they are,” said Carrieann Sipos, the district’s director of elementary teaching and learning.

Using diverse literature collections fosters children’s social and emotional development in addition to providing academic benefits, Superintendent Raymond Sanchez said. “We know that when children see themselves in books they read, it increases their engagement in learning, their confidence, their social awareness and their ability to empathize,” he said.

Micki Lockwood, STREAM educator at Claremont School, said that while its library had diverse books, “we knew we could do better and wanted to increase our literature to be reflective of all cultures.” A few examples of such books are “As Fast as Words Could Fly” about a boy who helps his father’s Civil Rights group write letters, and “Sofia Valdez, Future Prez.”

“These books had characters that our students could relate to, stories that needed to be told, and people who have inspired greatness in our world,” Ms. Lockwood said.

Using a Culturally Responsive Curriculum

Librarians, teachers and instructional coaches use a culturally responsive curriculum framework to evaluate literature, Ms. Sipos said.

“We’re looking for books that speak to kids’ identity but also open their hearts to the identity of others,” she said. “That tool helps us to say, ‘Wow, do we have enough books that are causing our kids to notice justice in the world and become active agents of change?’”

The same goes for “mentor texts” used to teach different skills, and texts used for assessments. “We’ve been weeding out ones that we think don’t really speak to our kids,” Ms. Sipos said.

As culturally responsive educators, district staff saw the need to expand collections on social justice, mental wellness, social and emotional learning, and race and identity in response to the months of protests over police violence and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The district is committed to providing a large selection of high-interest books to ensure students are engaged and successful in reading. “If you’re reading books you can’t connect to and you don’t see yourself in them, then you’re not going to be engaged,” Ms. Sipos said.

Finding Pandemic-Safe Ways to Get Books into Students’ Hands

Volume is an important ingredient in and out of the classroom. School libraries have developed a pandemic-friendly process for students to borrow books.

At Claremont, Ms. Lockwood created a digital Google form and taught children how to fill it out with specific requests and details on their favorite authors, genres and topics. Based on those, she and library clerk Theresa Rossini select and deliver bags of take-home books to classrooms.

Ossining High School recently began offering “curbside pickup” at the library entrance after making an electronic request, said library media specialist Sudha Narsipur. Teachers know kids need options other than screens, she said.

Diversifying Texts at OHS

Ms. Narsipur and Mirla Puello, OHS’ director of student academics, work with teachers and instructional coaches to add literary diversity in humanities courses and plan to incorporate it into all subject areas. All staff at OHS will receive training this year about culturally responsive education and social-emotional learning.

Classics like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” are important because they allow teachers to showcase the skills and concepts every student should understand and be able to use to communicate effectively, Ms. Puello said. “However, we understand that there are books that are more reflective of the student population that provide the same examples or provide different experiences,” she said.

Teachers at OHS can pair up classic and diverse literature, Ms. Puello said. For example, “The Great Gatsby,” a story about decadence and love in prosperous 1920s Long Island, can be paired with Toni Morrison’s “Jazz,” which is about Black urban life in Harlem during the same era. A teacher could also add books or texts about social justice.

Independent reading workshops provide additional room for adding diverse texts and allowing student choice.

In social studies, Ms. Narsipur worked with teachers on adding “Cleopatra Rules,” a fresh look at old history with reader-friendly language. In addition to reading “Romeo and Juliet,” an English class might also tackle Ibi Zoboi’s “Pride,” a modern take on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” with an Afro-Latina protagonist.

One of the considerations for adding diverse books in having authors’ own voices, meaning texts have diverse characters and are written by members of that diverse group. In the past, many people have written about cultures that are not their own, Ms. Narsipur said.

“We want to hear people in their own voice to get a balance of everything, so we get different perspectives, not the same one perspective,” she said.

OHS English teacher Jillian McRae, the school’s lead culturally responsive education instructional coach, said it is important that diverse texts do not all tell the same story or rely on stereotypes. The Black experience, for example, should not be limited to stories about growing up in poverty. The Latinx experience is not just one of immigration. This could apply to any marginalized group, she said.

Ms. McRae mentioned Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who gave a TED Talk on the “danger of the single story” to represent a people or country. Those stories create stereotypes that are incomplete and emphasize differences over similarities, the author said.

It is also important to evaluate how literature constructs social and political contexts, and what the systems of power and control were when the works were published, Ms. McRae said. “Of Mice and Men,” long a part of core high school reading lists, has one female character, who does not have a name, and one Black character, she said.

“I tend to push against the notion of even what is considered classic (literature),” she said.

“Do all students need to know the story of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and do they need to parse through Shakespeare, or can they be exposed to something else,” she added. “There are a lot of other star-crossed lovers and love across boundaries.”