2018 School Spending Survey Report
An Updated Look at Diversity in Children’s Books
Using numbers from the Cooperative Children's Book Center, this infographic—updated from 2015—illustrates representation in children's literature. The quantity of diverse books may have gone up, but that doesn't necessarily indicate accuracy and quality of titles.
An updated infographic on diversity in children's books has been released by Sarah Park Dahlen, an associate professor of MLIS at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, MN, and illustrator David Huyck.
While this 2018 version shows improvement in representation since 2015, the creators of the image added cracks in the mirrors to illustrate the continued misrepresentation of the underrepresented communities—the quantity of books may have gone up, but it isn't all good news as that doesn't necessarily indicate accuracy and quality in the titles.
"As with the 2015 infographic, we relied on the multicultural publishing statistics compiled by the librarians at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education Cooperative Children’s Book Center ( CCBC ) that were 'about' particular populations: American Indian/First Nation, Latinx, African/African American, and Asian Pacific Islander/Asian Pacific American," Sarah Park Dahlen and David Huyck wrote on sarahpark.com. "One important distinction between the 2015 and 2018 infographics is that we made a deliberate decision to crack a section of the children’s mirrors to indicate what Debbie Reese calls 'funhouse mirrors' and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas calls 'distorted funhouse mirrors of the self.' Children’s literature continues to misrepresent underrepresented communities, and we wanted this infographic to show not just the low quantity of existing literature, but also the inaccuracy and uneven quality of some of those books....
"We hope that this infographic, along with Lee & Low’s Diversity Gap blog posts, Debbie Reese’s blog American Indians in Children’s Literature, Edith Campbell and Zetta Elliott’s blogs, Maya Christina Gonzalez’ “Children’s Books as a Radical Act” blog posts, Malinda Lo’s LGTBQ blog posts, We Need Diverse Books, Reading While White, Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, and other diversity initiatives, can help push forward important conversations and lead to real change in children’s literature publishing. We encourage you to study these and other sources to better understand the context in which these numbers exist."
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Infographic citation: Huyck, David and Sarah Park Dahlen. (2019 June 19). Diversity in Children’s Books 2018. sarahpark.com blog. Created in consultation with Edith Campbell, Molly Beth Griffin, K. T. Horning, Debbie Reese, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, and Madeline Tyner, with statistics compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison: ccbc.education.wisc.edu/books/pcstats.asp. Retrieved from readingspark.wordpress.com/2019/06/19/picture-this-diversity-in-childrens-books-2018-infographic. |
For comparison, here is the 2015 infographic:
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2015 Infographic citation : Huyck, David, Sarah Park Dahlen, Molly Beth Griffin. (2016 September 14). Diversity in Children’s Books 2015 infographic. sarahpark.com blog. Retrieved fromreadingspark.wordpress.com/2016/09/14/picture-this-reflecting-diversity-in-childrens-book-publishing
Statistics compiled by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison: ccbc.education.wisc.edu/books/pcstats.asp
Released for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license
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