Our Diversity Council invited local author Sundee Frazier to attend our Tuesday staff meeting this week to speak about the particular needs of children who come from a mixed heritage (racial, ethnic, cultural or religious), are transracially adopted and/or who are Third Culture Kids (“a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside their parents’ culture” – definition from http://www.tckworld.com/). These categories cover a significant portion of our student body, which in turn is a reflection of our increasingly diverse and multicultural community.
Frazier, the child of an African American father and European American mother, has extensive experience writing and speaking about these issues. She shared advice, anecdotes and a reading list with our staff. She also facilitated discussions about best practices in the classroom, unexpected conversations and situations that can arise and how best to handle them, and concrete ways of making the classroom as safe and supportive as possible for every student.
If you’re not familiar with Frazier’s work, Brendan Buckley’s Universe and Everything In It is a delightful and engaging chapter book for upper elementary students that won critical acclaim and multiple awards. It is a wonderful story for children and parents to read together and discuss. While it deals specifically with the situation of a biracial child and his identity development, all children grapple with figuring out who they are for themselves making it a universal story in many regards.
Frazier, the child of an African American father and European American mother, has extensive experience writing and speaking about these issues. She shared advice, anecdotes and a reading list with our staff. She also facilitated discussions about best practices in the classroom, unexpected conversations and situations that can arise and how best to handle them, and concrete ways of making the classroom as safe and supportive as possible for every student.
If you’re not familiar with Frazier’s work, Brendan Buckley’s Universe and Everything In It is a delightful and engaging chapter book for upper elementary students that won critical acclaim and multiple awards. It is a wonderful story for children and parents to read together and discuss. While it deals specifically with the situation of a biracial child and his identity development, all children grapple with figuring out who they are for themselves making it a universal story in many regards.
If you would like to find more reading material like this, please check out previous posts on my blog about multicultural literature, or my multicultural books shelf on Goodreads!
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