THE INCLUSIVE TEXT 1
The Inclusive Text: Considering Family Diversity in Picturebooks
A Paper Presentation for LRA 64 th Annual Meeting, Marco Island, FL
December 5, 2014 by
Rachel Skrlac Lo
Doctoral Candidate, Reading/Writing/Literacy
Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania
In my proposal, I promised to identify new texts and new ways to read texts in order to cultivate inclusive readings and discussions on children’s picturebooks. This paper is one product from a research fellowship at the International Youth Library (IYL) in Munich,
Germany. During this fellowship, I conducted a critical content analysis of English-language picturebooks in order to develop a catalogue of titles to use at my dissertation research site. My dissertation site is in a large urban school district in the mid-Atlantic region of the United States.
I work with first graders in an afterschool reading club, hence the need for a collection of books.
My research explores family diversity and particularly focuses on non-normative family models.
My students come from a broad range of families. Family models in the classroom population include heterosexual and homosexual two-parents households, single parent households, young and old families, foster care, extended families, families with incarcerated or institutionalized members, divorced and separated families, and blended families. This variation far exceeds the diversity of families in the literature I reviewed at the International Youth Library.
A critical content analysis guided literature section and served as an opportunity for me to think deeply about the material I was going to share with my research participants. This critical analysis can be framed as an “emancipatory project”; as I reviewed literature I considered displays of power as well as subordinated or silenced groups, which helped reveal
“representations of social order” (Janks, 2010; see also Robinson, 2005). Using critical analysis such as queer theory to select texts is a social justice practice since the selection is intended to denaturalize majoritarian ideas of family and to identify books that more closely resemble the family models of the students with whom I am working. Texts are not considered neutral but reflect dominant ideologies both in content and in their means of production, which contributes to contributes to naturalized language discourses and social climate (Janks, 2010, p. 60). By coding a large cross-section of texts, I was able to identify patterns of family representations; moreover, I was able to identify particular groups of people who were either absent or underrepresented. This includes but is not limited to families of color, interracial families, poor families, and non-heteronormative families. These trends, or over representations of particular groups, indicate how particular notions of family are naturalized in our communities. My text selection for this dissertation study is intended to disrupt this over representation and provide students with access to texts that offer as diverse a range of possibilities as the students’ themselves, whom I describe in greater detail in the next section. This effort to disrupt or make visible different kinds of social order reflects the social justice motivation that can guide practitioner inquiry studies (Cochrane-Smith & Lytle, 2009).
This analysis was informed by my understanding queer theory, which encourages broader readings of literature in order to find openings in the texts and in interactions with texts that may

THE INCLUSIVE TEXT 2 enable other ways of being to emerge. In this study, I applied queer theory to resist normative definitions of families, identities, and texts in order to encourage thoughtful dialogue about texts and socially-constructed norms of “real life”. This may reveal identity categories in new ways and may lead to questions that challenge and reconstruct dominant ideas about families and relationships (Ryan & Hermann-Wilmarth, 2013). Using queer theory as a lens to consider potential experiences in this after-school reading club, I have designed reading lists and curricula to intentionally disrupt heteronormativity, a collection of practices that normalize particular types of sexual and gendered relationships, usually heterosexual (Blackburn & Smith, 2010; Butler,
2008).
At the IYL, my research was guided by what I quickly realized to be a naïve goal, namely that I would have access to and evaluate the hundreds and thousands of picturebooks on the stacks. Upon arriving, I quickly realized that my search strategies would have to be refined if I had any intention of developing a working collection (not to mention that the stacks were closed and I needed to request each title by call number). Turning to reference books (Allen, 2005;
Galda, Culliman, & Sipe, 2010; Yukota, 2001) and building on my own knowledge of international children’s literature awards, I created a list of 39 awards from the USA, the United
Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and two international organizations:
International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) and the International Youth Library
(IYL). Choosing to restrict my search to award-winning titles was potentially delimiting since awards can act as a form of censorship, both through increased publicity as a way of labeling books to guide potential readers (Kidd, 2009). While prizes may ascribe the label of “good” to particular books, these awards are often given by those with a “traditionalist bent” (p. 203), one that is intended to direct audiences to books whose messages and media are seen as quality reading material. National awards, then, may reflect the ideals of a dominant group. Other awards may be purposefully selective, perhaps to acknowledge an underrecognized population like the Coretta Scott King Award, which is given to recognize African American authors and illustrators. For me, these award-winning titles revealed “representations of social order” (Janks,
2010) and served as windows to dominant perpsectives (Bothelo & Rudman, 2010; Sipe, 2003).
Finally, since one purpose of my research was to develop a working library, access to physical copies of these texts, both at the library and in America, guided my methods. Titles that win awards are more likely to be picked up for distribution in other countries and therefore are more likely to have an international audience. Internationally distributed award-winning books are cultural products that serve as markers of the country’s “best” literature. These also were more likely to be in the IYL collection.
Criteria for selecting awards was based on the following:
(1) The awards were national- or international-level awards. Regional awards, such as
Pennsylvania Readers’ Choice, are so abundant that my list would have quickly grown unwieldy and my time at IYL would be filled with listing titles rather than reading them.
(2) Awards were given out on or after 2000. This data was selected because: a.
I wanted to get a sense of recent social attitudes as reflected in the content of contemporary titles rather than “classics”. Selecting titles from the 21 st century seemed like a reasonable starting point.

THE INCLUSIVE TEXT 3 b.
This start date creates a range of fifteen years, a reasonable range to consider.
Selecting an earlier date would lead to a similar issue of creating an unmanageable number of books to review in the given period.
Once the list of awards was generated, I compiled the list and recorded the title, author, illustrator, translator (if applicable), publisher, country of origin, award, and year of award. In total, I recorded 611 titles, but I filtered this down by eliminating all titles except picturebooks.
Then, I considered genre and decided to remove poems and lullabies, anthologies, and biographies since the purpose of my study was to consider how families and relationships are depicted in storybooks. While poems and biographies often tell powerful stories, they require readers to draw on different resources when reading them. Finally, I further eliminated titles based on the age of the intended audience, removing all baby books as well as those for older children. The books I selected were intended for emergent readers, those who are new or relatively new to school. In cases where genre and age-appropriateness was unclear, I referred to various online sources including Amazon, Goodreads, Horn Book, Publishers Weekly, and
WorldCat. In the event that I was still uncertain, I kept the book on the list.
After these filters were applied the list was significantly reduced to 215 titles. At this point, I submitted my requests to the IYL and eventually received 149 books. A quick review of these titles further identified titles that were not appropriate, either because of genre, age, or format. For example, a handful of texts were illustrated chapter books. I decided to exclude these since I had excluded other chapter books. As I reviewed the remaining titles, I discovered another category: time. When stories were set in a particular time, such as an historical event like the Civil Rights movement, they anchored the reader in a way that changed the purpose of the book. These texts were intended to inform the reader to the way life was (for a particular person or group of people) during this era or event. Because of this, these titles shifted the way the reader could imagine the story and their place in the story. For example, in Going North
(Harrington, 2004), the reader is invited into the backseat as an African Amerian family drives from the Deep South to the northern states during segregation, but it may be difficult for the reader to imagine themselves there. The reader is a positioned observer rather than a participant because of the historical context of the story.
As I continued to read and reread these stacks of books, an idea emerged that those stories that provided the most space for readers to enter the texts were those that were set in the generic present , a term I am using to describe books set in an indistinct time. These texts may have markers of a variety of periods, such as analog telephones, but they carry no specific references to dates. The reader is free to image the world of the story to be the present, a utopia or alternative reality. Even titles like Pigtails the Pirate (Elliot, 2002) with its four-mast sail boats and long frocks, creates space for the reader to step into the story because there are enough signifiers of present day, such as the structure of the homes, to connect the reader to the present.
After coding stories for the generic present, my selection of books was reduced to 57. Of these titles, I noticed that text diversity diminished significantly. A close rereading of these stories identified that once biographies and historically-situated stories were removed from my list, the books almost always featured white characters. Exceptions were stories from other countries such as India, South Africa, and the Philippines. Furthermore, the titles almost always reflected lives of the middle and upper-middle class. The settings depicted material comfort and wealth, as indicated by an abundance of furniture, toys, food, clothing, etc. Settings were, more often than not, single-family homes. In the instances when stories were set in cities, such as At

THE INCLUSIVE TEXT 4
Night (Bean, 2007), apartments were depicted as spacious, often with multiple rooms, balconies, and access to ornate and beautiful rooftop gardens, all which signify material security common to the upper classes. While the generic present creates space for diverse readers to imagine themselves in the story, these socio-economic and racial omissions may prevent wider audiences from equal access, or perhaps equally easy access to these stories. This is problematic and critiqued by a number of scholarly and literary communities including the group
#WeNeedDiverseBooks. For the purpose of this paper, and my research more broadly, I am exploring family models and namely how children from diverse families could find their ways into texts, to see their home lives reflected in the texts. I specifically consider LGBTQ families who are conspicuously absent from this body of literature.
In this study, I adopt a queer lens to consider family models and nature of relationships. It builds on work by Crisp and Hiller (2011) and Ryan and Hermann-Willmarth (2013), who use queer theory to interpret texts in order to increase opportunities for non-normative readers in heteronormative settings such as primary classrooms (see also Blaise, 2005; DePalma &
Atkinson, 2010). As Ryan and Hermann-Willmarth (2013) note, framing discussions about texts with a queer lens encourages “an exploration of nonnormative sexualities and genders that can work against the silences currently found in elementary schools without requiring the reading of
LGBT-inclusive texts” (p. 144). My research goal at the IYL was to seek out texts for younger students (K-3) that offered a potential to create “inclusive conversations about gender and sexuality” (p. 144), particularly as they pertain to nonnormative representations of the family.
For example, Crisp and Hiller (2011) note the adult figure in The House in the Night (Swanson and Krommes (ill.), 2008) “may be hard to conceptualize… as anything other than a female” for some readers (p. 206), but since no text confirms gender (e.g., gender specific pronouns), there is a potential connection for children who have a nonnormative parent, such as a cross-dressing father. Undergirding this research is recognition of readers’ shifting subjectivities and the potential for teachers, parents, and other adults to guide (or follow) children toward more inclusive interpretations of stories.
Failing to explore nonnormative representations of families perpetuates the heterosexual normative (Crisp et al., 2011; Ryan et al., 2013), which has the potential to harm at least two groups. The first is children who grow up in families that do not conform to this heteronormativity. By not seeing their stories reflected in the pages of books or in other media content, these children are silenced and this silencing can subordinate their lived experiences in public discourses beyond the printed page. The second group at risk is those who grow up in communities where heterosexuality is the norm and where those who may not conform are rendered invisible. These children are denied opportunities to see genuine representations of families and individuals. This absence of gay couples in children’s media also limits resources and support for children who may be gay or gender non-conforming thus rendering their future invisible and unpredictable. By ignoring the reality of family life for a growing portion of the population neither makes it go away nor creates inclusive and safe spaces for individuals to discuss non-normative issues.
A growing body of scholarly and advocacy research (Ritchie, 2013; Ryan et al., 2013;
Wickens, 2011) is concerned with the content of books with non-normative families, citing that many published storybooks make family diversity the center of the story. This serves to increase awareness of diverse families for those who aren’t aware of them but does little to share a story that normalizes these relationships. The story exists because the family structure is abnormal and

THE INCLUSIVE TEXT 5 telling it works to “Other” those whose lives may be reflected in the story being told. The purpose of my critical content analysis was to seek out texts that shift the narrative from norming nonnormative relationships – such as Heather Has Two Mommies (Newman & Souza, 2010) – towards an inclusive collection that recognize the shifting subjectivity of the readers (Ryan et al.,
2013) and their agencies to make texts relevant (Sipe, 2002) even when the content may vary from the readers’ lived experiences.
With regards to my short-list of texts, I coded the remaining books for the following depictions of characters: child alone, child with siblings or other children, child with a parent, child with parents, child with grandparent(s), child with other adults, adults alone, adults with other adults. Because there were only a few books that depicted adults only, and because the focus of this paper was on depictions of family relationships, I decided to eliminate the books that only included adults, since none of them depicted adults dealing with family-related issues.
For example, in Rats by Gavin Bishop (2007), the protagonist must find a way to manage the hoards of rats that have moved into her house. While some may argue that the rats are a metaphor for children, this is not the author’s intention and thus not relevant to this study.
Most of the books depicted children alone, children with a parent or parents, children with other children including siblings, and children with grandparents or a grandparent. Only a few titles included children with other adults. At least one book on the list, Tia Isa Wants a Car
(Medina & Muñoz, 2011), was not in the IYL catalogue but could have presented an interesting reading for this study because aunties and uncles often are “safe” gay characters in picturebooks since they do not pose the “challenges” that gay parents do. Depictions of gay parents challenge the biological imperative that normalizes heterosexual relationships (Sedgwick, 2004; Wolf,
1989) While the absence of Tia Isa Wants a Car should not discredit the findings of this study, it does highlight a limitation of it. Despite my purposive sampling, the resources at the IYL were limited, and the findings of this study are constrained to what I could review at the library. That said, the International Youth Library had holdings for all IBBY award-winning titles and their own catalogue, The White Ravens . These were the broadest and richest sources of international titles. The White Raven works to identify titles that push the margins and show directions in children’s literature, unlike other awards that are given to highlight the best illustrations or quality of writing. These latter awards may celebrate particular qualities of texts but do little to question or comment on ideals or norms (e.g., see Crisp et al., 2011, for a critique of the
Caldecott Medal).
For the remainder of the paper, I will consider how two of these remaining titles may create openings for children from gender and sexually diverse families to to enter the texts, to imagine that these stories may be their own. Specifically, I will consider the perspective of children with same-sex parents. By doing this, I hope to raise for discussion issues of access and
I aim to disrupt universal heteronormativity, the idea that the only type of romantic relationship is a heterosexual one, depicted in most of these texts. Before I move on, I would like to consider language use and the implications of the term “difference” versus “variation” (Sedgwick, 2004).
Difference references a deviation or movement from the perceived norm. By its nature, then, it implies exclusion. Variation, on the other hand, suggests a range of possibilities and, hence, is an inclusive stance. When considering the range of childhoods that could be represented (and should be), adopting positive language such as variation over difference may create a shift in stance such that variation depicts a “natural” range of possibilities while difference depicts

THE INCLUSIVE TEXT 6 deviance or a break from the natural. This positive language choice may allow for more experiences to be shared and read into the stories.
As I considered depiction of children in the stories, I thought not only about the obvious depictions, that is those that most reflected my own worldview, but the potential for other, more varying life experiences. In most instances, the only openings for children with same-sex parents to read themselves into the stories were in those where children were alone those with grandparents, and those with only one parent. While these stories do create opportunities to create representative backgrounds, they do not truly depict the children’s home lives. Two stories, though, provide a small entry for these children to see their families in the books: An
Ordinary Day (Gleeson, 2001) and Falling Angels (Thompson, 2001). Both depict a child who has two unnamed, largely unidentified parents. Like many of the other stories, the parents are props to imply a sort of household normalcy. The child wakes up in a house, the child moves through the routines of a day, such as getting dressed and having breakfast, and the child is bored and/or ignored by parents and thus must enter their own world of entertainment. In both cases the texts use magical realism to depict the children’s actions. At the end of the stories, the children return to their homes and, while the parents aren’t shown again, the stability of home is implied by the shift away from magical realism to realism. For example, at the end of An Ordinary Day , the whales and dolphins shift from their cetacean form back to vehicles as the boy steps onto his school bus. Because neither the text nor the illustrations name the parents in this story beyond
“parents”, the reader is free to envision these two adults as their own. They are not bounded by gender or sex, since the illustrations depict only the minimal details of these characters: the tops of their heads and the tips of their shoes. This anonymity does not diminish the story, and raises for speculation the role of naming characters. Of the 22 titles that included both parents, how would the flow and continuity of the stories change if the parents were depicted in this generic, gender-free way? This is an area of research that warrants further consideration.
To conclude, this research paper serves as a small contribution to the growing scholarship on issues relating to the LGBTQ community. By turning to queer theory, I was able to open up my methods for researching and reading texts. Kerry Mallan (2009) discusses four ways to consider queer qualities in a text: (1) “to politicize the interplay or sexuality and sexual identity”,
(2) to challenge or ignore the “naturalized binary of heterosexuality and homosexuality”, (3) to
“historicize and localize sexuality and sexual identity assumptions”, and (4) to resist the obviousness of straightness and to challenge spaces for queer identities (p. 127-8). As I have demonstrated, my critical content analysis of award-winning picturebooks has created openings to discuss sexual identity, to create openings for variation in identity, and to resist the obviousness of straightness. Most importantly, I have identified how these ahistorical stories, which I labeled the generic present , create a narrow worldview that presents the norm as largely white, middle-class, and heterosexual, which creates challenges not only for readers who do not fit these norms, but also for those who represent this norm to imagine the world in a different way. To close, I turn to Kerry Robinson (2005), who suggests the importance of questioning these assumptions about the norm and for pushing for a social justice pedagogy, something that is guiding my own work with at my dissertation research site:
“…social justice pedagogy is about teaching and learning that deals with challenging and disrupting discourses (or common-sense or taken-for-granted
‘truth’) that underpin the inequities experienced by ‘minority’ cultures…, and focusing primarily on identifying and understanding that everyday relations of

THE INCLUSIVE TEXT 7 power, at both the micro and macro levels of society, that constitute and maintain these inequities” (p. 176).
As I move on with my dissertation research, I look forward to sharing these titles with my young research participants and seeing how they, with their rich backgrounds, take up the texts.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the International Youth Library in Munich, Germany for the opportunity to be a “stippi” or research fellow. Your encouragement and endless trips to the stacks were an invaluable support and helped me move this research project from an idea to a realized goal. I remain indebted to your generosity and kindness.
References
Allen, R. (2005).
Winning books: An evaluation and history of major awards for children’s books in the English-speaking world. Staffordshire, UK: Pied Piper Pub.
Blackburn, M. V., & Smith, J. M. (2010) Moving beyond the inclusion of LGBT-themed literature in English language arts classroos: Interrogating heteronormativity & exploring intersectionality. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy , 53(8), 625-634.
Blaise, M. (2005). Playing it straight: Uncovering gender discourses in the early childhood classroom . New York: Routledge.
Bothelo, M. J. & Rudman, M. K. (2009).
Critical multicultural analysis of children’s literature:
Mirrors, windows & doors. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1990/2008). Gender trouble . New York: Routledge.
Cochrane-Smith, M., & Lytle, S. L. (2009). Inquiry as stance: Practitioner research for the next generation . New York: Teachers College.
Crisp, T. & Hiller, B. (2011). “Is this a boy or a girl?”: Rethinking sex-role representation in
Caldecott Medal-winning picturebooks, 1938–2011. Children’s Literature in Education ,
42 (3), 196–212. dePalma, R., & Atkinson, E. (2010). The nature of institutional heteronormativity in primary schools & practice-based responses. Teaching & Teacher Education , 26 (8), 1669–1676.
Galda, L., Culliman, B. E., & Sipe, L. R. (2010). Literature and the child , 7 th
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CA: Wadsworth.
Janks, H. (2010). Literacy & power . New York: Routledge.
Kidd, K. (2009). “Not censorship but selection”: Censorship and/as prizing. Children’s literature in education 40 , 197-216.
Mallan, K. (2009).
Gender dilemmas in children’s fiction.
London, UK: Palgrave MacMillan.
Ritchie, S. (2013). Disrupting genderism in schools: A critical analysis of transgender trade books. Paper presentation. LRA 2013 Annual Meeting, Dec. 3-7, Dallas, TX
Robinson, K. (2005). Doing anti-homophobic and anti-heterosexism in early childhood education: Moving beyond the immobilising impacts of ‘risks’, ‘fears’ and ‘silences’.
Can we afford not to? Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood , 6 (2), 175-188.
Ryan, C. L. & Hermann-Wilmarth, J. M. (2013). Already on the shelf: Queer readings of awardwinning children’s literature.
Journal of Literacy Research, 45 (2), 142-172.

THE INCLUSIVE TEXT 8
Sedgwick, E. (2004). How to bring your kids up gay: The war on effeminate boys. In Steve
Bruhm & Natasha, Hurley (Eds.) Curioser: On the queerness of children (pp. 139-149).
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
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Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit: A children’s classic at 100 (pp. 3-18). Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Wickens, C. M. (2011). Codes, silences, and homophobia: Challenging normative assumptions about gender and sexuality in contemporary LGBTQ young adult literature.
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Children’s Literature Referenced
Bean, J. (2007). At night. New York, NY: Farrar
Bishop, G. (2007). Rats!
Auckland, NZ: Random House New Zealand
Elliot, D. (2002) Pigtails the pirate.
Auckland, NZ: Random House New Zealand
Harrington (2004). Going north.
XXXXX: Melanie Kroupe Books
Gleeson, L., & Greder, A. (2001). An ordinary day . Lindfield, NSW, Australia: Scholastic Press.
Medina, M., & Muñoz, C. (2011). Tia Isa wants a car.
Somerville, MA: Candlewick
Newman, L., & Souza, D. (2000). Heather has two mommies: 10 th anniversary edition. Alyson
Books.
Thompson, C. (2001). Falling angels. London, UK: Random House