Building a Classroom Library That Represents the Actual Students

A classroom library is not a decoration. It is a curriculum that runs alongside the formal curriculum, and the books in it teach children what counts as a story worth telling, whose experiences are worth writing about, and which kinds of characters can be protagonists. For a teacher building or refreshing a classroom library, the intentional choice to represent the actual students in the room is one of the most consequential decisions available, and it costs no more than the decision to fill the library with whatever books the school supply order defaulted to.

The starting point is to know who the students are. In a classroom of thirty students, what cultural, linguistic, family structure, and ability backgrounds are represented? A teacher who can answer that question specifically can choose books that include characters from those backgrounds, and can ensure that every student in the room will at some point during the year encounter a protagonist who looks like them, lives in a family structure like theirs, or navigates challenges like the ones their own family does. The minimum goal is that no student in the room gets through a year without reading a book about someone like themselves.

The secondary goal, which matters for every student including those from majority backgrounds, is the inverse: every student should encounter protagonists different from themselves. This is how empathy is developed in reading, and how children learn to imagine themselves inside the lives of people from backgrounds they do not personally know. A classroom library that represents only the majority students produces majority students who believe their experience is universal. A classroom library that represents a range of experiences produces students who understand their own experience as one among many, which is both more accurate and more useful.

The practical tools available to teachers for this work have improved. Organizations like We Need Diverse Books, the Cooperative Children's Book Center, and state library associations publish annual lists of recommended titles organized by the identities represented. Independent bookstores specializing in children's literature often have curation specifically aimed at representation. Publishers have responded to demand by increasing output in this area, so the catalog of available titles is wider than it was a decade ago. A teacher starting from scratch can build a representative library using available lists and existing budget.

The ongoing discipline is to refresh the library annually. Children's publishing produces new work every year, and the library that was current in 2020 is already out of date. Setting aside budget and time each year to add five or ten new titles selected intentionally, removing worn books, and rotating books that have been in the room for years without checkout keeps the library alive for each new class. Teachers who keep a running list of what gets read, what gets passed over, and what individual students respond to can make the rotation decisions thoughtfully rather than arbitrarily. The library becomes a tool that develops along with the teacher's growing understanding of the students who pass through the room.