by Michelle Martin

About Michelle Martin

Michelle Martin is the Beverly Cleary Endowed Professor for Children and Youth Services in the Information School at the University of Washington, where she teaches graduate courses in children’s and young adult literature and youth services. She is the author of Brown Gold: Milestones of African-American Children’s Picture Books, 1845-2002 (2004) and Sexual Pedagogies: Sex Education in Britain, Australia, and America, 1879-2000 (co-edited with Claudia Nelson, 2004). With Dr. Rachelle D. Washington, she is the founder and codirector of Camp Read-a-Rama, a day camp for children ages four through eleven that uses children’s books as the springboard for all other camp activities.

African American

book Keywords for Children's Literature

From the beginnings of African American children’s literature around the turn of the twentieth century, the parameters of what should be included has been as much of a source of conflict as the terminology used to label this group of people. Commenting on the contested nature of this genre, Dianne Johnson (1990) asserts in Telling Tales: the Pedagogy and Promise of African American Literature for Youth:

Diaspora

book Keywords for Children's Literature

Diaspora, which means “to scatter” or “disperse” in Greek (IdEA, n.d.), combines “the prefix dia- (meaning ‘through’) and the verb sperein (meaning ‘to sow’ or ‘to scatter’)” (Edwards 2014, 76). While Münz and Ohlinger write that the term “was first used in ancient Greece to characterize the exile of the Aegean population after the Peloponnesian War” (2003a, 3), Edwards says that it originally appeared in the Septuagint, which is “the translation of the Hebrew Torah prepared for the ruler of Alexandria in Egypt around 250 BCE by a specially appointed group of Jewish scholars” (2014, 76). Although the word has historically been used as a self-designation by populations of Mediterranean Jews during the Hellenic period, today we use it to describe those living outside their shared country of ancestry or origin. Both emigrants and their descendants belong to the diaspora of the emigrant, who might or might not maintain strong ties to an ancestral homeland. Those with mixed heritage can belong to multiple diasporic communities (IdEA, n.d.).