“Welcome to the room where we began — but hopefully none of us are as we began,� Krista Aronson says earnestly.

Gathered before Aronson in Ladd Library, 29 elementary school teachers nod in agreement. They came to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ from all over the U.S. for two weeks in July to learn from Aronson and other experts how to better use a powerful educational tool: multicultural children’s picture books.

Aronson, an associate dean of the faculty and professor of psychology at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, is the director and co-founder of the Diverse BookFinder, an award-winning children’s picture-book resource and collection that tracks and explains how diversity is represented in thousands of children’s picture books.

With an increasing number of parents, educators, and librarians using the DBF in their parenting and their educational work, Aronson and a colleague from Bowdoin College, Margaret Boyle, decided to collaborate on a summer institute, “Identity and Multilingualism Through Picture Books.â€� Funded by a $175,000 NEH grant, the institute helped K–3 educators use picture books to help their young charges learn about inclusion and respect, and about cultures beyond their own.Ìý

Boyle is an associate professor of romance languages and literatures at Bowdoin who directs the college’s Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx studies program. She also directs Multilingual Mainers, an elementary world languages and cultures program.Ìý

For young children, being introduced to diverse narratives, characters, and cultures is important in developing empathy, says Aronson. “It’s empowering for children of any culture to be able to see themselves in the books and stories they’re given.�

That resonated with Carmen Bautista, who traveled to the institute from California, where she teaches at Richland Union Elementary School in Shafter, a few miles from Bakersfield. Bautista knows firsthand the importance of seeing herself in stories as a child. “Growing up, I didn’t really have books that represented who I was or who I am, and so I’ve always been very passionate about making sure my students do have that.â€�

Says Aronson, “It is absolutely important for everyone, youth and adults, regardless of background, to have access to a diverse set of stories that depict life’s realities — including struggle and joy. Together, we have to name and examine life’s pain points in order to envision alternatives. But we can’t live in a place of pain and suffering; we have to recognize, value, practice, and support expressions of joy.â€�

Shawnette Brown is a teacher at Beaumont Elementary School in Devon, Pa., where her classroom theme is, “All are welcome.â€� She says, “It’s important to learn that when you’re little!â€� The research bears that out, says Aronson. While it’s easy to think that high school or even college is the right time to talk about inclusion, race, culture, and identity, such lessons are more effectively taught at an earlier stage, in elementary schools.

“Fifty years of psychological research has demonstrated that such conversations are essential for helping children develop positive identities and intercultural competence in support of academic success.�

The institute’s first week, July 4–8, was offered online, followed by a week of in-person, hands-on learning at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. By then, the educators were eager to meet face to face, and by the last day, there was an obvious sense of camaraderie among them as they shared notes and discussed questions with each other.Ìý

And, importantly, they had a chance to find friends in the struggle that can be part of teaching in a public school. “I’m not really used to being vulnerable, especially when it comes to teaching,â€� says Bautista. “But when I opened up about my experiences, I realized that everyone else has the same issues going on.â€�

“It was good to see that there are tools and resources out there for us — that we’re really not alone. There’s a community of us,â€� adds Griselda Solano, who teaches at Borman Elementary School in Denton, Texas. “And we have resources available to us.â€�

From presentations by visiting scholars and guest experts in the world of children’s picture books to a block print project, a day trip to the Bowdoin Museum of Art, and a session in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Museum of Art — immersed in the art of the late Ashley Bryan — attendees got hands-on with tools they can use in their classrooms.

The final day of the program started with a presentation by Kirsten Cappy, executive director and co-founder of I’m Your Neighbor Books, a nonprofit based in Portland, Maine, that puts books that share affirming stories about new American citizens, including immigrant and refugee communities, into the hands of parents and educators.

Such books have the power to “create a homecoming� for a generation of new Americans, Cappy says, and “as a nation, we are simply not telling the stories of these new arrivals.�

International news stories can create a surge in demand for children’s books as parents and educators seek to help children explain what’s going on. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February, for example, created a demand for stories about Ukraine, just as the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 created demand for stories about the South Asian country and its culture.

Solano has been a language teacher in Texas for 11 years. Children’s picture books enable “critical conversations with students, especially in the time that they’re growing up in,â€� she says. Creating a space for those conversations can be difficult, and having a wide range of voices telling those stories helps.Ìý

“I need to have books in my library that when they read them, they can light up.”

For the educators gathered for the institute, representation is just one tool to open up their students’ worlds to each other. Another tool is the multilingual book, which introduces a new language to a student, or makes another student feel at home again. A book written in a student’s home language “helps them see themselves,â€� says Brown. 

Brown says while she works to value each student for who they are — “to acknowledge them and celebrate who they are, their customs, where they come from� — that is not enough. “I need to have books in my library that when they read them, they can light up. And where they can read about their own culture and also get excited that other kids are interested in their culture.�

Brown and her fellow educators say they hope to put their students on the path to global citizenship. She used to think just in terms of citizenship, minus the worldview. “Some children, all they know is their own culture and communities. But they will grow up to be in different positions and spaces and places with all different kinds of people.

“If they have a global mindset, and they understand how to be a global citizen, then we’re doing a good job as educators. And my school district has that as part of their strategic plan.â€� Which is why, she says, “I love my job and my school — they don’t just talk. They take action.â€�

The collaborative aspect of the institute excited Aronson; the entire program was designed to be flexible and responsive to the needs of the attendees. “The institute was just another way for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ to reinforce and express how we might live into our mission now as faculty and also our commitment to community-engaged work and community-engaged dissemination.â€�

For Solano, the takeaway was “validation,â€� she says. “That what you’re doing, it actually matters.”

For educators, often beset by too many challenges and too few resources, the institute offered the best kind of professional development, yielding both inspiration and empowerment. “They were such a fantastic, engaged, really energetic group,� Aronson says.

As Brown reflected on her week at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, she offered a takeaway: “The importance of sharing this good news and my new knowledge with colleagues, with people I know, and fellow educators. People need to know all this information.â€�

For Solano, the takeaway was “validation,â€� she says. “That what you’re doing, it actually matters. What you’re doing is going to make a difference.â€�

In mid-August, the award-winning Diverse BookFinder, a for multicultural children’s picture books, saw an unusual spike in web traffic to its ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College website.

Coinciding with events overseas, the trending Google search term “children’s books about Afghanistanâ€� was directing web users to a site. There, the selection of awareness-expanding books included The Library Bus, a story of a young girl, set against the backdrop of war, written by an Afghan author and appropriate for ages 5 and up. 

For ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Professor of Psychology Krista Aronson, founder and director of the Diverse BookFinder, the Google-driven traffic was good news on multiple levels.

For one, the traffic indicates that librarians and teachers — the BookFinder’s major users, in addition to parents — are accessing its resources. It’s also “evidence of how these educational leaders are always seeking ways to use multicultural picture books to teach and guide young children.â€�

Reflecting its growing importance to educators and librarians around the country, the BookFinder will play a major role in a new summer institute hosted by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in 2022 and funded by a $175,000 grant from the .

Geared toward elementary school teachers who want to use picture books to develop more equitable teaching strategies, the institute represents a collaboration between two academic experts at the forefront of diversity, equity, inclusion and childhood education: Aronson at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and .Ìý

The pair will serve as co-directors of the institute, titled “Identity and Multilingualism through Picture Books.�

Boyle is an associate professor of Romance languages and literatures at Bowdoin who also directs the college’s Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx studies program. In 2017, she launched established as a partnership between Bowdoin students, pre-K through second grade students and teachers, and families in the local Brunswick community.

Picture books “provide a perfect platform for beginning to have essential conversations about race and culture with children.”

The institute’s focus on elementary school educators underscores what experts like Aronson, who also serves as an associate dean of the faculty at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, and Boyle have long known: While popular wisdom was that high school or even college is the right time to learn about inclusion, race, culture, and identity, such lessons are more effectively taught at an earlier stage, in elementary schools. 

And a powerful teaching tool to help achieve all that, Aronson says, is the children’s picture book, with their almost magical capacity to help children begin to have “cross-cultural conversations with curiosity, compassion, and understanding. They provide a perfect platform for beginning to have essential conversations about race and culture with children.”

Picture books, says Aronson, can be “utilized as the basis for conversations about race and culture with very young children. Fifty years of psychological research has demonstrated that such conversations are essential for helping children develop positive identities and intercultural competence in support of academic success.�

Officially launched on Sept. 26, 2017, the Diverse BookFinder has made big strides toward fulfilling its mission statement: “to be a go-to resource for librarians, educators, parents, book creators, and publishers who seek to create collections in which all children can see themselves — and each other — reflected in the picture books they read.�

The BookFinder was recognized in June 2021 as one of the year’s “Best Digital Tools for Teaching and Learningâ€� by the American Association of School Librarians, the preeminent professional organization for the school library community. In the past year, the BookFinder website has averaged 46,000 page views per month and gotten 1.25 million page views overall. 

The BookFinder offers a few different resources. Its search tool allows anyone, from educators to parents, to easily locate and explore children’s picture books.

In addition, the platform also offers a free, online collection-analysis tool that helps libraries diversify their picture-book holdings by identifying who is represented — among Black and Indigenous People and People of Color — in their collections and what themes and messages are presented.

Plus, the BookFinder also offers a circulating collection in Ladd Library, available through interlibrary loan.

Aronson and her team offer consulting services to libraries in all 50 states, “including hundreds of libraries in Maine and Massachusetts, just to give a sense of the scale,â€� she says. The NEH grant and the summer 2022 institute “will allow us to expand our engagement to include educators more directly.â€� 

As co-director of the institute with Boyle, Aronson will guide educators through the ins and outs of the BookFinder and how picture books serve as bridges to important ideas. She’ll also explain how children understand the concept of race and describe the current landscape of multicultural children’s literature in the U.S. 

The two co-directors will be joined by a supporting team of educators, experts, scholars, and author-artists.

Sessions over the 10 working days of the institute will be both virtual and in-person. Topics will  include “Picture Books and Performance,â€� which provides guidance on classroom read-alouds and storytime theater; “Addressing Equity in Social-Emotional Learningâ€�; “Curating Your Classroom Libraryâ€�; “Multilingualism and ‘Language Stories’â€�; and “How Do Children See Race?â€�

Using the collections of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Museum of Art, Boyle will lead an “Ashley Bryan Intensive,â€� featuring close inspections of art objects, including paintings, puppets, oral histories and personal correspondence of the Black artist who was the subject of a major exhibition at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in fall 2020. Institute participants will also travel to the Bowdoin campus to explore the at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this article do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Diverse BookFinder is also made possible through support from the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

Professor of Psychology Krista Aronson is a key figure in the creation of the Diverse BookFinder, a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ resource that tracks how diversity is represented in thousands of children’s picture books.

She’s also the mother of two daughters. One daughter is in preschool. A teacher there recently told Aronson, “I actually knew you before I knew you” — and the connection was the .

In Ohio, where the preschool teacher had lived previously, her son’s middle school had based a classroom project on the DBF, and even used a beta version of its Collection Analysis Tool to audit the children’s book holdings in the school library. “I was flattered and excited,â€� says Aronson. “And I love to hear new ideas and new spins on our work.â€�

The episode illustrates the success attained by the DBF, a resource that identifies what groups — among Black and Indigenous People and People of Color, as the DBF mission statement says — are represented in a given book and, importantly, what messages the book conveys about those groups.

Since its launch in 2017, the DBF has broadened the reading choices for countless children and parents, thanks to its powerful Search Tool for multicultural picture books. It has also helped nearly 200 libraries analyze their picture book collections, enlarged its own collection from 2,000 to 3,000 books, established a newsletter and social media channels, and .

“We have thousands of people who on a regular basis pay attention to the work that we’re doing, which is really wonderful,â€� Aronson says.

The DBF website, which was redesigned a year ago, makes clear the accessibility of the resource for parents of young children, librarians, researchers, and folks in publishing. And new developments this fall promise to further the reach of the DBF and its goal of giving a richer view of diversity to the youngest readers.

In December, after months of pilot testing, the DBF will officially unveil its . Essentially, the CAT makes publicly accessible the engine that has powered the BookFinder right along: an analytical method that uses book-specific data, meticulously compiled from the DBF’s books by Aronson’s team, to assess how any children’s book collection represents different groups.

Professor of Psychology Krista Aronson reads in Ladd Library with her daughter Hope in 2017. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Moreover, the Diverse BookFinder team recently launched a program to help Maine libraries use the CAT to assess their children’s book collections for diversity — and, through a competitive grant process, provide successful applicants with $300 grants to buy books that will help balance those collections.

That effort has been made possible through a partnership with the and a $50,000 grant from the Brooks Family Foundation of Portland, Maine. The grants will target underresourced libraries, as determined by number of librarians or collection budget relative to community size. (Mayo Street Arts, in Portland, and Lewiston’s Literacy Volunteers–Androscoggin will share $1,000 of the Brooks Family funds for development of their children’s libraries.)

Applying for the grant is a fairly straightforward process, says Aronson. First, a library needs to use the CAT, , to analyze their picture book collection. (Creating an uploadable list of relevant ISBNs, or standardized book IDs, is the only tricky bit, she says, but there are tutorials online.)

A selection of picture books at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ photographer Phyllis Graber Jensen took the photo during a Short Term 2017 visit to the museum by Krista Aronson and her students in a course related to the Diverse BookFinder. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

“Within minutes, you’ll have your report,â€� she says. Then, to apply for the $300 grant, “you write 300 words or less about what you learned from your CAT report, and upload that and a list of books that you want to purchase.â€�

With the humanities council administering the application process, the program is accepting the first round of grant proposals now, with a Dec. 2 deadline. A second application period will begin during the winter.

“I hope that we can use the model that we’re creating with these funds to do something on the national level with additional support,â€� Aronson says. It’s one thing to raise consciousness and help librarians better understand their holdings, she explains, but ultimately there’s no better way to diversify a collection of children’s books than to help buy books.

To date, between beta testing and a soft launch earlier in the fall, about 195 libraries have used the CAT. The DBF team will start promoting the tool in December.

Matt Schlobohm ’00 reads a book with his son Avery, 6, in Ladd Library during a 2018 MLK Day workshop titled “Friends Across Difference.” The workshop used artmaking and picture books to explore cross-cultural relationship-building. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

One of the 195 is the Kennebunk Free Library in Kennebunk, Maine, which pilot-tested the CAT last spring. “It is so meaningful to see, with concrete numbers and graphs, how our collection represents all children,â€� says children’s librarian Maria Richardson. “It’s enabled me to develop our collection more mindfully.â€�

Among other results, the report prompted the library to expand its assortment of books about First/Native Nations/American Indian/Indigenous peoples, which had been underrepresented in its collection.

In fact, while the DBF is impressively inclusive in the attributes it measures, two sets are central to its workings. First, there are seven demographic categories (First/Native Nations being one of them). Then there are nine story types, which provide a lens for understanding what messages are conveyed about different demographic groups. Richardson, for one, has found the story types “extremely valuable,â€� she says. “I’ve started to use them when identifying books for purchase.â€�

Parents, like librarians, seeking diverse picture books find a robust helper in the DBF. Thanks to wide-ranging filters in the , you can tailor your search closely to your family’s circumstances. For instance, if you seek a book in the Folklore story type and the Asians/Pacific Islanders/Asian Americans demographic type — and you select Buddhism from the Religion category, too — the DBF will show you seven books. And even give you more information about each.

The Diverse BookFinder’s physical collection at Ladd Library in 2017. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

DBF project coordinator Andrea Breau is encouraged by the amount and kind of feedback she’s getting about the DBF from parents, via social media and directly from folks who sign out DBF books at Ladd. “We’ve heard from parents who have prepared for the arrival of a new baby by ‘registering’ for books they’ve found using our Search Tool’s filter functions to home in on their family’s own racial, cultural, and religious identifications,â€� she says.

“We’ve heard from those who follow our newsletter and blog posts to learn how they might use a picture book to discuss issues of race and racism that their children are currently facing at school. And, of course, there are those who follow us on social media to get book ideas when their creativity is running low or to keep up with what’s happening in the broader diverse books movement.”

Aronson points out that as soon as new books are added to the collection in Ladd Library, the DBF team (this year including sophomores Ojochenemi Maji and Isabella David)‚ codes them for the database. The website reflects this constant updating in a feature called , which “are a first in the field,â€� Aronson points out. “And ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ is a part of it.â€�

For Aronson, the accessibility of the DBF data beyond academe satisfies another deeply felt goal. “It represents the translation of research-based academic data into something that’s useful and usable for the public. When you think about how we engage and share out with people, how we move out of strictly academic spaces and interact with people, that’s certainly a good way to do it,” she says.

“It’s really exciting.â€�

In the battle of the benefits, tactics are shifting — The Boston Globe

, the chief people officer at HubSpot, for its story on the changing nature of company perks.

Reporter Scott Kirsner says that “offering dazzling benefits,” like beer taps and catered lunches “just for the sake of grabbing a candidate’s attention” isn’t the goal any more. In the Boston area specifically, firms are finding that what workers want most are benefits that create work-life balance.

Katie Burke ’03, chief people officer of HubSpot, speaks about leadership at a recent Boston ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Business Network event. (Paige Brown ’96 for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

“The thing we are working the most on for the year ahead is infusing flexibility into our experience,� says Burke. That includes “exploring more remote work options� and “making no travel or minimal travel an option for senior positions.�

Burke notes that while “it’s much easier” for the media “to talk about the new sexy trendsâ€� related to employee benefits, “no one talks about the hard, gritty work of training good managers or training people to develop new skills.”

U.S. healthcare has an immature business model. Here’s how to fix it — The Hill

Michael Katz ’84

Pediatric anesthesiologist Michael Katz, in an , says that “Washington’s raging battles over healthcare finance reform are missing a fundamental point.”

The real problem with U.S. healthcare, he says, is the “fundamentally flawed business structure underlying its delivery.”

The answer, he says, is to force the system to evolve through new policies. Maturation means creating “a highly consolidated industry,” rather than the current fragmented one, that “will drive health systems to compete on price.”

A “moral obligation to achieve health equality.”

The goal is not just reducing costs. Replacing the current, expensive “fee-for-service payment model with a value-based system” will give patients “higher-quality, lower-cost care with better health outcomes.”

The imperative to achieve a more-healthy society, Katz says, means that our leaders should feel a “moral obligation to achieve health equality.”

The rare equestrian product that hits the mainstream — The Plaid Horse

The , owner of the equestrian-products company EquiFit, about ShouldersBack, a posture-improving device she invented in 2001.

Since then, ShouldersBack has “successfully crossed over from the equestrian world to the mainstream market, with mainstream sales exceeding equestrian sales,” says editor Sissy Wickes.

“I love the horse industry, and that’s what we are about,� Cherubini said. “But, it is fun to have a product that crosses over.�

Worn like a vest, ShouldersBack gently encourages equestrians to maintain good posture, which helps horse and rider work together.

EquiFit has since developed “an iconic brand of [horse] boots” known as the T-Boot, “EquiFit’s flagship product…[a] the foamed-lined, non-chafing, washable boot” that is now “de rigueur for equestrians nationwide.”

The intent of any changes will be to elevate ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College — Lewiston Sun Journal

When the Lewiston Sun Journal , the focus was on any changes that Fein might make.

“I think it’s incremental change,â€� Fein told Assistant Sports Editor Lee Horton. “When you’re 20th”Ìý list of the nation’s best athletics programs, “logic would say don’t come in and try to change a whole lot.”

Director of Athletics Jason Fein stands before a portrait of early-20th century Director of Athletics Royce Purington, Class of 1900, in the lobby of Alumni Gym. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Horton said that the intent of Fein’s changes “will be, of course, to elevate ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.”

Fein says the focus is “how can we best support (the coaches) to make the improvements they need to? How do we get from there to there? It’s incremental, which is a cool challenge as opposed to being down here and we want to go up here.â€�

To end racism, focus more on new policy — Maine Public

Before speaking in the Gomes Chapel on Oct. 23, historian and author Ibram X. Kendi .

Efforts to end racism in American have “focused on trying to educate away the racist ideas” through “education and love.”Ìý The problem is, he said, is that producers of racist ideas tend not to create them out of ignorance or hate but from “economic, political, and cultural self-interest.”

Kendi suggest that when “we think about these mass-produced racist ideas and these mass-produced racist policies…it’s more effective to challenge the policies than it is to educate away these ideas.”

Historically, he says, “we’ve actually been able to undermine racist ideas by undermining racist policies. And I think that’s where we should focus moving forward.”

Founder of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, Kendi won the National Book Award for Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.

This ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ tweet from the Ibram X. Kendi talk on Oct. 23 has been retweeted 421 times, thanks to an initial retweet by social activist and former NFL player Colin Kaepernick.

Solving a parenting challenge with an innovative database of diverse picture books — Lewiston Sun Journal

The , who, with a team of colleagues has created the Diverse BookFinder, a searchable database of diverse children’s picture books.

The purpose of creating the database is about more than finding good bedtime reading.

“There’s a lot of evidence that reading diverse picture books can make it easier for kids to interact across difference, help them develop empathy and better prepare them for our changing world,” Aronson told reporter Lindsay Tice.

For Krista Aronson, an inspiration for a new direction for her research came from her daughter’s relationships with white and Somali children at school. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Ìý

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ dishwasher raises $105,000 for the Dempsey Challenge — Lewiston Sun Journal

“David Gervais has worked in the college’s kitchens for 39 years, since graduating from Lewiston High School,” . “He’s also a Dempsey Challenge fundraiser. A very good one.”

In nine years, Gervais has raised more than $105,000.

Held annually in October, the Dempsey Challenge running and bicycling fundraiser supports the Dempsey Center, which serves, free of charge, anyone affected by cancer.

It’s sponsored by actor, philanthropist, and Lewiston native Patrick Dempsey, who received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree at Commencement in May.

He jokes that he and actor Patrick Dempsey are “like that,â€� crossing his two fingers. “(He’s) super nice,â€� Gervais told Skelton. “Every year at the (fundraiser) banquets, he would come over and say hi. There were a lot of girls around and they would say, ‘How do you know Patrick Dempsey?’â€�

David Gervais of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Dining Services poses with Patrick Dempsey in October 2016. (Lewiston Sun Journal photo)

As a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student, Brenna Callahan ’15 helped run a literacy program at Montello School, a Lewiston elementary school about a mile from campus. That work often involved reading to the pupils.

One day Callahan read the picture book Nabeel’s New Pants: An Eid Tale to a Muslim child.

It was the first time that he had seen a book about that Islamic holiday, says Callahan. “He saw himself in that book in a way he hadn’t before. And that was powerful.�

There is considerable power in children’s books. It’s a formative power, especially in the case of picture books for younger children, with their rapidly developing intellects and personalities.

So what’s the formative impact on children of color when most picture books — as many as 90 percent — are all about white people? And if you want to lay hands on one of the relatively few books that feature diverse characters, what happens when the local library catalog can’t help you find them? And what if that library doesn’t even know which races or cultures are represented in its children’s book collection?

Krista Aronson, associate professor of psychology at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, has devoted considerable time and thought to such questions. And she has an answer.

As part of a team including Callahan, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ humanities librarian Christina Bell, and noted children’s author-illustrator Anne Sibley O’Brien, Aronson has a three-fold set of resources that bring new accessibility to the world of diverse children’s books:

• First, there’s the Picture Book Collection, a comprehensive physical collection of some 2,000 diverse books. Housed at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ George and Helen Ladd Library, the collection is nationally unique in that the books are available for anyone to sign out.
• Second is the itself, a public database that went live this week. Designed to mirror the ever-growing Picture Book Collection, the DBF makes — for the first time — diverse picture books findable by both the human characteristics and, importantly, narrative messages that recur in them.
• Third is an analytical method, based on the Diverse BookFinder resources, that will enable librarians and other book curators to understand how diversity is represented in their own picture book collections.

The team behind the Diverse BookFinder project: from left, Christina Bell, humanities librarian; Brenna Callahan ’15, Maine Campus Compact civic leadership post-baccalaureate fellow; Krista Aronson, associate professor of psychology; and Anne Sibley O’Brien, author and illustrator. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

The Diverse BookFinder project, which recently received a grant of $250,000 fromÌýthe federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, is a “potential game-changerâ€� for parents, librarians, and teachers — anyone seeking diverse children’s books, says Cheryl Klein, a member of the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ project’s advisory board and the editorial director for Lee and Low Books, which specializes in multicultural children’s titles.

Book learning

Aronson, who is biracial, studies how people, particularly the young, come to understand social constructs like race, and how such understanding affects interactions and psychological well-being.

Her dissertation at the University of Michigan focused on identity development among African American teenagers and the role that parents play in the socialization process. The size of the black community in Ann Arbor ensured she’d have a substantial pool of research subjects.

But when Aronson joined the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ faculty, in 2003, that meant a move to the nation’s whitest state and therefore different directions for her research. The inspiration for one new direction came from one of her daughters, Sophia, and Sophia’s relationships with white and Somali children at school.

When Sophia was about 6, “she was bringing home difficult questions around the topics of race and immigration that she was being asked by her friends,� says Aronson, “which gave me insight into some of the issues they were grappling with.�

For Krista Aronson, an inspiration for a new direction for her research came from her daughter’s relationships with white and Somali children at school. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Aronson discovered psychological research in England exploring how picture books affect children’s attitudes towards refugee children. Experiments had shown that when children take in stories about different groups of children getting along well, they in turn tend to get along better with peers who are different from them.

Collaborating with Rupert Brown, a prominent social psychologist who studies prejudice and stereotyping, Aronson sought to follow up on and localize that prior research by studying children’s responses to books portraying interactions between white and Somali children in Lewiston.

But no such children’s books existed. So one of Aronson’s thesis students, Elizabeth Ellman ’10, created stories under the guidance of two Mainers known for making diverse children’s books, writer Margy Burns Knight and illustrator-writer Anne Sibley O’Brien. O’Brien illustrated the stories for the research.

“These books mattered. They could actually shift children’s perceptions.”

Conducted in winter 2010 with support from the college’s Harward Center, Aronson’s experiment confirmed that so-called cross-group picture books can indeed promote better relationships among diverse kids. “It was a wonderful learning experience for me and my students, and the community,� Aronson says. She and O’Brien went on to give a series of public workshops on the study.

Raised in South Korea by white American medical missionaries, and deeply impressed by her experiences there, O’Brien has made it her mission to use children’s literature, as she says, to “explore and celebrate human difference.� She has illustrated 32 children’s books and written 14 of those books, including I’m New Here, a picture book about immigrant children that was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2015.

Author and illustrator Anne Sibley O’Brien talks about the Picture Book Collection in Ladd Library during the college’s 2017 Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

“The work with Krista was like, ‘Eureka!’� O’Brien says, because it provided “data that proved what I was betting on: that these books mattered that much, and that they could actually shift children’s perceptions.�

That early work, Aronson says, “got me thinking about picture books more broadly. I wanted to see what we could do with the books that are out there.� And, she wondered, “What is out there?’

“And that’s how Annie and I started collecting the picture books.�

First up: the Picture Book Collection

For both Ladd Library and the team that created the library’s Picture Book Collection, “it was an early decision that we needed to make this usable for as many people as possible,� says the library’s Christina Bell.

From Aronson’s perspective, as a researcher seeking to translate her work for the public, “it’s important that these books don’t just sit in my lab and get utilized when I teach, or pulled off the shelf to analyze and then shoved back on there. I want my work to have meaning beyond, perhaps, the scholarly or the academic.�

The fact that the books of the Picture Book Collection circulate makes the collection nationally unique. Collections of diverse children’s books are not unheard of, but access to them is restricted. Books in the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ collection, on the other hand, may be checked out in person by anyone with a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ ID or Ladd courtesy card, or remotely via interlibrary loan.

If access to the collection is straightforward, building the collection was anything but. “When we started this project I had no idea that it was going to be so difficult,� Aronson says.

The paucity of books depicting people of color is “a crisis for all of our children.”

For one thing, diverse picture books continue to constitute a small fraction of all children’s titles. Ten to 14 percent of picture books that are published annually feature people of color, “and that number has not budged since the late 1960s,� Aronson says.

Yet, even as the proportion of diverse children’s books hasn’t budged, the proportion of diverse children has blossomed in the U.S., as O’Brien points out. The paucity of books depicting people of color, she says, is “a crisis for all of our children, because it’s not healthy or useful for white children to only see reflections of themselves,� or for children of color not to see themselves in books.

“It doesn’t help build relationships, and it doesn’t help them function in the world that they’re entering.�

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ team’s book search led them to 111 publisher websites plus online resources including the website; online lists of titles, including ; the database of Baker and Taylor, an important book distributor; and a list provided by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center, the site of a major diverse book collection at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

The search is a dynamic, grassroots process. “I learn of new publishers all the time,� Aronson says, “and people bring titles to me,� including a parent whose daughter had worked on thesis with Aronson, and who, at Commencement, recommended a book that she proceeded to add.

Next: the Diverse BookFinder

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ team is taking its quest for picture book accessibility to a new plane with Because, after all, how valuable is a book that you can’t find?

The online Diverse BookFinder website allows users to search books by title, racial group depicted, where the story takes place, and the narrative message within.

If you go to your local library looking for multicultural picture books, it’s possible that the catalog won’t recognize the search terms that make most sense to you. Say you’re looking for The Sandwich Swap, a book about two best friends, one white and one Arab American, who have a falling-out over their lunches (peanut butter and jelly vs. hummus).

You might use a search term like “Arab American� to find it. And you would come up blank. In the catalogs of the Library of Congress and WorldCat, the word “Arab� does not appear in entries for The Sandwich Swap (whose author, by the way, is the queen of Jordan), although the book’s various subject headings do include “food habits.�

Traditional library cataloging doesn’t tend to indicate the race or ethnicity of the people in a book, Bell explains. “It will document in a line or so, very generally, what’s happening in the story, but there’s no indication of who is represented in the book.�

Even publishers themselves don’t necessarily make findable their own books featuring people of color. “It seems as though some, when they enter books, just don’t want to use any race, cultural, or ethnic labels,� Aronson says.

As they amassed the collection, Aronson, O’Brien, and Callahan identified and refined nine recurring categories that the DBF associates with diverse books.

The nine categories reflect various narrative messages that a given book is designed to convey. For example, “Cross Group� books like Anna McQuinn’s My Friend Jamal portray interactions of characters across racial or cultural difference, while “Any Child� books tell stories about characters of color where race, culture, or ethnicity are incidental to the plot.

+How the Diverse BookFinder makes book messages searchable

The team, supported during this phase of the project by library cataloging consultant Deborah Tomaras, also created other code sets that indicate where stories take place and what racial or cultural groups the characters represent. The racial-variables coding is unique to the DBF, and Brenna Callahan herself coded the collection’s first 600 books and then wrote about that work for her senior thesis, with Aronson as her adviser.

Deployed in tandem with existing finding aids, the DBF promises to “really help people just cut through to what they’re after — which is the Holy Grail of publishing,� says Klein of Lee and Low Books.

Interested in diverse children’s books through her literacy work with schoolchildren, interdisciplinary major Brenna Callahan ’15 made Diverse BookFinder research central to her senior thesis, with Krista Aronson as her adviser. Callahan is now an AmeriCorps VISTA Fellow at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Alongside the Picture Book Collection and the Diverse BookFinder, the third piece of the project has been piloted and will be developed as funding becomes available: an online tool that can analyze a given collection of books for representational balance.

The same coding that helps individual users find a book or two via the DBF also allows wholesale analysis of a particular collection or grouping of books — in a library, say, or in a publisher’s new releases for a given year — to reveal what messages the collection is sending and how it might be improved.

“One library that we did this with,� Aronson says, “learned that 2.4 percent of their books featured human characters of color, and that 65 percent of this small proportion were African American characters� — though 19 percent of the population served by the library was Asian.

The messages within

On most Sundays, Aronson and her team members meet for tea and snacks, vetting new titles for the collection and plotting out objectives for the near- and longer terms.

Krista Aronson poses in Ladd Library with her daughter Hope, age 2.

Specifically, they’re pondering how or whether to represent book quality in the search language (“I can’t tell you that every book we have is of high quality,� says a diplomatic Aronson) and, perhaps more important, how to broaden their system’s definition of diversity.

In some ways, “this is one of the biggest public humanities projects ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ has ever taken on.â€�

“It made the most sense to start with racial and ethnic diversity because that’s where the idea was grounded originally,� Aronson explains, referring to her cross-group research. But now, with a robust methodology in place, they can think about bringing in other dimensions of diversity.

“We’ve talked about gender diversity, sexuality, orientation,� says Bell. “We’ve talked about socioeconomic diversity, and immigration and refugees.�

In fact, the Diverse BookFinder is as impressive for its potential as for what it has already made possible. “This is not made for an internal audience, and this is not made wholly and completely for scholarship,� Bell says. It’s about “making important work usable, accessible, findable for everybody.�

In some ways, she adds, “this is one of the biggest public humanities projects ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ has ever taken on.â€�

During the 2017 Short Term, Krista Aronson (second from right) and ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students designed a new psychology course to examine issues around children’s literature. They’re pictured doing fieldwork at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Mass., last May. Aronson is teaching the new course, “Experiencing Children’s Literature,” this fall. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

Aronson, who worked with students during Short Term 2017 to design a course using the Picture Book Collection as the basis for examining issues around children’s literature, says that she has “come to see picture books as socio-historical artifacts, as well as artistic artifacts. They capture our current thinking, I think, and ideas that we want to express to our children.

“Message matters,� she adds. “It’s not just numbers to me. It’s content, it’s message and representation.�

Supporters for the Diverse BookFinder include the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services and, at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, the Faculty Development Fund, and Information and Library Services.

Thanks to Maine’s U.S. senators, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½â€™ just-launched project is on the national radar.

U.S. Sen. Susan Collins

On Sept. 7, Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King announced that the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services had awarded a quarter of a million dollars to the Diverse BookFinder, a portfolio of resources for finding diverse children’s picture books.

was disseminated nationally by The Associated Press.

The IMLS National Leadership Grant, the agency’s second grant to the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ project, will support enhancements to the DBF’s and the further development of a tool for analyzing diversity in book collections.

U.S. Sen. Angus King.

“Libraries are repositories of knowledge, providing important educational resources for communities in Maine that help us all learn and grow,� Collins and King said in a joint statement.

The Diverse BookFinder, they added, will help “improve our understanding of the world and prepare students to live and thrive in today’s global society.”

The statement spotlighted the DBF’s educational and developmental value for children. The resource “furthers libraries’ efforts to foster intercultural competence and positive self-image among children and enhance their ability to succeed in our diverse world.�

“We commend ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for their efforts to advance this educational tool,â€� said Collins and King.

The grant, the senators also noted, will fund training opportunities for Maine librarians through the Maine State Library.

About a year ago, the IMLS gave the DBF a boost with a $20,200 “Sparks! Ignition Grant for Libraries.� Such grants provide early funding to experimental projects that may later be scaled up through the institute’s National Leadership Grant for Libraries. The “Sparks� grant supported the creation of the DBF website and searchable online database.

The IMLS supports libraries and museums nationwide with the goal of promoting innovation, lifelong learning, and cultural and civic involvement.

Collins, Maine’s senior senator, received an honorary degree from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in 2017.