Bücher als Spiegel und Fenster

Das Bild, Bücher seien „Spiegel und Fenster“, hat sich in amerikanischen Debatten über Diversität im Kinderbuch etabliert.
Wir finden, es beschreibt sehr einfach und klar die Funktion und Bedeutung von diversen Kinderbüchern.

Emily Style sagte 1988: “Education needs to enable the student to look through window frames in order to see the realities of others and into mirrors in order to see her/his own reality reflected… The delightful truth is that sometimes when we hear another out, glancing through the window of their humanity, we can see our own image reflected in the glass of their window. The window becomes a mirror!”

1990 weitete Rudine Bishop die These aus: „Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience.”

„It’s not just the children who have been underrepresented and marginalized who need [diverse] books. It’s also the children who always find their mirrors in the books. They get an exaggerated sense of their own self worth and a false sense of what the world is like because it’s becoming more and more colorful and diverse as time goes on.“ Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop

Titelbild: Serena Mabilia, Beitragsbilder: aus „Die Zukunft gehört uns“, erschienen 2021 im Insel-Verlag