Take a Close Look: Inventorying Your Classroom Library for Diverse Books

Classroom libraries are an important component of elementary classrooms. These collections support readers' literate identities, their motivation to read, and their access to texts that reflect a world outside of the classroom. Yet, many classrooms lack texts that mirror the racial, cultural, and linguistic diversity of students and their lived experiences. The authors-three elementary teachers (grades 1-3) and three teacher educators-inventoried the hundreds of books in the teachers' classrooms. The team discovered that the libraries lacked diversity across intersectional representations. Teacher-purchased books created the diversity that was present in each library, a lack of Black boy representation in transitional chapter books was evident, and the physical space of the libraries was problematic for young readers. The authors provide a strategy for classroom teachers to assess the contents of their own classroom libraries.