Creating multicultural and global text sets

McCaffrey, M., & Corapi, S. (2017). Creating multicultural and global text sets. Talking Points, 28(2), 8-17.


Today’s literature for children and young adults can provide a rich resource for examining, understanding, and appreciating the diverse experiences and perspectives that are part of our society. A text set is one tool for doing that. The authors here share how they used text sets to achieve multiple instructional purposes, while at the same time answering a mandate to use specific text exemplars from the list found in Appendix B of the Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts (CCSS-ELA).

First off, let me state that the administrators described here, who were demanding that teachers use the specific text exemplars listed in CCSS-ELA had missed the point of the inclusion of those lists. The developers of the CCSS never intended the list to be prescriptive, and in fact they clearly state that in the first portions of Appendix B. The text exemplars were intended as examples of the kinds of “complex texts” that teachers might use with students at each grade level. Teachers might look at the exemplars, but they could choose other texts that are like the exemplars.

But as anyone who has worked within mandates knows, once an example is given in a standards document, that example becomes a prescription. Administrators don’t want to trust teachers to interpret the example and come up with something similar, and teachers might not even trust themselves to do that. Besides, it’s easier just to take the examples given. In the case of the CCSS text exemplars, it’s easy to just order all the books on the list and be done with it. What’s more, the books are already “leveled” for us (using Lexile scores), so why not just get the books on the list?

The big problem with that approach is that the CCSS lists don’t really represent the range of diversity found in today’s literature for children and young adults, and more importantly, the books on those exemplar lists do not reflect the diversity in today’s student population. McCaffrey and Corapi present sobering numbers: among the 33 text exemplars listed for Grades K-1, they found only four authors who were of color, and four who were international (p. 8).

Even if this list had been sufficiently diverse when it was first published (which it was not), in the years since the CCSS came out (going on a decade already), many new and high-quality books have come out, and we are seeing a multiplicity of perspectives in these books that would have been unimaginable when I began teaching children’s literature courses more than 30 years ago. As far as I know, no one has gone into the CCSS document and updated Appendix B.

The authors here recommend beginning to build text sets with books from the mandated lists, but then expanding the text sets with additional, more diverse selections. They describe how they created text sets on the theme of “identity”. They built sets at three levels: Grade 1, Grade 4, and Grade 8. When possible, the texts’ Lexile levels were determined, since Lexiles were used to “level” the CCSS text exemplars. Each text set is comprised of a wide variety of texts across “a range of reading levels, text formats, and genres”, and the sets were “intentionally created with multiple perspectives” (p. 9). Cross-disciplinary connections were stressed, and the authors of this article point out the utility of that in meeting standards across disciplines.

The article ends with an Appendix containing a table (pp.12-16) listing all of the titles used in the three text sets, along with information about each text’s subtheme, Lexile range, which grade’s text set it is part of, notes on how it fits the main theme of “identity”, and cross-curricular connections. While this is an extremely useful and helpful example, I urge readers not to make the same mistake made by the administrators who imposed the CCSS lists from Appendix B! Yes, there is a lovely list here, and the fact that McCaffrey and Corapi have already done the work on it makes it all the more tempting. However, making your own text sets is a good kind of work, and teachers (including me) will do better to let the lists here inspire us, but then go on to create our own good lists, lists that we shape and update continuously to fit our changing groups of students and the exciting new books being published each year. McCaffrey and Corapi provide a few resources to begin our own searches, in bullet lists on page 11. I plan to start my own search soon.