We Love Diverse Books was created with teachers and students in mind. With organizations such as We Need Diverse Books leading the way in ensuring diverse authors and perspectives are represented in literature there has been an increase in diverse books. As a middle school reading teacher there seemed to be a disconnect between what was getting published and getting those diverse books into students' hands. With a desire to help students learn to self-select books of interest and read multiple perspectives, I saw a need to create a platform for students and teachers to discover the great books accessible in their local library. The goal of the website is to grow and change as the more books are added to our library to give students opportunities to discover books about diverse people, communities, and worldviews.
With help from my Professional Learning Community, education friends, and a wonderful IT Guru, I was able to put my dream together to create this site. Thank you to everyone who helped along the way. A special thanks needs to be said for my husband for his endless support and encouragement throughout this process.
Happy reading,
Courtney
The We Love Diverse Books database was created as a capstone project in fulfillment of a Masters of Arts in Teaching through Hamline University.
This website is intended to be used by educators and students interested in reading diverse books in the middle grade and young adult categories.
The website was created as a way to help match students with books of interest, focusing on books with diverse characters and perspectives. Further, the hope is that using this site will open up dialogue between students and educators about diverse literature.
The website is intended to improve literacy through connecting readers with books of interest. Each year there are hundreds of new books published for teens. In recent years, many books with diverse perspectives have been published. By utilizing this tool, the work of trying to find a book of interest for a student becomes easier. Users are able to search by category, hopefully finding interesting books they have never heard of before.
The search categories were inspired by student feedback. A PLC (professional learning community) at a diverse middle school in the Midwest wanted to ensure that students were seeing themselves in the reading materials used at school. Through collecting data on student opinions it was clear that there were five areas of culture that they did not feel they were able to see people like them in literature: race/ethnicity, gender/sexual orientation, religion, socio-economic status, and nationality.
The books in the database are all in circulation at a middle school media center in the Midwest. Books will be added to the database as they become part of the media center's collection. Due to the space limitations on the database, only books that are considered diverse by at least one category on the website are considered for addition of searchable books.
The website was designed for optimal performance on Chrome. Other browsers will work, but may have compromised functionality.
This website is not sponsored. The site is hosted on a free platform.