Arab Storybooks in American Schools
Education Professors Promote Diversity with Children’s Literature

Tami Al-Hazza and Robert Lucking from the educational curriculum and instruction department at Old Dominion University’s Darden College of Education won the national Virginia Hamilton Essay Award presented in April 2008.

The award recognizes a published article that makes a significant contribution to the professional literature concerning multicultural literary experiences for youth. Al-Hazza and Lucking were selected for their superior scholarship in “Celebrating Diversity Through Explorations of Arab Children’s Literature,” an article published in the spring 2007 issue of Childhood Education. The award was presented at the 24th Annual Virginia Hamilton Conference on Multicultural Literature for Youth at Kent State University.

According to the article’s introduction, “The five years since the 9/11 attacks … have brought about huge shifts in the collective global view of Arabs, and it is certainly timely to examine how educators treat the literature of the people in that part of the world. While language arts teachers may feel like throwing up their arms in frustration at being asked to learn about yet another body of children’s literature, it has never been more important to represent a clear-headed and balanced view of a people, their culture, and their literature.”

William Graves, dean of the Darden College said, “The Hamilton Award is an important national award. It recognizes the pioneering work that Dr. Al-Hazza and Dr. Lucking have conducted in Middle Eastern children’s literature. I am delighted that their scholarly contribution is receiving critical acknowledgment.”

ODU education faculty member Kaavonia Hinton-Johnson, who serves on the National Council of Teachers of English Racism and Bias Committee, and whose research focuses on multicultural literature for children and young adults, said the Al-Hazza and Lucking article is an important contribution to the field of multicultural children’s literature: “They focus on an area that has been overlooked in the field of children’s literature, and their expertise in texts and guidelines for selecting Arab children’s literature is noteworthy, to say the least.”

Al-Hazza and Lucking discuss the origins and scope of their work in the following interview:

Quest: How did you develop your interest in this topic?

Al-Hazza: My interest in the Middle East first developed when I married my husband who is of Middle Eastern origins, and we moved to Kuwait and lived for over a decade. I taught there in the educational system at both the K-12 level and university level, and I became very involved in cultural activities. During my stay, I developed a deep appreciation for the culture and the people of the region. However, my interest in researching and writing about Arab issues began with the events of 9/11. I noticed a change in American attitudes toward Middle Easterners and a level of mistrust directed at people believed to be from that region of the world. Arab Americans became the “minority of suspicion,” a term we have used in our recent articles. At the same time, my daughter was going through the American school system, and I realized that except for an occasional token unit on ancient Egypt, Arabs were not represented in the literature of the classroom, nor for that matter, in any other part of her curriculum.

Lucking: My Ph.D. work was concentrated in English education, so I’ve been involved for a number of years in issues related to literature teaching in K-12 schools. I’ve always held that young people are most likely to become interested in reading good literature when they identify most clearly with the characters they read about. Accordingly, I’ve long advocated the need for introducing students to a variety of characters representing a broad spectrum of cultures, even in the works intended for younger readers.  The importance of personal identification becomes even more critical for minority youngsters since there has traditionally been little literature in the typical school curriculum or school library that reflects characters with whom they can identify.

“When we ask simple questions of fact, for example, on the distinction between Arabs and Muslims, our students reveal to us some terribly mistaken notions.”

I am committed to many cultures being acknowledged in schools, so it was only natural that after 9/11 Tami and I, colleagues in the same department in the College of Education, turned our attention to a cultural group that had completely escaped representation.

Quest:  Tell us about your research and how it led to an award-winning article.

Al-Hazza: The focus of this article is an appeal for American educators to broaden their global perspectives to include literature from the Arab world in their classroom. In this work, we examine the cultural values of the Arab society such as the centrality of the family, putting the needs of others before oneself, the forms of requisite social generosity, the value of hard work, and the fulfilling of one’s role in society through kindness toward others in need, and we examine these themes as they are represented within Arab children’s literature. We discuss works of literature whose plots reveal an accurate portrayal of Arab life and narratives that contain realistic and believable characters with whom children can relate. The article included examples of traditional literature, contemporary realistic fiction and historical fiction from the Arab world.

Lucking:  We tried to set the directions for the potential study of prospective and practicing teachers because we have found both groups to be exceedingly unaware of Middle Eastern cultures and world events.  When we ask simple questions of fact, for example, on the distinction between Arabs and Muslims, our students reveal to us some terribly mistaken notions. They tend not to know the geography of the region, and they know almost nothing of the religious beliefs of the people who live in that area of the world.  I am advising a new graduate student in history-education who completed his undergraduate degree at a prestigious liberal arts university, and he readily admits that he had never been required to study the history of this portion of the world.  He has completed an entire four-year degree at a good university without once having to turn his studies to the history of this region.

Another force we were attempting to deal with was Hollywood’s use of stereotypes of Middle Easterners to establish predictable villains in films. In recent years, the film industry has become particularly insistent at painting people of Middle Eastern ancestry as the villain of contemporary pictures, and the evolution of their sinister qualities has grown over time.  These films would have us believe that it’s only through raw teeth-gritted determination and brawn that American film heroes overcome demented Middle Eastern extremists.  An entire people are vilified by these formulaic movies produced for mass consumption in which evil is reduced to swarthy bad guys, and young people are fed a consistent diet of such fare.

Al-Hazza: The driving force behind our research is the desire to help educators create classrooms that accurately reflect the ethnic landscape of the American population. Sitting in classrooms across America are Arab American children who have completed 12 years of education never having encountered a literary work that reflects their culture and their heritage. Including Arab literature in the curriculum allows Arab children to learn from a familiar cultural base, to acknowledge their ancestors’ accomplishments, lifestyles, traditions and customs, and it enables all students to develop an understanding and acceptance of the Arab culture.

“Including literature of diverse people is vital as a means to help students develop understanding and tolerance.”

The term, “multicultural education,” has become a painful cliché causing a rolling of the eyes among many teachers who feel put upon by yet another demand on their time. Accordingly, we argue for the inclusion of more than a token teaching unit on another isolated feast or festival of a people in some far off place. Examinations of other cultures, including the Arab culture, should not be a marginalized issue to be relegated to the confines of a token filmstrip on ancient Egypt or to an annual multicultural fair; American education should pride itself on a constant examination of the fabric of society as reflected by the individuals who make up its classrooms. Including literature of diverse people is vital as a means to help students develop understanding and tolerance for others whose sociocultural framework differs from their own.

Lucking:  We look to establish ways of allowing all students, be they elementary or college-age students, to feel a part of classroom events and the instruction that leads to personally meaningful learning. I’ve been involved in a line of research for the past half-dozen years on some of these affective dimensions of learning among university students that we have called “sense of community.” What we have learned is that there is a considerable difference in the degree of cohesion and feelings of connectedness that occurs among students from classroom to classroom and in some forms of distance-based learning. We’ve learned that not only do these differences impact students’ comfort in the classroom but also the degree to which students judge the quality of their learning experiences.

Concurrent to this research, we have also examined whether these differences exist among K-12 students, and it is no surprise that they do. Learning takes place within a social context, so to become preoccupied with standardized test scores alone is to miss a great deal of the true dynamism of what we hope is occurring in schools.  Good teachers develop an intuition about these matters, but our data also reveal that it is possible to identify distinct threads of some of these dimensions of learning.

Quest: Have your media surveys turned up any news you view as positive?

Lucking: Yes, since we are interested in attitudes toward contemporary world events involving people of the Middle East, we believe that America is served well today by its legacy of being a nation of immigrants. Anyone who watches the nightly news on public television will be familiar with one of the contributors, the Pew Charitable Trust; and the Pew Research Center is responsible for two enormous studies which we often cite. In this case, we are referring to research involving Muslims, not Arabs, but the results give us hope.  In 2006, the Pew Center’s “Global Attitudes” survey, carried out in 13 countries, found that among Muslims most were generally positive about the conditions in their host nations; however, European Muslims expressed more reservations about blending in than their American counterparts, and the majority reflected resistance to assimilation. On the other hand, the situation in the United States was more hopeful. In a more recent study in this country, the Pew researchers conducted more than 55,000 interviews in Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and English and concluded that Muslim Americans were “mostly mainstream.” Pew estimated that the total population of Muslim Americans in the U.S. was 2.34 million and that the majority were “highly assimilated.”  In our view, these studies offer considerable optimism for this country, particularly if we take the extra effort to recognize all cultures, including those of the Middle East, through the literature that children read, even in our elementary schools.

Quest: What books would you recommend for adult readers to develop more knowledge on this topic?

Al-Hazza: There are several interesting and informative books on the market today about Arab cultures and the Middle East. “Understanding Arabs: A Guide for Modern Times” by Margaret K. Nydell is an excellent book to acquire an understanding of the customs and traditions of the Arab world. For a more historical perspective, I recommend “A History of the Modern Middle East” by William Cleveland. The book is superbly written, giving the reader an in-depth analysis of the modern Middle East history. My colleague, Katherine Toth Bucher, and I have also written a new book just recently released titled “Books About the Middle East: Selecting and Using Them with Children and Adolescents.” Aimed at teachers, this book contains an overview of historic touchstones of the Middle East, guidelines for selecting young people’s books, selection recommendations and teaching ideas for the classroom. It is written to help K-12 classroom teachers and library media specialists choose quality Middle East literature for the classroom.

Lucking: Another good source for understanding the historical events that have led to many of the present-day points of tension is “A History of the Middle East” by Peter Mansfield. Mansfield’s book traces how many Middle Eastern countries were constituted in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s after nearly 200 years of colonialism. The boundaries of these countries were many times drawn up by former colonial powers as expeditious ways of withdrawing their interests. The author also places in bold relief how very different many of the cultures are within the arbitrarily drawn boundaries of single countries, sometimes creating an admixture of cultures. Understanding these pages of history helps us comprehend the clashing of interests.

Quest: What will be the focus of your future work in this area?

Al-Hazza: We believe that educating teachers is a first step. Although the majority of negative stereotyping is directed toward Arabs, the entire Middle East region is often misunderstood and largely overlooked in K-12 schools; therefore, part of our future work will include an examination of literature of other peoples of the region. Our goal is to help create a global perspective among students and an attitude of understanding and acceptance toward peoples of other cultures, particularly peoples of the Middle East.

Lucking: The war in Iraq, the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis and the action of the Kurds will all have a continuing impact on world events for some time, so the call for action in schools has never been more needed. We recognize that the K-12 curriculum is packed and that teachers have a responsibility to treat all groups from all parts of the globe equally, but this is an extraordinary time in world affairs. Potentially explosive events at this very moment in history are likely to shape how Americans are viewed around the world for years to come, and these events inevitably shape how we view our own citizens, as well. The pending election will likely influence the timing of the withdrawal of our troops from the region, and the eventual return of tens of thousands of veterans will influence American perspective for decades. This legacy will impact many, many families, and we hope to contribute to better schools of tomorrow for their children.