This is a case study of an elementary teacher's decision to add multicultural children's books to her curriculum and an analysis of how her ideologies about race shaped the classroom discourse. Although the teacher's stated purpose was to teach the pitfalls of racial stereotypes by encouraging conversations about prejudice, often the classroom talk normalized Whiteness in ways that shut down explorations of racial diversity, power, and oppression. This article describes how multicultural literature is used in an upper elementary classroom to supplement the existing curriculum and how a teacher's beliefs about race are present in the resulting discourse.
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