Tag Archives: Children’s books

Guide critical of racism published

Initiated by the IMAFREDU research project of Dr. Elina Marmer, last year a collective of authors, among others with the participation of glokal, developed a “Racism Critical Guide for Reflecting on Existing and Creating New Didactic Teaching and Learning Materials for School and Out-of-School Educational Work on Blackness, Africa and the African Diaspora”. It is now available digitally and will soon be available in print.

The urgency of a racism-critical revision of school educational materials was highlighted in a textbook study Migration and Integration published in March by the Federal Government Commissioner for Migration, Refugees and Integration, Minister of State Aydan Özoğuz. The study shows a great need to catch up in the production of textbooks in many areas. for example, in the representation and address of the German migration society:

“Thus, a key finding is that in the textbooks analyzed, migration is primarily problematized as conflictual as well as crisis-ridden. The approach of presenting migration-based diversity as normality is rarely found.” Continue reading →

Children’s Book Debate

A heated debate on children’s books has been raging in Germany for a few weeks now: By discussing what we want to read to our children, the discussion is about what image of the world and of oneself should be conveyed. Leading media like DIE ZEIT demonstrate effectively and with racist imagery: The white majority society should continue to have the power of definition over which stories are told and with which words they should be told.
The debate about the use of the N-word is a very central one, not least because it makes the mainstream’s current understanding of racism clear and, at least to some extent, open to question. Unfortunately, in most cases this happens through reproduction and thus stabilization of racism. Continue reading →