Respond to Stories with Stories: Teachers Discuss Multicultural Children's Literature
Abstract Stories help us construct our selves, who used to be one way and are now another; stories help to make sense of, evaluate, and integrate the tensions inherent in experience: the past with the present, the fictional with the “real,” the official with the unofficial, the personal with the professional, the canonical with the different or unexpected. Stories help us transform the present and shape the future for our students and ourselves so that it will be richer or better than the past. (Genishi and Dyson 1994, 242-43)