ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the roles that children’s literature with global perspectives can serve, especially as a means to bridge cultures. Within the pages of this chapter, key resources for discovering high quality children’s books with global perspectives are offered, such as World of Words, the Mildred Batchelder Award; Notable Books for a Global Society, USBBY: United States Board of Books for Young People, and IBBY: International Board of Books for Young People. Teachers who are intent on honoring their students’ backgrounds and heritages as well as expanding their students’ global perspectives might consider using text sets as a means of developing critical thinking and empathy as well as reinforcing close reading skills across many genres of books. To illustrate, a multi-genre text set on the timely and timeless topic of immigration is provided that exemplifies the bridges across intercultural connections that can be made to enhance readers’ global perspectives.
