ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an instance of critical race media literacy for the sake of addressing the hierarchization of children’s literature in relation to literacy instruction. This chapter argues that literacy curriculum and the preparation of pre-service literacy teachers in general tends to subordinate children’s literature as a tool of literacy instruction, by modeling literacy as a demonstration of cognitive abilities ahead of understanding the context of selecting children’s literature and the way in which a children’s story might reveal things to the reader about social and racial context. This chapter offers an interpretation of The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein in this context, to expose the kind of racial imaginary that could inform a study of this text. We place this discussion of The Giving Tree in the context of Croom’s theory of post-White racial literacy and propose that literacy instructors need to be made aware of the relative function of the literary artifact in order to avoid colorblindness in literacy instruction practice.
