EP113: Dr. Krista Aronson PhD on picture books, extended contact, and central identity

I've always thought that (a) book(s) can change the world. Books have definitely changed me. Picture books are a format that I got more familiar with as an adult reading to my children, and as a genre, I think they are hugely important. Dr. Krista Aronson is a psychologist whose work bridges my interest in picture books with my attempts to more fully see, hear, and feel the world around me. Dr. Krista M. Aronson, PhD is Professor of Psychology and Associate Dean of Faculty at Bates College. She researches how we come to understand constructs like race and ethnicity and how best to discuss the topic with children. She also looks at how picture books can be effectively used in such conversations. Dr. Aronson herself is a citizen of the African diaspora and helps host the Blackbird Children’s Book Festival. She has established a Diverse Book Finder, and the Diverse BookFinder's Collection Analysis Tool (CAT) can be shared with libraries in the US and on US military bases to assess what stories/races/identities are represented in a given collection. CAT link: https://cat.diversebookfinder.org/

Transcript

[00:00:00] Christine Ko: Welcome back to SEE HEAR FEEL. Today I am very happy and excited to be speaking with Dr. Krista Aronson. Dr. Aronson is Professor of Psychology and Associate Dean of Faculty at Bates College. She researches how we come to understand constructs like race and ethnicity and how best to discuss the topic with children. She also looks at how picture books can be effectively used in such conversations. I am excited by this concept of picture books really helping to, introduce and discuss topics of race, ethnicity, complicated constructs. Dr. Aronson herself is a citizen of the African diaspora and helps host the Blackbird Children's Book Festival. Welcome to Krista.

[00:00:42] Krista Aronson: Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be talking with you today. 

[00:00:46] Christine Ko: Krista, can you first share a personal anecdote? 

[00:00:49] Krista Aronson: Happy to. It might be interesting to think about how a psychologist like me gets into this kind of work. Scrolling back 15 or maybe 16 years now, we were living in Lewiston, Maine where Bates College is located, and my daughter was attending our local school, which was scheduled to be demolished and redistricted. So taken from a 200 kiddo school to more like a 600 kiddo school about a mile up the road, which was going to lead to a merger between our school district and a portion of another. Our school district which was about a block from Bates College was predominantly white. I don't remember exactly, but I'm pretty sure my kiddo was the only, if not one of the only kids of color, in her class. And we were going to be merging with a school district that drew from a neighborhood community where most of our Somali new neighbors were living. I'm a psychologist who studies race and identity, and I'm thinking this is a big deal. I'm really curious to see how this gets metabolized and what happens. And at first I watched on the kind of parent side and attended the forums about it, and there was some tension and concern that got navigated well. And then I was also hearing about it at home, and my daughter was bringing home questions that her friends were having. Are you Somali? And so my daughter would come home and say, the kids at school want to know if I'm Somali. Am I? And I would say, because of the legacy of slavery, I don't know, but you're not Somali in the way that your friends are asking. Do you have a live and active connection to Somali culture? No, you don't. So then she'd come home and she'd say things like, the kids are wondering if I'm not Somali, will I be able to play with the Somali kids? Which, led some insight into what's going on in their minds. Playing across difference can be scary and stressful. And then one day she came home and she said, we played dodgeball at school today. This is when the school had transitioned, and she said it was Somali against non Somali, and the kids weren't sure which team I was supposed to be on. And one of her best friends at the time had decided that she should be on the Somali team because she was brown. And so there was kind of all of this swirling around of identity and place and power and a lot of complex ideas that kids aren't necessarily well equipped to answer on their own. I happened to be on sabbatical at the time, it was my first sabbatical, and I quickly realized I was getting paid to think about whatever I wanted to think about, and so this is what I decided I wanted to think about.

[00:03:13] Christine Ko: That's so cool. Yeah. And so you started to think about it in relation to picture books. 

[00:03:18] Krista Aronson: I did some searching, and I thought, what does psychology have to say about this? And found that there were researchers in England who were using picture books to address this very question with Somali and non Somali children in particular. I reached out to the lead researcher on that, Rupert Brown, at the time, and we wrote a grant. I spent the rest of my sabbatical with him in England, studying the work of him and Lindsey Cameron. We also then at that time found other researchers in Italy who were struggling with some of the same questions. And so we did this international study with picture books.

[00:03:47] Christine Ko: What did you guys find?

[00:03:48] Krista Aronson: We found that picture books can be used to affect children's attitudes about race and culture and intergroup contact that largely functions through this psychological concept that we call extended contact or vicarious contact, where you can, by reading about someone like you doing something like interacting with someone not like you, it can reduce your anxiety about having that kind of interaction yourself and thus lead to more positive intended behaviors. And so that's true for racial differences in picture books. So using that as a vehicle for extended contact, it's pretty much true for any sort of difference that, that's meaningful socially. So our results were similar across the countries, even internationally. 

[00:04:35] Christine Ko: Was it only if the picture book had a main character that's like, whoever's reading the book? Does there need to be a character in the book that I feel like is more like me? 

[00:04:48] Krista Aronson: To activate extended contact, there needs to be someone like you in the book. And they need to be interacting directly with someone not like you. And they need to be having fun. They need to be engaging in what we would call typical activities that kids do every day so that you can get yourself into that story and really relate to the characters in that story. Other kinds of books where they're exposing me to something that I may have been unfamiliar with before likely also has effects on intergroup contact, but just not through this mechanism of extended contact, right? What it can do is it can help introduce children to new ideas, maybe help them break down stereotypes about what they thought another group was like. Maybe if they had a negative impression or a scary idea of what a group or what a holiday was, then it can help dispel that. So I'm not going to say that the only books depicting cross group friendships, which at the Diverse Book Finder we refer to as cross group books, those aren't the only kind of books that can have a positive effect. It's just, those are the kind of books where I've spent most of my research doing.

[00:05:56] Christine Ko: Yeah. Love that you set up this Diverse Book Finder. Can you talk about that a little bit? 

[00:06:01] Krista Aronson: Happy to. We are an award winning resource. We provide a number of opportunities for engagements to our users. We are a collection of books, and so we have our own unique inclusion criteria that emphasize having characters of color in the book. Currently we're focused on picture books, but soon. weeks, you'll see us relaunch with all of children's literature. So not just picture books, but picture books through Y. A. Which is a huge leap, but we're doing it. 

[00:06:32] Christine Ko: Congratulations. 

[00:06:32] Krista Aronson: Thank you. The collection does circulate. All the books can be checked out through interlibrary loan, through Bates College. We also provide a source of critical data. Because of what we do, we can tell you, on the market right now, who is represented? Who are the groups that are being talked about in children's literature? What are the stories that are available? We don't make a prescription about what those stories should be, but we do offer opportunities for reflection on balance. If all of the books, for instance, featuring Korean characters focus on culture, then that's valuable. But there are also other stories to tell, right? There are biographies. There are books that are just a slice of life that may have a Korean child in them but aren't about Korean culture. And we generally find that books featuring Asian characters focus on centering culture, which is important, but it can also run the risk of communicating to children that to be Asian American or to be Asian descended means other or different from mainstream culture, which is not, I would say, a healthy, internalized attitude for children to have, whether they're of Korean descent or not.

[00:07:47] Christine Ko: Yeah. When you started thinking about extended contact and other ways in which picture books can really influence kids, did your research and the diverse book finder influence how you would choose what books to read to your kids?

[00:08:02] Krista Aronson: It certainly expanded what I knew was out there. Half the battle is finding them. They're not well marketed. If anyone told me when I got into this work how much time I was going to spend merely on book identification, I probably wouldn't have done it, honestly. 

[00:08:16] Christine Ko: Yeah. How do you do? 

[00:08:19] Krista Aronson: In the beginning it was just me, and I had to put it in a box, and it was like eight hours a week that I could devote to it. We hand go through catalogs from hundreds of publishers each season to identify those books that will fit our inclusion criteria. And that work is currently being done by about 20 book identifiers who volunteer: librarians and academics around the country who are assigned to catalog and go through it every season to identify books and then assign them to our book coders.

[00:08:48] Christine Ko: Wow. What a huge undertaking. 

[00:08:51] Krista Aronson: So I know what's all out there now, and I have a language for how to search, and I know what's common. So my children are African descended, and books available about African descended children, probably with the widest number of stories. So it makes it easier for me to find that and be intentional about balance on my own bookshelves. I'm also more aware of what's rare. Anything with an indigenous character is rare. Anything with an indigenous character set in the moment, a contemporary story, is rare. Anything that features two BIPOC characters interacting with one another in a book is rare. Most of our cross group books feature a white character and a character of color, which is important, but it's just a thin slice of what we all do on the daily, right?

[00:09:37] Christine Ko: Fascinating. Can you address a little bit more some of these complex social constructs of race and ethnicity, which is how your research started: intercultural relationships and self understanding? 

[00:09:50] Krista Aronson: Sure. I got my start as a psychologist in researching racial identity development among African American adolescents and their parents, working with Rob Sellers in his lab at the University of Michigan to understand what are the identities that are associated with positive outcomes among African American adolescents. And what are parents doing that supports the internalization of those identities, right? And from that I've really learned the value, the importance, the essentialness of helping our children understand and see themselves or see their racial identity is central to who they are. Like I am an African descended person. That's a statement of centrality. That's high on the hierarchy of how I think about myself. It's also important that they have positive feelings about that group affiliation and that they feel connected, in whatever way that's meaningful for them. Sometimes, or there's some indication, particularly for African American youth, that it's important to also realize that not everybody sees you that way.

[00:10:54] So, the most important features are it's part of who you are and you feel good about it. So we can use books as vehicles, for that and looking for stories that meet our children wherever they are and whatever questions they have about their own identities. But that really drive home this idea of you're connected, you're worthy, and you should feel good about it. There's a strong history there. There's so much to feel proud of. 

[00:11:20] Christine Ko: I didn't read picture books when I was younger. My parents, they were immigrants to this country, and they weren't read to as kids either when they lived in Korea. I really started reading picture books when I was reading to my kids. I didn't think about who are the main characters, what race, what is the story, you know, all the stuff that your Diverse Book Finder does. And it was only until my son was in first grade and he had a teacher who was very much devoted to diversity in books himself. All the books that were on display around the classroom were very diverse, and the coverage, you just tell a book would be like, I am Muslim, would maybe be the title or you know, Hanukkah Celebration, like all of these books. And so I remember at the time I, at first, I have to admit, I thought it was a little strange. About eight years ago, any other classroom you went to at the school, almost all the books on display, the main character is white. And so I thought it was a little weird, but then once I got used to it, I thought, oh, this is wonderful. I realized how much I missed Asian characters in books without knowing that I was missing it myself and how it goes back to what you just said that being Korean is a large part of my central identity. It was surprising to me how much it meant to me.

[00:12:37] Krista Aronson: Yeah. And you mentioned that your parents didn't read to you growing up. I hear that a lot from my international students. This notion of reading picture books as a child is a fairly Western idea and concept. I work with a number of international students at the Diverse Book Finder who have been in my lab. And it was often first of, what is this? This format. 

[00:13:00] I, too, when I walk into a library or a collection that is diverse, still, I think after 20 years of doing this work, you have so many conflicting feelings. I went to my childhood library, two summers ago. I grew up in Rochester, New York, and we were in my old neighborhood. And I decided I wanted to go to the library and check it out. Now, I do know that library has a collection analysis tool account. And what that means with the Diverse Book Finder is you can upload a file of your collection and we will give you a report that tells you about it. Who's in that collection of books? What's the proportion of different groups? What are the stories being told? As a moment of inflection. What does it look like in relation to your census numbers, for instance, is a question that I ask. And so we try to provide those moments of inflection so people can say, Oh, I need to expand this. What are some ways that I can expand this systematically so that I can look to build a more diverse collection over time with my budget, right?

[00:14:02] So I went to that library, my old childhood library. It looked very different from the library I remember in terms of what was on the shelves. There was so much more with folks who looked like me, or maybe didn't look like me, but who also came from minoritized or marginalized groups, and it felt wonderful to know that kids growing up in my old neighborhood had access to them. There's also a sadness to it, a feeling like you said, wow, who could I have been if I didn't have to overcome the things that I needed to overcome to see myself as a person of worth and value? Maybe I could have done even more. That's what we want for our kids. 

[00:14:37] Christine Ko: Yeah, absolutely. Do you have any final thoughts?

[00:14:41] Krista Aronson: I've enjoyed our conversation. If you're a parent and you're starting to think about this, or maybe you're far along in thinking about it, remember that your children are not colorblind. You're not breaking them by intentionally introducing them to books featuring characters of color and to topics and stories that may deal with the complexities of inter group interaction or your own self identity exploration. Kids as early as six to nine months see difference, they see race, they see gender. They're forming their own internalized maps and ideas about the world, regardless. You may as well be part of that conversation because if you're not, children, childhood egocentrism, they think you're thinking what they're thinking, and the only way to disrupt that is to talk to them.

[00:15:29] Christine Ko: I love it. Thank you so much, Krista. I really enjoyed this. 

[00:15:33] Krista Aronson: Thank you for inviting me. I enjoyed our conversation as well.