Why Representation Matters
“Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us” (Bishop, 1990, para. 1)
Book as Sliding Glass Doors:
Literature as a Site of Human Encounter
“Diversity is a way to honour both the distinctiveness of our identities and our participation in the human experience” (Enriquez, 2019, as cited in Enriquez, 2021, p. 105).
Books are also sliding glass doors, inviting children to step into the worlds, histories, and experiences of others. Through these doors, children move beyond simply seeing another life to entering it, engaging emotionally and critically with perspectives that differ from their own (Bishop, 1990).
​
When children step through these doors, they are not passive observers - they encounter relationships, conflicts, and possibilities. This imaginative participation helps children deepen their understanding of human experiences far beyond their immediate context.
​
However, sliding glass doors do not open automatically. Enriquez (2021) reminds us that “sometimes… those doors are heavy and [children] need our help to push them open far enough to walk through” (p. 105). Without educator support - intentional conversations and questions - children may only glance at unfamiliar worlds, rather than fully engage with them.
Books become powerful sliding glass doors when educators help children sit within the story, ask questions, and consider the emotions and power dynamics embedded in the narrative. In their readings with young children around slavery and segregation, Souto-Manning (2009) describes how children “developed empathy for the characters
Walking through sliding glass doors provides opportunities to recognize “multiple perspectives, voices, and stories - all while recognizing how power and/in society determine(s) their value”
(Souto-Manning & Yoon 2018, p. 55).
and delved into larger social issues and expanded the sphere of their problem posing beyond [their] classroom walls” (p. 66). Children make meaning by reading the word and the world (Souto-Manning, 2009; Souto-Manning & Yoon 2018); stepping through a sliding door is exactly this act - connecting text to lived realities.
​
When educators intentionally invite this movement - through shared reading, critical questions, and connections to children’s own experiences - books become worlds where children encounter the diversity of human experience – it’s emotions, relationships, and complexities - not as something distant, but as something they can feel, understand, and respond to with empathy (Enriquez, 2021).