Culture and Picture Books

“A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the souls of its people." --Ghandi 

What is culture exactly?

"Culture is the learned, shared symbols, language, values, and norms that distinguish one group of people from another"--K. Floyd, Communication Scholar.

Culture is learned. Our culture is more about who raises us, where we grow up, our friends, our media, our schools, and so forth, rather than our DNA. 

We live in a beautiful multicultural world. This enriches our lives by offering us more breadth and depth of possible life experiences. 

There are four major components of culture:

i. Symbols: something that represents an idea.

ii. Language: researchers believe that there are about 6,800 languages used in the world. Language allows us for written and speech communication. It passes culture from one generation to the next.  Many languages are in danger of extinction. 

iii. Values: the standards a culture uses to judge how good, desirable, or beautiful something is. 

iv. Norms: rules and expectations that guide people’s behavior.

These four components of culture help structure it but the people are the actual essence and aesthetic of a culture. 

Unfortunately, in the world of picture books our beautiful multicultural world isn't represented very well. 

There are some organizations like First Book.org who are working to fix this. I support their efforts! 

I hope to read many more books that do a better job at representing our beautiful and diverse world.