BOWDOINHAM

Bowdoinham Community School has been talking a lot about diversity in recent months, and how books can help with that conversation.

Maine author and illustrator Anne Sibley O’Brien recently met with teachers, parents and community members to continue the discussion about race and how to bridge differences. She also spoke with students about ways to welcome new peers.

The elementary school received a $1,000 grant from the Maine Humanities Council to focus on welcoming diversity, which helped fund O’Brien’s visit.

O’Brien said she’s long investigated models for having conversations about race. Meeting with parents and teachers, she shared some information about racial identity development including the neuroscience and psychology behind it.

A minority after moving to Korea with her missionary parents in 1960, O’Brien remembers becoming a spectacle. Her experience there informed her world view.

Her aim became to celebrate differences, and her books are multi-racial and multicultural, both domestic and global.

“Social psychologists tell us that all the pieces of our identity are formed from the mirrors that were held up for us when we were young,” O’Brien said. “That which was made salient for us.

“So it’s in what people say, how they respond to you, what people tell you about yourself, how they react, what you overhear, on and on,” she added. “All that information comes together into some kind of sense of who you are in the world.”

While children can learn negative or positive racial ideas at home, O’Brien said, the primary influence is from the community culture at large. All day long they support what is and what isn’t familiar, she said, and sometimes the brain says: “Not like me, bad.”

“If we want our unconscious to match what we believe, what we intend … then the key is to feed our brains a diet that represents what we want to express,” O’Brien said, “which is a really exciting and liberating idea to me.”

Books are important and useful to have conversations about race, according to O’Brien, who said it’s key to give children language and permission to express what they’re already seeing and thinking.

It can also help guide them, she said, “so they’re not stranded with the ideas about race the current and past generations have grown up with.”

Bowdoinham librarian Kate Cutko also has been working with Kirsten Cappy of Curious City in Portland to create a traveling collection of 25 picture books to help children learn about diversity. Cappy created a set of discussion questions for each book as part of the I’m Your Neighbor project. The collection can be checked out.

A parent of two Bowdoinham Community School students, Dana Pratt is a member of the parent partnership. Last year, a few parents overheard negative comments from students about people who are different; at the same time, negative, racial incidents were reported in the Midcoast area.

In an effort to be proactive, the parent group formed the Caring Kids subcommittee, which has planned events and raised money to purchase 30 books about diversity. They invited an African drummer to the school last year and are continuing to explore diversity education opportunities.

Bowdoinham students worked with O’Brien to create posters that show what it means to be welcoming to others. The posters covered the wall of the gym during the larger community discussion that recently took place at the school.

Pratt thinks it shows excitement and ownership when it comes to being open and welcoming to students who are different.

“We’re trying to make this not a one-off but to continue the work throughout the year,” said Principal Chris Lajoie.

The school has also created a civil rights team that already has 24 members. The plan is also for volunteers to read some of the school’s multi-cultural books to students during lunch as part of the Lunch Bunch program.

“This is the launch and a lot of teachers are excited about featuring multi-cultural diverse books in the classrooms,” Lajoie said. “It’s our job to start the conversation.”

dmoore@timesrecord.com