When using multicultural literature in the classroom, teachers should Check the text's authenticity Help learners understand the characters' world Encouage children to see the world through the characters' perspectives Identify values underlying the characters' conflict resolution strategies Relate self to the text and critique the portrayal of characters in the text and in popular media Use variants of the same story or collection of stories to help students to build schema Encouage students to talk, write, and respond throughout reading the multicultural texts The author reports a study in a fourth‐grade classroom in which these principles were applied in teaching four variants of the Mulan story and watching Walt Disney's Mulan video. Data included videotaped records of instructional sessions, transcripts of the sessions, field notes, teacher journals, student journals, and student projects. After a three‐week instructional unit, students demonstrated critical understanding, empathetic understanding, and conceptual understanding of the texts. Teachers of children and young adolescents can apply these principles to teaching other multicultural literature selections.

This article presents an approach to use wordless picture books to enhance the language development of English language learners. This approach is grounded in best practices to teach ELLs. The process starts with viewing and analyzing the visual images, engaging ELLs in discussion, and ending with students' self‐authored texts. The wordless picture books contain all the literary elements and text structures that books with text have. Wordless picture books, without the language demands, invite ELLs to share the reading experience and to construct meaning from the viewing experience. Since wordless picture books vary in its complexity, booklist indicating level of complexity with annotations is provided for K‐5 students. Classroom discussion and writing samples are also included to demonstrate the four stages of this instructional approach.

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This article reports a case study of a high school teacher's attempt to enhance students' development of empathy after guiding them to explore the cultural, political, and historical context of text. Empathy is defined as an other‐oriented perspective that is congruent with another's sociocultural values, political ideology, and historical background. The students who participated in this study grew up in a small town with limited exposure to diversity in their lives and in their school curriculum. During a six‐week unit, the teacher used simulation, lecture, poster analysis, and a movie to help students understand the context of a Chinese novella before they read the book. Students engaged in discussion and journal writing when they read the text. The data collected included videorecording of lessons, the investigator's field notes, teacher diary entries, students' assignments, and postinstructional interviews with individual students. The findings suggest that these students demonstrated five types of empathy: cognitive empathy, historical empathy, parallel emotional empathy, reactive emotional empathy, and crosscultural empathy. Students varied in their empathetic responses. Some refused to empathize with the characters; some accepted the characters' positions partially; only a few could and were willing to experience the feelings of the characters.