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To promote students’ awareness about diversity and to create and sustain an ethic of inclusion, it is vital to offer them critical analytical skills necessary to understand systems of power and the tools to create change. Although many faculty already integrate diverse perspectives, materials, and pedagogical approaches into their courses, many of us struggle to diversify our course content and teaching strategies. In this article, I overview the process of incorporating diversity into a literacy education course at a Midwestern university in the United States. In particular, I discuss how the use of this instructional technology enhanced students’ learning experience of diversity. In so doing, I focus on Plotagon, a video production app that provides a user-friendly script editor to narrate a story through custom-made characters, actions, emotions, scenes, dialogues, music, sound effects, and plots. Participants in this study were 36 male and female undergraduate preservice teachers enrolled in two sections of a required literacy education course. Each student read a multicultural young adult novel of their choice (see Appendix A in the article) and created an animated video version of a few scenes of the book in Plotagon. Integrating Plotagon multimedia medium into this instructional practice brought specific attention to the concept of diversity. The animated scenes improved the delivery of content, demonstrated students’ attention to different aspects of diversity, and enhanced their empathy. Also, through the creation of animated video clips, students were able to foster the fundamental skills of analysis, creativity, and engagement into their learning process.

Using multicultural children’s literature is one way to help preservice teachers build cultural knowledge and awareness about diversity. Another possible practice, not commonly used, is the addition of emerging technology in conjunction with conventional instructional approaches. In this article, we reviewed incorporating a lesson about homelessness in preservice teachers’ ( N = 46) respective curricula. We provided an illustrative example of the class and assignment process employed to facilitate preservice teachers’ knowledge, skills, and awareness that can be used with K-12 students who are experiencing homelessness. The goal of these assignments was to initiate or continue the conversation about building knowledge related to effective teaching practices about diversity in general and homelessness in particular. In this article, we shared an innovative instructional strategy that might lead to a shift in educators’ approaches, a move toward more diverse curriculum.

Cultural authenticity in children's literature has long been the subject of heated literary, educational and sociopolitical debate. Reviewing opposing perspectives in multicultural children's literature and examining Susan Fletcher's Shadow Spinner , this paper argues the possibility of acquiring the genuine perspective of the other culture and therefore authentically representing it for people who do not belong to that culture.