ENGL 481 Children's Literature: Home

This will limit your search to the books found in our Children's Collection.

Also, search DAWCL or ALSC Awards Shelf for award winning children's book titles and then use our OneSearch to see if we have them:

The We Need Diverse Books movement  "is a grassroots organization of children’s book lovers that advocates essential changes in the publishing industry to produce and promote literature that reflects and honors the lives of all young people."

Use these lists to find books on different socioeconomic backgrounds, gender identities, abilities, ethnicities, and cultures that are available in the Children's Collection at CSULB.

AI resources are quickly becoming a daily part of our lives.  A few things to think about when deciding to use AI for academic purposes.

Yes, it can be very easy to create things, but keep in mind:

• AI can "hallucinate" made up information by mashing stuff together.  For example, ChatGPT will create article citations, but they are not real things, just titles, journal titles, random page numbers and dates
• Specific facts and numbers tend to be incorrect in this same way.  Using AI to research facts does not (always) work.

You should consider that what it creates is realistic fiction (sounds real but might not be).

Using AI as a source of true information is problematic.  It can create falsities, and it cannot be refered back to (i.e. your readers/professors can't go back to see what you used as a source.) Using the same exact prompt will yield different results every time.

It can work fantastically as a starting point, for example, creating an outline.  It can also summarize large amounts of text fairly well (you are giving it a finite collection of data to summarize, so there isn't as much possiblity for incorrect mashups).

If you do use text generated by AI in your work, you must cite it as such.

We all tend to live in our own bubbles these days, where our information sources echo back to us what we already know and agree with (think of your "For You" page). Information we agree with feels good.

Some resources are significantly more biased than others and can feed into skewed views of the world.

Reliability of sources is also very important.  Is the information presented true?

Here is a tool from Ad Fontes Media to help you find out about sources you may be accessing.

• Choose a book, Award winners are good place to start. Find it using OneSearch. 
• Content Standards, can this book promote learning?
• Age/ability appropriate?
• Accurate information?
• Illustrations? Appealing techniques and colors are used? do they connect to the text?
• Representation/diversity? Are different cultures reflected in a positive way?
• Anti-bias? Are biases and stereotypes avoided (be especially wary of older titles)?

• Challenges are increasing exponentially, generally from politicians and religious groups or extremist groups like Moms for Liberty
• Top reasons for challenges are for LGBTQ+ and/or racial/ethnic content.
• Book removal harms children who need to see themselves represented.