Representations of Diversity in the Revised New Zealand PictureBook Collection

Abstract

ABSTRACTCollections of children’s literature are used for a range of reasons including preservation, record keeping, and more recently the encouragement of intercultural understanding. Both the significance of learning about other cultures and the importance of children seeing themselves reflected in the books that they read have been discussed extensively. In 2010, the New Zealand PictureBook Collection (NZPBC) was developed in order to create a resource that reflected New Zealand national identity. In 2015 the NZPBC was revised and this article presents a visual and textual analysis of the diversity present in the sixty books nominated through the lens of critical multicultural analysis, using four variables. Findings indicate considerable diversity is present in the collection in terms of representations of ethnicity and family; less so for representations of disability and languages.