The Information Center on Children's Cultures

Abstract

The Information Center on Children's Cultures Peggy Whalen-Levitt No discussion of internationalism and children's literature would be complete without mention of the Information Center on Children's Cultures at the U.S. Committee for UNICEF. Particularly if we conceptualize "children's literature" broadly to include the cultural environment of the child—not only the verbal and visual arts, but the rituals, festivals, dance, games, music and the children's own aesthetic productions that frame and shape their worlds—then the Information Center on Children's Cultures must be recognized as an invaluable resource. Under the expert direction of Anne Pellowski, known to most of us for The World of Children's Literature (Bowker, 1968) and The World of Storytelling (Bowker, 1977), the Center has been in operation for over a decade and boasts a rich and varied collection of educational materials that comes only with years of systematic collecting. The primary purpose of the Center is to disseminate information about how children live and grow up in different cultures, particularly Third World cultures, to children of our own culture. Thus most of the materials in the collection are intended for or appropriate for use with children. The Center staff evaluates books, films, filmstrips, recordings, games and other media about children's cultures and regularly updates annotated bibliographies pertaining to over eighty countries. In addition to materials created for English-speaking children about other cultures, the collection includes primary materials (toys, games, musical instruments, masks, textbooks, literature for children, children's art) from Third World cultures. The collection of children's art from around the world is prepared for exhibits that are circulated throughout the U.S. and for the UNICEF wall calendar. The development of programs for the use of selected materials with children and research on their use is also a function of the Center. While the Center is chiefly concerned with the education of today's children—it answers nearly 5,000 questions annually—it also offers a significant and relatively untapped resource to the student of culture or social history. For example, the comprehensive collection of American fiction and non-fiction for children pertaining to Third World cultures could readily serve as a basis for investigating the beliefs, values and attitudes about these cultures that we have presented to our children over the past decade. Similarly, the Center's collection of textbooks written for Third World children in their native lands and languages gives us access to the "reality" constructed by a given Third World culture for its children at a given point in time. And although the collection of Third World children's literature is designed to be representative and not comprehensive, it lays a foundation for research in comparative children's literature—an area of scholarship that has too often ignored the productions of Asian, African, and Latin American nations. The Center is located at 331 East 38th Street, New York, NY 10016. Copyright © 1979 ChLA Newsletter