Every fall, the University of Rhode Island celebrates Diversity Week. The Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, with a diverse faculty and an increasingly diverse student body, is always involved, and this site was first developed to accompany a GSLIS continuing professional development program in celebration of the October, 2001 Diversity Week.

The issues raised on this web seem in some ways more urgent than they did when I proposed the topic. The World Trade Towers and the Pentagon have been bombed, and American Muslims are feeling unsafe on our streets. We are remembering Pearl Harbor, and maybe remembering, too, the interning of Japanese Americans during World War II. What can telling folk tales contribute to multicultural understanding? What are the pitfalls?

But of course, these pages also have a personal background. I am a former children's librarian, and in my new incarnation as a university professor one of the things I miss most is telling stories. 

In spring 2001, I was asked to tell stories to third graders in Providence. Their classroom teachers, art teacher and school library media specialist were collaborating in a program initiated by the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), using the folk tale genre to inspire students' writing and to also instill in them an awareness and appreciation of the various artwork found in both book illustrations and the museum at RISD, and I was especially asked to include folktales which related to the various cultures represented in the student population.

Well, many of the stories I know fit the bill: they come from Africa, or the Caribbean, or the American South. I accepted the invitation with pleasure -- but also with guilt. Should I, a white woman, be telling these stories to children of color? It's something I never worried about back in the seventies and eighties. Then, I told "Wiley and the Hairy Man" with gusto to mesmerized white sixth graders who, according to their teacher, had no attention span whatsoever -- but these days, I no longer tell it, knowing that children in Rhode Island are likely to hear it from Len Cabral, a wonderful storyteller and a man of color.

Still, I need all the stories I've stolen over the years. What if I were limited to my own heritage? My family's from Maine, so I have a heritage of Down East stories, maybe. But when you think about it, women aren't usually the ones to tell Down East stories, and maybe there's a cultural reason for that.

So I had two motives for proposing this topic for diversity week. First, it gives me an excuse to tell stories -- even stories that aren't mine. And second, it gives me a chance to explore the pros and cons of my lifelong thievery. Should an outsider tell stories belonging to people of another culture? How can we ensure that mutual respect is enhanced by the telling, and cultural distortion is kept to a minimum? Where does the whole project of telling stories, and especially telling folk tales to children, fit into our understanding of cultural diversity?

As a scholar, or a discussion leader, I should be open minded about this. As a committed children's librarian, I know in advance some of the answers I want to believe. We often hear that a person who hasn't had an experience can never understand how it feels; but I want to believe that language and storytelling can help us empathize. I want to believe that literature, both oral and written, has the power to let us experience vicariously what we have not endured in person. I want to believe that stories told respectfully, by a teller who cares about the material and cares even more about the audience, are likely to inspire respect.

Folk tales, obviously, are not enough. They make it too easy for us to imagine other cultures as existing in a timeless, archaic void -- not part of our own real, contemporary world at all. We need more, and more powerful, children's fiction portraying the cultures of other parts of the world, because nonfiction is not enough, either. Facts, even the best and most accurate facts, often make it too easy for us to imagine other cultures as objects of study rather than the settings of real people's lives. But back in the 1950s, Bangor children's librarian Helen Wheeler told us Japanese tales from Yoshiko Uchida's collection, The Dancing Kettle (1949). Then, I enjoyed the stories. Now, I know what she was up to. She wanted what I want. Where there had been war, she wanted to plant seeds of understanding and respect.