Center Library

Teaching Strategies

Teaching Empathy and Critical Thinking Using Books (Social Justice 101), Making Space for Free-Choice Reading Alongside Textbooks in Social Work Generalist Courses, and the Center Library resource page. See also Literature as Exploration and two K-12 books on multiculturalism that can be applied to college education and across cultures, Stories Matter: The Complexity of Cultural Authenticity in Children’s Literature and A Magical Encounter: Latino Children's Literature in the Classroom.

Center Library

Literature serves as a powerful pedagogical tool to motivate critical thinking on interculturality and social justice. Diversity Center Director Dr. Yolanda Padilla curates a collection of contemporary books that engage students in the exploration of a range of social issues. Included in this collection are memoirs and ethnographies; traditional, graphic, and science fiction novels; and books on social analysis/social action. The last section is a collection of children’s books that offer an appreciation of cultural worldviews through folk tales and other stories. Book covers are organized by genre and alphabetized by book title. Click on the book cover for a description of the book. A corresponding book list provides publication information. 
 

Narrative Nonfiction Novels Social Analysis Children's Literature

 

Special Collection of Asian and Asian American Literature
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Narrative Nonfiction

After the Last Border cover American Prison cover Behind the Walls cover The Beast cover
The Best Little Boy in the World cover Barefoot Woman cover Black Lotus cover Children of the Land cover
Dear America cover The Making of a Teenage Service Class cover The Devil's Highway cover
Dirty River cover Domestica cover Enrique's Journey cover Everyday Desistance cover
Evicted cover Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies cover The Girl Who Smiled Beads cover The Girl With Seven Names cover
Good Girls Revolt cover Here We Are cover The Home Place cover Homeward cover
Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers cover In the Country We Love cover The Death and life of Aida Hernandez cover The Line Becomes a River cover
Luther Standing Bear cover My Underground American Dream cover Mukiwa cover Negroland cover
Nickle and Dimed cover No House to Call My Home cover Notes From a Young Black Chef cover One Time One Place cover
The Other Wes Moore cover Queer Rock Love cover Redefining Realness cover Savage Inequalities cover
The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace cover Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down cover There Will Be No Miracles Here cover They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields cover
Travels with Lizbeth cover $2 A Day cover The Undying cover The Ungrateful Refugee cover
Warriors Don't Cry cover What The Eyes Don't See cover With the Old Breed cover The Yellow House cover

Nonfiction Graphic Novels

A.D.New Orleans After the Deluge cover Belonging cover The Best We Could Do cover Good Talk cover
Persepolis cover Poppies of Iraq cover Safe Area Gorazde cover  

Fiction 

Apeirogon cover America is not the Heart book cover An American Marriage cover Americanah cover
Behold the Dreamers cover The Boat People The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night time cover Exit West cover
The Gone Dead cover Gringo Champion cover The Hate U Give cover Home Fire cover
Home Going cover Housegirl cover House of Stone cover The Invention of Wiings cover
A Kind of Freedom cover The Kinship of Secrets cover The Map of Salt and Stars cover Midnight's Children cover
My Part of Her cover On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous cover the other americans cover The Poet X cover
The People Could Fly cover Piecing Me Together cover A Place for Us cover Push cover
Pushing the Bear cover Refuge cover Slash and Burn cover
The Underground Railroad cover Ta Nehisi Coats the Water Dancer cover
Women Dreaming cover    

Science Fiction/Fantasy

Always North cover American War cover Ancillary Justice cover Children of Blood and Bone cover
Clade cover The Deep cover The Dispossessed cover Fierce Femmes Notorious Liars cover
The Fifth Season cover The Forever War cover The Freedom Artist cover
Parable of the Sower cover
The Wall cover
   

Fiction Graphic Novels

Social Analysis/Activism

Afrotopia cover Alice Walker cover As Long as Grass Grows cover Automating Inequality cover
Becoming Ms. Burton cover Becoming Transnational Youth Workers cover Becoming Wise an Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living.cover
Beyonce in Formation cover Biological Exuberance cover Black Wave cover The Body is not an Apology cover
The Boys Crusade cover Can't Stop Won't Stop cover Care Work cover The Casualty Gap cover
The Class Ceiling cover The Closing of the American Mind cover A Disability History of the United States cover Dispossession and the Environment cover
El Norte cover Emergent Strategy cover Race Question cover Erotic Islands cover
Exile and Pride cover Extraodinary Bodies cover Fight of the Century cover For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood book cover
Forgotten Citizens cover Fragile Families cover Good Economics for Hard Times cover Good Muslim Bad Muslim cover
Ghosts in the Schoolyard cover Guest House for Young Widows cover Home and Exile cover
How to Be An Antiracist cover How to Do Nothing cover Hungry Translations cover Hustle and Gig cover
I Put a Spell on You cover The Injustice Never Leaves You cover Jay Z cover
Just Mercy cover Kids at Work cover The Land of Open Graves cover
Last Girl cover Leadership in Turbulent Times cover Light of the Stars cover Medical Apartheid book cover
Memes to Movements cover Mountains Beyond Mountains cover No BS cover Normal Life cover
Notorious RBG cover The Ones We've Been Waiting For cover The Poisoned City cover On Being Included cover
Permanent Record cover Reason in a Dark Time cover Refuge Beyond Reach cover Refugees in Extended Exile cover
A Sand County Almanac cover Salt Sugar Fat cover Secondhand Time cover The Sixth Extinction cover
We Are the Weather cover Smallpox The Death of a Disease cover Soil Not Oil cover Solution Focused Brief Therapy cover
The Social Transformation of American Medicine cover Spoken Soul cover Stamped from the Beginning cover Tethered Fates cover
Trauma Stewardship cover The World May Know cover The Uninhabitable Earth cover Unequal City cover
Until We Are Free cover The Warmth of Other Suns cover Weapons of Math Destruction cover
Where Do We Go From Here cover Who's the Bigot cover Wilmington's Lie cover
Working cover      

Children's Literature 

Great Soybean Picnic cover Bowwow Powwow cover A Differnt Pond cover Dreamers cover
Family Pictures cover Firebird cover Grandpa Cacao cover Islandborn cover
Jack Agyu cover Leila in Saffron cover Black Fish cover My First Book of Haiku Poems cover
My LIfe with the Wave cover The Name Jar cover The Promise cover Sharing Our World cover
Sulwe cover The Three Questions cover Where Are You From cover Windcatcher cover

Featured Book

The Routledge International Handbook of Social Work Education, the most complete compilation of analyses of social work education to date: its key issues, its response to current needs, and its future. 

Genre: Social Analysis