(Re)Storying Obama: An Examination of Recently Published Informational Texts

American publishers have published numerous children’s books about Barack Obama over the past several years; most take the form of informational biographies. This article reports on a research project aimed at how these books incorporate sociohistorical narratives, particularly those related to the civil rights movement. Though the features of the books might cause the reader to presume political neutrality, the books link readers to distinct Discourses (Gee, 1996), suggesting particular ideologies. In this article, we identified the following differences: (1) specific happenings from Obama’s life were included in some texts while omitted in others; (2) when the events were included, how they were framed differed; and (3) the narrative constructions of the events varied. We use the differences amongst these texts to argue for the importance of critical literacy in elementary classrooms. Laura A. May, Assistant Professor at Georgia State University, researches the texts teachers use in classroom literacy instruction, the classroom interactions that surround them, and how these two areas relate to teacher preparation. e-mail: [email protected] Teri Holbrook, Assistant Professor at Georgia State University, studies multiple literacies, technology, writing pedagogy, and the socio-cultural construction of learning disabilities. Laura E. Meyers, Assistant Professor at Georgia State University, studies social studies education, teacher development practices, cross-cultural immersion experiences, and children’s literature as it relates to literacy and social studies instruction. During the 2008 presidential campaign, a pre-service teacher in one of our university courses reported a complaint by the school media specialist at his field placement. While publishers were making available a growing number of books for children about Barack Obama, the librarian was having difficulty finding a comparable number of books about John McCain. Her interest in appearing nonpartisan was limiting the number of presidential campaign books she ordered. As we began examining the children’s books about Obama, we thought about how difficult the media specialist’s job must be. The books appeared similar; as nonfiction, they presented a seemingly neutral and factual account of the soon-to-be president’s life. We wondered: How would teachers, media specialists, parents, and caregivers make their purchasing selections? As we thought more deeply about the situation, other questions arose: Amid the plethora of ‘‘facts’’ publicly available about historical figures, what conditions might lead authors to make decisions about which ones to include? Given the critical literacy stance that literacy is never neutral, how is neutrality portrayed in biographies for children, and how might presumed neutralities be disrupted? Are there underlying discourses informing authors’ positions and decision-making, and how might adult readers understand and respond to those discourses to better guide children as they engage in these texts? American publishers produced more than 20 children’s books about Barack Obama between 2006 and the first months of 2009. As the calendar months pass, this number increases; at the time this article was written, the number had risen to more than 50. In our current times of fast capitalism (Agger, 1989; Gee, 2000), publishers must be nimble and quick to respond to market trends (Taxel, 2002). The speed with which these books have been published makes us pause. As U.S. citizens build our collective memory (Wertsch, 2002) of this historic figure, it is important to think critically about which stories we tell, which Discourses (Gee, 1996) we work from, and who benefits from the versions presented. In other words, there’s no such thing as a neutral text. All texts draw on stories that have taken place within specific sociohistorical contexts working from particular ideological understandings. As consumers and citizens, we must think critically about the books we offer to our children. This work is especially important given general recognition of Obama as the first U.S. African American president (though even this general recognition is not shared by all Americans) and the potential ways in which his story will be taken up and used by different Discourse communities. Barack Obama’s ability to make his own story public—and thus help shape the biographical record about him—has been exceptional. He has written two memoirs (2004, 2006) and spoken often about his personal history. Additionally, Obama has been a part of the daily news, the topic of several biographies written for adults, and the object of significant pundit analysis from both traditional sources of commentary and the emerging blogosphere, all collectively influenced to various degrees by his autobiographical works. But, as we learned from Bruner (1987/2004), there are multiple ways to ‘‘story’’ a person, and multiple ways for a person to story his autobiography. When someone tells a story from his own life, he is not recounting an exact record of events. Rather, he is socially constructing or (re)interpreting what happened. He selects which parts to tell, how to portray those parts, which parts to leave out, etc. Therefore, an autobiographical account (oral or written) cannot be presented as a direct representation (Bruner, 1987/2004). All cultures develop narratives that become part of their collective memory, and these narratives undergo challenges and revisions as multiple viewpoints and perspectives push back against conventional tellings. As the first African American president, Obama’s story undeniably will become part of the collective memory of the United States, affecting, among other understandings, how Americans conceptualize the development of civil rights in their country. But the history of the African American civil rights movement as a narrative project is a contested discourse. Williamson (2006) argued that cultural understandings of the civil rights movement rely on the ‘‘different frameworks [available] to tell the story of the black freedom struggle’’ (p. 39). She described conventional narratives [or meta-narratives (Banks, 2001)] as those that emphasized a ‘‘top–down’’ view of the political struggle in which national organizations led by prominent figures worked within receptive legal and political infrastructures to bring about change. Challenging these narratives are revisionists who have brought attention to local and grassroots organizations that engaged in lengthy and dangerous resistance against white racism and a reluctant and tepid federal apparatus. The differences in these two narratives are important, Williamson maintained, because conventional narratives support the notion ‘‘that moral suasion, normative and institutionalized routes to social reform’’ are the only options, ignoring the unruly, ongoing, and often violent activism necessary to advance equity in the face of an entrenched and self-serving status quo. Furthermore, she posited that, in spite of important differences within and among scholarly work on this historical event, one ideological position— or to use Bruner’s term, ‘‘story’’—predominates in texts provided by schools: conventional narratives. In many ways, this preponderance is problematic because ‘‘[b]y telling part of the story and leaving other parts of the story out, meta-narratives suggest not only that some parts of the story don’t count, but that some parts don’t even exist’’ (Banks,