Hi everyone, today I would like to share with you a really interesting article I read about the book “Nicolás tiene dos papás”.
Yesterday I read an article at the page of “Anatarambana literatura infantil” about a book that last days was a cause of lots of controversies, the book is “Nicolás tiene dos papás” which translated into English is “Nicolás has two dads”. It is a Chilean book which, taking into account the huge sells numbers will appear in many schools, in the book we can see a very simple story of a boy who lives with his two dads, and they are a really happy family, the whole story is based in very simple sentences and images related with the pictures.
First of all I thought that the critics would focus on the idea of the family of Nicolás (of course the book received some hard critics from the religious institutions) but lots of the negative critics were based on another point, the literacy content. In the article I read the author criticizes the book not because he consider that the content was inappropriate, but just because if speaking about words, the book doesn´t offer too much, the author consider that the book is the perfect example of a book which idea of the content is quite good, but its literature value is terrible.
Is true that the history of Nicolás is a very minimalistic and poor in words creation, maybe the authors should focus not only on writing books with goods values like family values or a book that promotes respect to all the people but also it should offer some stories, some action and emotions, some relation between the different situations and words that the pupils will learn while reading the book.
My surprise and the interesting point of the article is the recommendation of another book about the same topic called ¡En familia! Written by Alexandra Maxeiner and Anke Kuhl. The difference between this book and the previous one is huge, “¡En Familia!” is also a simple book but it shows some real social situations, uses more sentences and makes the students to learn real facts about the different types of families and the differences between them.
I would like to know your opinion about this article and also to share some links about the topic with you.
Link to the online version of the book: http://www.movilh.cl/documentacion/nicolas-tiene-dos-papas.html
The article link: http://anatarambana.blogspot.com.es/2014/11/nicolas-tiene-dos-papas.html
An article that recommends another book about the different types of families: http://anatarambana.blogspot.com.es/2013/09/libro-recomendado-en-familia-de.html
Hi Krzysztof! Congrats for your post, from my point of view, the ideas that you shared with us are really interesting.
It is quite easy to appreciate that over the past twenty years our society has changed a lot. More in detail, and as a consequence of this variation, also families have diversified, that is, their structures have varied. Nowadays, there are lot of different families. Because of that, as teachers, we cannot just bear in mind traditional families (those ones composed by a father, a mother and kids) . Surely, our future students will belong to many different families, and they need to feel identified with the examples that the school teach to them and also to understand that there are not just one right option. In order to teach values such as diversity and respect to each other, features like these ones can be decisive.
Literature can be a great tool to carry on these kind of aims. However, as you showed us, although there are lot of books that deals with this concrete topic, some of them have a really poor literature component. I do not think that children will learn of situations so neutral and idealistic that “Nicolás has two dads!” describes.
In our subject, we have known English literature authors such as Marc Brown (Azu, Rocío and Cristina presented him) that also deals with this theme but in a realistic and empathic way. Besides, he presents a high level of literature in their works. An example is “Dinosaurs Divorce (a guide for changing families)”, where the author tries to take into account the most important consequences of this familiar aspect, in order to help children in this crucial point of their life.
Definitively, the propose of all of these books is fantastic, but the way some of them transmit contents should change completely.