Rudine Sims Bishop Quotes

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created or recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of a larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books.

Whilst acknowledging that 'good literature reaches across cultural and ethnic borders to touch us all as human', she (Rudine Sims Biship) argues that books can act as both mirrors and windows for children. 'Windows' offer us a chance to look closely at a view of the world we may not have previously seen. Those windows might take us out to escapist fantasy or provide a view of lives we have not previously seen. These are notions familiar and vital to writers, teachers and those of us who care about stories. But Sims Bishop adds that books might also mirror our lives in some aspects and that children from the dominant culture tend to have books as mirrors whilst children who have been historically 'ignored - or worse ridiculed' do not, and this communicates important messages about the extent in which they are growing up'. Recognising that a window can be a barrier, Sims Bishop later added the idea of the sliding glass door as 'a way to suggest that a book can offer.. a lived experience for a reader'.