Dr. Pomerantz applied for and was awarded a Whiting Foundation fellowship to support five days at the International Youth Library in Munich, Germany for the further development of her graduate course Literature for Children. The project goals are to: 1) identify, evaluate and collect high quality international children’s literature to promote intercultural understanding, 2) explore pre-service and in-service teachers’ attitudes towards these books and topics, and 3) increase teachers’ knowledge and use of international children’s books, particularly those that can broaden children’s views of the world and present stories in ways that demand complex, inferential thinking.
The International Youth Library (IYI) was founded in 1949 by Jella Lepman, a Jewish author and journalist who left Germany during the Nazi period and returned to help children and youth traumatized by the war. Lepman believed children’s books could be a way to build bridges between nations that had been in conflict during the war and develop tolerance and empathy. Lepman wrote: “Let us begin with the children to slowly straighten out this utterly confused world. The children will show the adults the way” (http://www.ijb.de/en/about-us/iyl-history.html). The IYI collects children’s literature from around the globe in order to foster inter-cultural understanding. The first and largest youth library in the world, it now contains over half a million books in 130 languages and the collection spans four hundred years.
The Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation awards fellowships to New England professors “to study abroad or at some location or locations other than that with which they are most closely associated. The aim is to stimulate and broaden the minds of teachers so as to improve and enhance the quality of their instruction.”