Insider/Ousider debate

I believe the insider outsider debate is an interesting topic to discuss being a future teacher. On the one hand, I believe that the best kind of book to have in my classroom would be a book written by an insider's perspective. My mom used to always say to me, "You don't know what it feels like until you are in that person's shoes". Most often, being the insider you have experienced first hand what you are writing about and have created a story to educate others about. The knowledge an insider is sharing can be trusted to the average reader because it was part of their culture and lifestyle growing up. The tone and language used in the story sometimes even feels more authentic coming for an author who is an insider. An insider will create real illustrations in their books and not the "fake" "stereotype" drawings. To think about it logically, it is much easier to tell someone a story about yourself then to tell a story about someone that you heard about. More often than not, the story that you tell about someone else will get altered every time you tell it.

However, on the other hand I do not think it is wrong for an outsider to write a story either. I believe that if they research what they are writing about thoroughly then that outside author can create a story which appears to be very authentic and accurate. By doing this research, an outsider can create these "real" illustrations, and not the "fake" "stereotypical" ones. The outsider just needs to make sure that they are not making a story that give a false sense to its readers. It is not fair to the children/teenagers/adults who are reading the story to lie to them and given them a false portrayal of what they are reading about. If outsiders continue to write books that misrepresent what they are writing about, then as a society, we are going to continue to receive false information.

As future teachers, we need to make sure every book that we have in our classroom is a good story to have our students reading. I know when I was growing up, I read many books that now seem so inaccurate to me. I do not want my students getting these false impressions.

I would like to explore more children's books authors who are insiders and outsiders. I would like to compare books written about the same things with these authors and see their strengths and weaknesses of their writing and illustrations.