# Rudine Sims Bishop

Rudine Sims Bishop, professor emerita at Ohio State University, has been referred to as the "mother of" multicultural children's literature for her sociologically groundbreaking American children's literature research.

## Biography

Bishop was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, about a hundred miles northwest of Philadelphia. The public schools in her community were not racially segregated, though Bishop noted that professional opportunities were limited for African Americans at the time. One area open to her was teaching.
After graduating from Pottsville Area High School, Bishop attended West Chester State Teachers College, which is now West Chester University. She completed her master's degree in education from the University of Pennsylvania. She later obtained her doctorate from Wayne State University in Detroit.
She taught elementary school for a few years. At the college and university level, Bishop taught reading, curriculum development, and children's literature at Morgan State College in Baltimore, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the State University of New York at Buffalo and Ohio State University, where Bishop specialized in children's literature, particularly African American children's literature.
Bishop has credited a few influences on her evolving work around multicultural children's literature. The first influence came when one of her freshman college roommates, Patricia Grasty Gaines, introduced her to Marguerite de Angeli's Bright April (1946), the first children's book Bishop read with characters that looked and experienced community life similar to her own. The next memorable occasion happened while Bishop was a graduate student at Wayne State University. Here she first encountered a large collection of African American children's literature. The Detroit Free Press sponsored an annual book fair. In November 1969, Dr. Donald Bissett of Wayne State's Children's Literature Center, coordinated a display of 40+ children's books featuring African Americans at the fair. The display was called "The Darker Brother Collection" after the Langston Hughes poem, I, Too. Bishop later recalled, "...it was the first time I had seen so many children's books about African Americans together in one place. I remember wanting to read them all, see what they were like, what sorts of topics and themes were dealt with, and how African Americans were represented. That was one of the threads that eventually led to my interest in multicultural literature..." The final influence came from Bishop's work as a graduate research assistant to Wayne State professor Ken Goodman, who was also her advisor. Bishop and others assisted Goodman in his reading miscue analysis research. The analysis examines when an observed response in the reading process does not match the expected response. The research recorded children in states as diverse as Mississippi, Maine and Hawaii reading two different stories, including one identified as "culturally relevant". Bishop recalled, "...[w]hen we examined the miscues and the retellings, we observed that when there were differences between the kids' performances on the two stories, they did better on the 'culturally relevant' stories. So one conclusion is that what children read makes a difference."
Bishop's 1982 book, Shadow and Substance, established a framework for analyzing children's literature about people of color, and remains a standard in the field. Bishop examined 150 contemporary fiction books that included African American characters. She categorized the books into three distinct areas: Social Conscience, Melting Pot, and Culturally Conscious books.