rticipate in questioning content. When dealing with real-world problem solving it is usual to find absolute right answers, but you can come up with some better than others. One needs to recognize the problem, formulate a question, collect data, and arrive at an acceptable answer to the problem.Often educators and teacher-librarians are admonished to avoid resources of a stereotypical type and to acquire materials reflective of cultural diversity. Promoting information literacy is a pedagogical approach that can effectively combat the entrenchment of stereotypes of Native Peoples, by assisting students in developing critical thinking skills, and thus enabling them to do problem-solving, decision-making, and creative thinking. It is imperative the teacher librarian actually promote critical thinking about popular representations of Native People and about information resources that purport to depict Native peoples and issues. The necessity for using informational literacy to separate multicultural "fact from fiction" is well illustrated with examples from literature and media. An example is Tom Sawyer, the book, when Injun Joe is portrayed as the bad guy.The reality is that librarians are unlikely to pull classics from the shelves because of the inclusion of racial/ethnic stereotypes, and intellectual freedom stances cannot be downgraded. However, another reality is that classics are born everyday, and are not necessarily an improvement over older works. Consider for instance, the book, Indian in the cupboard (Banks, 1980), which has been soundly trounced by Native librarians. The other reality is that even if every pre-high school librarian acquired sensitive rewrites of the classics, young adults will eventually discover the unexpurgated versions. Moreover, there is no way that students in a multimedia world are going to avoid contact with stereotypes about ethnicity. Reruns on T. V. and such as older versions because they have ...
