Journal of Literary Education. 2021. No. 04

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https://hdl.handle.net/10550/115145

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Making Tutorial Films on Picture Books in Teacher Education
(2021) Bjørlo, Berit Westergaard; Johnsrud, Ellen Birgitte
In this article we analyze two films about picturebooks, made in student-led groups in a children’s literature course at university level. We also investigate the self-assessments the students wrote. The assignment was designed to explore specific Norwegian picturebooks, in this case Snill (What a girl!) by Gro Dahle and Svein Nyhus and Garmanns hemmelighet (Garmann’s secret) by Stian Hole. Our aim is to highlight ways this assignment expanded the students’ knowledge on picturebooks and literature didactics. For this purpose, we build upon picturebook theory, theories on multimodality and theories on collaborative learning processes. Our findings support results and ideas in other studies on how to use and produce multimodal artefacts and digitized media in collaborative learning contexts (Jewitt, 2006; Jewitt, 2013; Kress & Selander, 2011; Selander, 2015), and studies on the potential of collaborative teaching and learning processes, and of students’ self-assessments (Alexander, 2017). Both films present and discuss the interplay between words and images in ways that demonstrate solid knowledge of picturebook theory. The analyses also indicate that this kind of film-making project may foster a high degree of student engagement suited to achieve in-depth knowledge on topics within the field of children’s literature.
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Representation of Racial Diversity in Picturebooks in Teacher Education Programs in the Republic of Croatia
(2021) Butković, Matea; Vidović, Ester
In the Republic of Croatia, the importance of intercultural education and competence-oriented curricula has gained momentum in the last decade, with children’s literature being perceived as an invaluable source of intercultural learning and a fruitful tool for an exploration of global cultural diversity. Given that empirical data indicate the importance of children’s age for selecting age-appropriate intervention methods that would help combat discriminatory and prejudicial views, especially during the period between early and late childhood, this paper explores the choice of authors and picturebook titles taught in children’s literary courses at six Croatian Faculties of Teacher Education (Rijeka, Pula, Zagreb, Osijek, Zadar, and Split) with the aim to determine how university instructors interpret multicultural children’s literature and to which extent their syllabi accentuate the potential of picturebooks in fostering future pre-school and elementary-school teachers’ intercultural competence. The findings indicate a misalignment between the objectives of intercultural education and the racial and ethnic representation of authors and their characters, especially protagonists. Furthermore, intercultural competence is not a major learning objective in the analyzed university syllabi. The choice of authors and picturebooks indicates a clear preference for white North American and European authors and white characters and protagonists. These findings highlight the need for teacher-educators, i.e., university instructors, to rethink the nature of their learning objectives and study content and to expand their reading lists with more diverse voices that challenge the traditional models that have historically left many ethnic groups misrepresented, under-represented, or fully omitted from school and university curricula.
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Green Dialogues and Digital Collaboration on Nonfiction Children’s Literature
(2021) Campagnaro, Marnie; Goga, Nina
Contemporary children’s literature has developed a growing interest in the interconnectedness between humans and the environment and in the ongoing exchange and negotiation of ways to be in the world. These new directions in children’s literature consequently challenge teachers of children’s literature in higher education. The study of contemporary children’s literature needs not only to be informed by new theoretical perspectives like ecocriticism, posthumanism and new materialism, but also to revisit, develop and explore the methodological tools and teaching practices necessary to prepare students to address these demanding issues. The aim of the article is to present and discuss the research question: How is it possible to secure scholarly dialogue and practical collaboration in an academic course on nonfiction children’s literature and environmental issues? Building on a cross-disciplinary theoretical framework consisting of theory of nonfiction, ecocriticism, dialogic teaching, environmental architecture and place-based teaching, the study reports on a pilot course which took place in the summer of 2020. Due to the pandemic situation the course became digital. Hence the digital challenges and possibilities turned out to be a critical aspect of the planned practical collaboration between students, teachers and students and teachers. The main goal of the course was to help motivate students to engage in and negotiate about nonfiction children’s literature and sustainability, to enhance their aesthetic experiences and to foster their environmental consciousness through children’s literature. The course was characterized by its alternating blending of lectures and hands-on experiences with theoretical and methodological tools as well as nature or culture specific places.
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Teaching Children’s Literature Online: Co-constructing Stories in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)
(2021) Daly, Nicola; Forbes, Dianne
Most scholarship on teaching children’s literature has focused on teaching fiction in university literature courses (Bedford & Albright, 2011; Butler, 2006). While there is a vast literature associated with online teaching dating back more than 20 years (e.g., Palloff & Pratt, 2005), and there is increasing use of online teaching in university contexts (Rapanta et al., 2020), there are very few published descriptions or analyses of the online teaching of children’s literature. In this article we document and discuss the development of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) to be delivered in mid-2021 focusing on picturebooks developed at a university, in partnership with a popular MOOC provider. The MOOC development is analysed with respect to supporting the presence of the educators, creating clarity in the delivery of the content, providing spaces for reflection and interaction, and generating human connections in an online environment. These features are linked to the notion of storytelling (Bietti, Tilston & Bangerter, 2019). The contribution of picturebooks to supporting these aspects of effective online teaching is also discussed.
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Interactive Storytelling through LEDs and Paper Circuits: Tapping into Materials and Technology in Children’s Literature Education
(2021) Dinç, Betül Gaye; Özkan, Birce; Veryeri Alaca, Ilgım
How can interactive technology enhance children’s literature? How can new materials and technology be incorporated into courses on children’s literature at university level feeding upon the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)? What is the best way to embed new materials such as paper circuits into a children’s narrative? This article offers a review of an experiment conducted at a liberal arts college where students were provided the theoretical and practice-based knowledge for designing children’s picturebooks, then asked to introduce circuit technology to their picturebook design. The upper-level course admitted students from across a range of disciplines, such as computer science, psychology, literature, medicine, and media and visual arts, which resulted in lively exchanges between them. Regardless of their strengths, students participated in the hands-on workshop supported by a designer and the course instructor to learn about electric circuits, copper tape, and LEDs, and seek ways to adapt them into the page structure and the narrative sequence. They explored how to fuse light into text and image so as to tell a story and facilitate engagement in a children’s book. This study builds upon the Maker Movement and borrows technology from HCI, fusing the two movements into children’s books. As such, students were asked to assess the potential uses of HCI technology in art and design, book arts and seek ways to apply those technologies to enrich children’s engagement during reading. Students revealed that this endeavour motivated them to think creatively as they explored ways to transform children’s literature. Thus, the course brought theory and practice together with electric circuits to offer a novel way to contemplate children’s literature.
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The Three Robbers in Three Languages: Exploring a Multilingual Picturebook with Bilingual Student Teachers
(2021) Hartmann, Esa Christine; Hélot, Christine
This study investigates translingual and multimodal teaching strategies in the context of multilingual literacy acquisition within a bilingual education program in France. It is based on a research project carried out at the Graduate School of Education of the University of Strasbourg, during the academic year 2017-2018. The purpose of our research is to analyze the student teachers’ representations and attitudes towards multilingual picturebooks, and to lead them to explore the pedagogical affordances of interlingual and intersemiotic mediation in the context of a multilingual reading project, built around the trilingual edition of Tomi Ungerer’s The Three Robbers. The qualitative analysis of the student teachers’ discourses allows us to discuss how translingual and multimodal activities give rise to a new pedagogical approach to literacy with young readers, specifically in a bilingual education context, and explain how picturebooks can foster integrated, multimodal, and translingual learning, as well as the development of biliteracy and metalinguistic awareness.
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Student Teachers and Kindergarten Children Talking about Picturebooks Focusing School in Didactic Research Labs at University
(2021) Hoffmann, Jeanette
As part of the project “Lehren, Lernen und Forschen in Werkstätten” (Teaching, Learning and Researching in Laboratories) from 2016 to 2019, seminars on German language and literature didactics were held at the “Lern- und Forschungswerkstatt Grundschule” (LuFo, Primary Education Research Lab) at the Technische Universität (TU) of Dresden. The seminars, which were attended by student primary school teachers, dealt with telling stories using wordless picturebooks, reading aloud picturebooks about school or other topics. The student teachers dealt with selected picturebooks from the perspective of literature didactics, visual literacy studies and empirical research on reading engagement. They designed didactic arrangements (different kinds of didactically based activities by students with children in a literary-aesthetic context) following the principles of inquiry-based learning and invited kindergarten and primary school children to the LuFo to explore the stories told in the picturebooks together. The study is based on the student teachers' seminar papers in which they describe their projects, give didactic reasons for the selection of literature and analyse their interactions with the children around the picturebooks. Using the example of picturebooks about school, the study uses Key Incident Analysis to ask which books the student teachers chose and how they read them, how they talked to and interacted with the children about them and how they shaped the reading situations. Finally, they asked how they reflected on their own learning processes. The results give an insight into both the processes of reflection of the primary school student teachers and the processes of literary learning of the children.
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Teaching Picturebooks in First Year Literature Courses
(2021) Morris-O’Connor, Danielle A.
In many universities, first year literature courses are required for students in a wide variety of programs, including arts and sciences. These courses are generally focused on teaching transferable skills and strategies, such as critical analysis, essay writing, and research. This article argues that picturebooks are an exceptional teaching tool for these broadly focused first-year courses, because they quickly engage students as learners, encourage participation, and open students to new approaches of critically reading texts while challenging their assumptions and personal biases about children’s literature. Examples of picturebooks, secondary sources, class discussion, and group work activities used in first year literature courses are shared, along with students’ responses to these approaches. The article ends with an explanation of a short, low-stakes assignment that instructors can assign students to help build essential skills with picturebooks, and exercises to do around picturebooks to work on critical thinking skills. Picturebooks are often perceived as being simple and only for children, but many picturebooks are layered texts that make great teaching tools for any literature course.
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Introducing Critical Literacy to Pre-Service English Teachers through Fairy Tales
(2021) Novianti, Nita
The need for a more critical approach to EFL teaching and learning is undeniable, yet little has been done to prepare teachers for teaching with this approach. This article reports one of the cycles on my action research study, involving a teacher educator and 35 pre-service English teachers. Together with the teacher educator, a unit on critical literacy was developed using fairy tales as the core text. In the unit, we introduced pre-service teachers to critical literacy through the critical reading, analysis, and rewriting of fairy tales for social transformation. They were assigned to rewrite a fairy tale as a form of social action and to reflect on the choices made in the rewriting process. The re-written fairy tales and the accompanying reflection essay were analysed using a rubric adapted from the four dimensions of critical literacy (Lewison et al., 2002). The re-written fairy tales and the reflections suggest the pre-service teachers’ growing understanding of the non-neutrality of text, ability to read from a different perspective and offer an alternative one, and ability to identify socio-political issues, such as stereotypes, and to subvert them.
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Engaging the Social Imagination in the College Classroom Through Radiant Readings of Global Picturebooks
(2021) Panaou, Petros
Building on Kelly Wissman’s (2019) work, the article describes and analyzes artifacts from the author’s college children’s literature class, during which students read radiantly: in ways that may take them outside of themselves, their realities, and points of view, “like rays emitting from the sun, to seek out alternative perspectives, new directions, and unique pathways” (p. 16). The analysis of these collected student artifacts is guided by Wissman’s understanding of the social imagination as the capacity of a reader to imagine “the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of others” as well as “to invent visions of what should be and what might be” (p. 15). It also builds on the theoretical framework developed by Kathy Short (2019) in relation to the social responsibility that needs to be practiced and cultivated by those involved in the creating, teaching, and reading of global children’s literature. Nurturing reading as an act of creativity and fostering dialogic inquiry around global picturebooks is shown to be quite effective in engaging college students’ social imagination. The author brings evidence from the prompts and artifacts that supports this effectiveness, demonstrating the different ways in which students were able to read Two White Rabbits (2015) and The Arrival (2007) radiantly. The prompts that were designed for these immigration-themed picturebooks were successful in nurturing reading as an act of creativity and fostering dialogic inquiry, and thus succeeded in engaging the students’ social imagination. A main reason behind their success was that, by design, they required readers to use their imagination and creativity as well as pay close attention to the picturebooks’ visual aesthetics in order to fill in the gaps. Another important reason behind the students’ radiant readings was the selection of these specific picturebooks, which fit Jessica Whitelaw’s (2017) definition of disquieting picturebooks as they encourage their readers to embrace unfamiliarity and discomfort.
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Teaching with Children’s Literature in Initial Teacher Education: Developing Equitable Literacy Pedagogy through Talk about Books
(2021) Simpson, Alyson
Teaching about children’s literature in pre-service teacher education is quite rare, even though research shows it is crucial for teachers to be good at teaching reading as well as being committed readers (Commeyras et al., 2003; Cremin et al., 2009). Emphasis on the reading process can sideline the importance of talking about quality literature to engage students in reading (Simpson, 2016). I have positioned the role of talk about books as a core part of the undergraduate program that I coordinate. In this way, the pre-service teachers of this study were alerted about the ‘fiction effect’ (Jerrim & Moss, 2019), which shows extended reading of literature has potential to improve reading skills for all students. The paper explores how an initial teacher education course in Australia partnered with local schools to create interactions between school children and pre-service teachers talking about children’s literature. A dialogic approach to learning (Alexander, 2020) was adopted to teaching pre-service teachers to develop equitable literacy pedagogy working with children’s literature. Equity was used as a guiding principle to ensure pre-service teachers would provide children of all backgrounds and abilities the same opportunities to read literary texts. During their education program, the pre-service teachers received letters from school children who wrote about their reading preferences. The letters were discussed for evidence of reading habits and new books were sought as recommendations for children to read. By considering their own reading identities, pre-service teachers collectively developed their knowledge about children’s literature as they developed knowledge of literacy pedagogy. The scaffolding of habits of noticing through iterative discussion (Simpson et al., 2020) helped the pre-service teachers learn about their students, learn from their students, and encouraged them to take a more holistic view of the teaching of reading.
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‘Once Upon Many Times Little Red Riding Hood’: Introducing Contemporary Children’s Literature to Senior Learners
(2021) Fernández de Gamboa Vázquez, Karla; Etxaniz, Xabier
Inspired by the idea of Lifelong Education, the University of the Basque Country decided to open its academic program to senior learners, creating the ‘Experience Classroom’ College. This college, aimed at people over 55 who are not currently working, offers a specific Degree in Human Sciences. One of the compulsory courses of this four-year degree is ‘Language and Literature’. The aim of this paper is to present the short-term project to teach children’s literature conducted in that course, in which we presented senior learners with a general overview of how the production of children’s literature has changed over recent decades. To do so, we analysed the intergenerational classic tale of the Little Red Riding Hood and compared its contemporary retellings. We chose this fairy tale since it is part of a global narrative tradition that has been reinterpreted throughout the history of children's literature according to the social, moral, and literary concerns of each moment. After concluding that most of the learners only knew the Brothers Grimm’s versions of the tale, we read both the Perrault and the Brothers Grimm versions and discussed their differences. In the subsequent lessons we brought 25 diverse contemporary retellings of the fairy tale including picturebooks, silent books, illustrated books, comics and verses. The chosen retellings enabled interesting discussions about psychological characterisation, social criticism, humour and parody, and visual codes concerning narrative and semantics. Ultimately, exploration of this book selection revealed to the senior learners the ways in which postmodern trends have become features that characterise contemporary children’s literature.
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“I Don’t Really Have a Reason to Read Children’s Literature”: Enquiring into Primary Student Teachers’ Knowledge of Children’s Literature
(2021) Farrar, Jennifer
Research into in-service teachers’ knowledge of children’s literature indicates there is a powerfully symbiotic relationship between teachers’ perceptions and projections of themselves as readers and students’ engagement with reading as a pleasurable activity (Commeyras et al., 2003; Cremin et al 2014). Less is known about pre-service teachers’ knowledge of children’s literature or their attitudes towards reading and the Scottish context is unexplored in this regard. Inspired by and aligned with the work of Cremin et al. (2008) with in-service primary teachers in England, this project investigated the personal reading habits of more than 150 student teachers over a two-year period by capturing snapshots of their knowledge of children’s literature and perceptions of themselves as not only readers, but as readers of children’s literature, at various stages of their initial teacher education. Framed by understandings of literacy practices as socially and locally constructed (Barton & Hamilton, 1998) and of literate identities as fluid, contingent and plural (Moje et al., 2009), this paper also outlines how project findings linked to knowledge of texts for children and reader identity have informed the teaching and learning of children’s literature at university level.
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Editorial: Teaching Children’s Literature in the University: New Perspectives and Challenges for the Future
(2021) Campagnaro, Marnie; Daly, Nicola; Short, Kathy G.
Children’s literature is an area of frequent scholarship, reflecting its influential position in telling stories, developing literacy, and sharing knowledge in many cultures. At its best, children’s literature is transformative in the lives of children and their adult reading companions, and as such plays an important role in society. Indeed, in the last several decades, children’s literature has become an important focus of teaching and research in centres for literature and literary criticism, education, and library/information sciences in universities across the world. Much has been written about the historical undervaluing of children’s literature and research in this area (e.g., Nikolajeva, 2016). While there is considerable literature concerning the teaching of children’s literature in primary and secondary classrooms (e.g., Bland & Lütge, 2012; Arizpe & Styles, 2016; Ommundsen et al., 2021), there has been relatively little scholarship on the pedagogy involved in teaching children’s literature in a university setting with two notable exceptions. Teaching Children’s Fiction edited by Robert Butler (2006) presents eight chapters by experienced children’s literature teachers and scholars, mostly from Britain, concerning intellectual and educational traditions in children’s literature studies and teaching, sharing and discussion of teaching practices, and providing resources for teachers in this field. A Master Class in Children’s Literature, edited by April Bedford and Lettie Albright (2011), offers chapters in which children’s literature professors from across the United States of America share and reflect on their practice in relation to the structures of children’s literature courses, the characteristics and elements of children’s literature, and future trends and challenges in the teaching of children’s literature.

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