Racialized Depictions of Literacy Events: An Analysis of 100 Children's Picture Books

• In Event: 70.065 - Roundtable Session 27
  In Roundtable Session: 70.065-5 - Rethinking Normative Literacy, Literacy Practices, and Research on Literacy

Abstract

Sharing a picture book is widely believed to socialize children into valued literacy practices and dispositions. These texts may also feature depictions of literacy practices as narrative elements. It is therefore relevant to consider how these depictions signal who can participate in literacy and under what circumstances. This project sought to determine patterns of racialized representation through content analysis of a corpus of 100 children’s picture books sourced from a community library. Two kinds of literacy events were examined: shared book reading and shared storytelling, representing print literacy and oral literacy respectively. Clear racialized patterns were found. People of Colour were under-represented in depictions of shared book reading and over-represented in depictions of shared oral storytelling.

Author

• Sue Mary Nichols, University of South Australia