Promoting Children's Critical Thinking Using Parody Stories

• In Event: 25.041 - Young Children's Cognition, Play, and Learning Experience

Abstract

Critical literacy serves as an important instructional method to help students think critically. Parody stories are considered to be a useful vehicle for critical thinking because they provide opportunities to pose problems and challenge stereotypes in the text. Using a qualitative case study approach, this study explored how a critical literacy approach helped children’s critical thinking and challenge social norms and stereotypes through literary discussions on parody stories. 20 five-year-old Korean children and their teacher participated. Findings suggest that parody story reading and discussion helped children foster children’s perception of the story from different perspectives, and challenge dominant social norms and stereotypes. How critical literacy practice using parody can be implemented more meaningfully in early childhood classroom is discussed.

Authors

• Su-Jeong Wee, Purdue University Northwest

• Kyoung Jin Kim, Wheelock College