Children's Digital and Visual Responses to Social Justice Picture Books in a Third-Grade Classroom

• In Event: 66.085 - Multimodal Methods and Meanings: Expanding Critical Understandings of Students' Lifeworlds Through Visual Artifacts

Abstract

When children critically engage with picturebooks that include diverse perspectives and center on social justice, they are able to “challenge, confront, disrupt misconceptions, untruths, and stereotypes that lead to or exacerbate structural inequality and discrimination” (Nieto, 2013, p. 21). These perspectives are fostered as readers experience and relate to others, their cultures, and their languages. In addition, the synergistic relationship between images and text encourage readers to articulate insightful interpretations (Sipe, 2008).
The purpose of this presentation is to explore what happens when third grade students use digital and visual tools in response to children’s picturebooks about critical social issues. Using data from a third-grade classroom where students engaged in interactive readalouds and responded using visual and digital tools, this study considers the social practices and power relations within responses (Rowsell & Pahl, 2007). The primary question of this research study is: In a third-grade classroom, how do children use visual strategies to respond to social justice picturebooks? Using qualitative methods of participant-observation and descriptive analysis, we documented children’s visual and digital responses to interactive readalouds. Data were generated from classroom sessions that incorporated interactive readalouds as well as students’ annotated visual images, sketches, and digital responses which included videos, photos, annotated images, and comments using the web-based tool Seesaw.
Data was analyzed using critical visual methodologies (Rose, 2016). From our process of analysis, the following themes emerged:
1. Personal connections- Students often responded by connecting personally with the text, such as to the book I’m New Here (O’Brien, 2014), about students who were excluded by classmates in the classroom. One students drew a picture and recorded a message that, “I would go up to her and ask her what is wrong…What I would do is I would make sure Fatima is okay… She looks beautiful - in and out. I love to be kind.”
2. Inserting self into text – Using digital tools, students visually inserted themselves into the stories and showed how their lives relate to the stories that they had read. For instance, several students drew their family into the book En Mi Familia (Garza, 2000) because several of the scenes that depicted family events were relatable to them.
3. Expanding texts using social, cultural, and linguistic resources – Students used digital tools to retell and redesign texts. For instance, we observed students pair up and record multilingual versions of stories using their native languages.
Encouraging responses in the classroom, particularly combining visual, digital, and linguistic modes, is one way educators have encouraged more expansive approaches for learning, thus creating more inclusive classroom contexts (Author & Colleague, 2016; Author, 2015). Interactive readalouds with multimodal responses can provide expansive options for engaging with stories and can “theorize and examine the possibilities of leveraging students’ linguistic repertoires as pedagogical resources” (Author, p. 366). From this perspective, educators can leverage both monolingual and multilingual students’ linguistic repertoires, which in turn prepare students as readers to develop linguistic flexibility and respond to rapid changes across linguistically and culturally complex contexts.

Authors

• Angela Michelle Wiseman, North Carolina State University

• Nermin Vehabovic, North Carolina State University

• Ashley Ann Atkinson, North Carolina State University