Undergraduate Education Majors’ Critical Encounters With Picturebooks About Immigration

• In Event: A Critical Critique of Cultural Representations in Children’s Picture Books

Abstract

In this presentation, we will share data collected from an undergraduate education course titled “Immigration and the Diaspora in Education”. We analyzed assignments designed to give students a supported opportunity to critically engage with picturebooks representing both historical and contemporary migration to the U.S., and to consider how immigrants – and the experience of migration – were represented in these books. Participants used a set of critical literacy questions to guide their analyses of four picturebooks and respond in writing. Through these “critical encounters” with books written for children, students engaged in text analysis that held potential for them to interrogate the representations of immigrants that children are exposed to through picturebooks.

Authors

• Audrey Lucero, University of Oregon

• Bradley Sullivan, University of Oregon