Undergraduates’ Critical Media Analysis of Picturebooks about Immigration

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 11:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Exploring Diversity in Play in Children's Storytelling

Abstract

In this presentation, I will share data collected from my undergraduate education course titled “Immigration and the Diaspora in Education”. I 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 them. Participants used a set of Critical Media Analysis (CMA) questions to guide their analyses of four picturebooks and respond either orally or 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.

Author

• Audrey Lucero, University of Oregon