"What Do You Think the Author Was Trying to Tell Us?" Examining Educators' Critical Read-Alouds in Elementary Classrooms

• In Event: Amplifying Early Childhood Educator Voices With an Equity Lens

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
Multicultural picture books are ripe with opportunities for educators to teach students how to be active agents in analyzing messages through critical discussions. Not all teachers, however, feel prepared to facilitate critical conversations that involve topics like race, gender, class, or ability status. This study aimed to understand how pre-K—Grade 2 educators participating in a professional development (PD) series use read alouds of multicultural picture books to talk about historically marginalized dimensions of social identity.
Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
This study was guided by the four dimensions of critical literacy (Lewison et al., 2002): disrupting the commonplace (i.e., seeing the everyday through new lenses), interrogating multiple viewpoints (i.e., counter narratives), focusing on sociopolitical issues (i.e., unequal power relationships), and taking action and promoting social justice. These dimensions demonstrate the breadth of approaches to critical literacy instruction.
Empirically, teaching from a critical literacy perspective involves learners as active agents in deconstructing and reconstructing language to understand how the voices of individuals from particular backgrounds are amplified or silenced (e.g., Raible & Irizarry, 2007; Vasquez, 2001). Examining teachers’ language use with multicultural picture books can highlight how they support children to become aware of injustice and value social diversity.
Methods
Eleven urban elementary educators participated in ten 90-minute PD sessions throughout the 2021–2022 academic year. Sessions included collaborative reflections on instruction with, critical analyses of, and collaborative read aloud lesson planning in grade-based groups with different types of multicultural picture books. Alongside their PD participation, educators submitted videos of their read alouds with students.
Data sources
This study draws on six submitted critical read aloud videos (~15 minutes) from three educators across the fall and spring: a first-grade teacher, a dual language teacher, and a special educator.
Results

Educators use questioning as the primary strategy to talk about historically marginalized dimensions of social identity. Their critical questioning strategy involved presenting alternative viewpoints and ways of being. Furthermore, how marginalized social identities appeared in the book appeared to inform how educators presented alternative viewpoints. For example, when a character experienced discrimination because his family could not afford the newest shoes, Educator 1 asked students to put themselves in the character’s position by using both concrete and hypothetical examples to simulate what it feels like to be left out. When a book depicted but did not explicitly address class, Educator 2 drew students’ attention to the book’s illustrations to highlight similarities and differences among experiences without attaching judgment or value to these observations. Table 1 shows how Educator 3 drew on character and student preferences as a way to build empathy for an autistic student. These findings suggest that educators embed questioning strategies within their knowledge of their students and multicultural picture books to facilitate critical literacy conversations.
Scholarly significance
This study investigates educators’ questioning strategies during read alouds to interrogate the experiences of characters from historically marginalized backgrounds. The study expands our understanding of educators’ critical literacy instruction as an evolving social practice. This work is relevant to early care and education teachers who educate increasingly diverse student populations.

Author

• Shana E. Rochester, Child Trends
  Presenting Author