Teaching Justice-Oriented Picturebooks Through Collaborative Discussion and ‘Slow Looking’: Implications for Initial Teacher Education Settings

Abstract

Picturebooks have a long history as literature for literacy learning in initial teacher education (ITE) settings. Yet, the practice of “using” picturebooks solely to teach isolated skills becomes more alarming as pre-service teachers encounter classroom picturebook instruction that features diverse racial, linguistic, or ethnic communities as “plugged” into scripted curriculum without opportunities for students to respond to the socio-cultural portrayals encountered. Guidance for ITE programs is needed to ensure that the aesthetic and sociopolitical features of picturebooks are not only considered but deeply taught to pre-service teachers. Drawing from a qualitative analysis of a fifth-grade reader engaging with a picturebook featuring a character with a similar phenotype across ten days, an inductive and iterative process of data analysis identified salient moments of collaborative discussions and the ‘slow looking’ approaches she used to interact with justice-oriented picturebooks. Our findings highlight the visual, material, and multimodal ways these texts serve as mentor resources for writing and drawing, while also acting as identity-affirming texts. To conclude, we offer essential implications for ITE settings, instructors, and their students by unpacking the significance of instruction that matters most for supporting pre-service teachers as curators of justice-oriented picturebooks.

1. Introduction

As students in Whitney’s fifth-grade classroom were immersed in a collection of linguistically diverse picturebooks, they self-selected picturebooks from the collection to read more closely. One of the students, Jamaila, lifted Yo Soy Muslim (Gonzalez, 2017) to read more closely. After multiple reads, Jamaila leaned on the illustrated narratives featured in Yo Soy Muslim as a mentor text for a self-portrait focused on her life, languages, and literacies. Specifically, the visual depictions of the female lead character in the book offered Jamaila a model for illustrating herself as a young girl of similar phenotype. Having dedicated and focused time to engage in ‘slow looking’ (Pantaleo, 2020) with a picturebook featuring diverse linguistic, racial, and ethnic representation afforded Jamaila the opportunity to both read deeply and affirm her ethnic identity.

Initial teacher education (ITE) instructors and students have much to learn from classrooms like Jamaila’s as they consider the role of picturebooks featuring diverse representation as essential material for the preparation of teachers of diverse sociocultural communities. Children’s picturebook research has already demonstrated the impact that extensive engagement with literature can have on students’ reading and writing (Jerrim & Moss, 2019; Simpson & Cremin, 2022) and how picturebooks with diverse racial, ethnic, linguistic, and cultural representation serve as important identity texts for young readers (Machado & Hartman, 2021; Zapata et al., 2024). Picturebooks also have a history as literature for literacy learning in initial teacher education (ITE) settings (Daly & Blakeney-Williams, 2015; Daly & Short, 2022). Yet, a research–practice divide remains regarding how pre-service teachers share and teach with picturebooks that both support students’ reading/writing development AND offer opportunities for students to leverage their sociocultural resources in the classroom for identity development. In this paper, we offer analysis of one fifth-grade reader, Jamaila, ‘slow looking’ at a picturebook that features a character of similar phenotype, exploring how access to teacher-guided opportunities to collaboratively respond to the visual narratives featured in justice-oriented picturebooks become inclusive literature-based practices that can be implemented in ITE settings and enhance future students’ sense of belonging.

1.1. ITE and Picturebook Research

Research has demonstrated that ITE settings shape pre-service teachers’ literacy practices and self-efficacy as reading and writing teachers (Farrar & Simpson, 2024; Hikida et al., 2019). For example, from their study of primary pre-service teachers involved in two initial teacher educator (ITE) programs in both Scotland and Australia, Farrar and Simpson (2024) found that pre-service teachers (despite different program experiences and contexts) expressed poor confidence in their ability as reading teachers to share literary texts, including picturebooks, and attributed this finding to the increasing shift away from reading from for pleasure in schools. Hikida et al. (2019) similarly found that pre-service teachers expressed uncertainty in their foundational knowledge as literacy educators, including how to use ‘think alouds’ with literature like picturebooks to support reading development. Both studies also point to the significance of increased engagement with children’s literature during their ITE coursework as promising practice to increase reading teacher confidence. Together these studies highlight the developing confidence pre-service teachers share during ITE programs as this relates to teaching literacy through literary texts.

Related research has simultaneously elevated the picturebook as essential material for literacy learning in ITE settings. For example, using semi-structured interviews with eight teacher educators involved in a New Zealand ITE degree program, Daly and Blakeney-Williams (2015) found that picturebooks were utilized for a variety of purposes in teacher education to teach both content and pedagogical knowledge and that teacher educators believed their students benefited significantly from their exposure to the literature. Zambo (2005) similarly found that picturebooks could be shared in ITE courses to help pre-service teachers recall and translate theory into practice and provide a salient pathway to reinforce skills and domains of knowledge among pre-service teachers. Additionally, in the context of programs where they learned about the significance of literature-rich classroom environments, pre-service teachers frequently learned how picturebooks could serve as mentor texts, or literary exemplars, for literacy instruction to nurture students’ reading and writing practices (e.g., Ulusoy, 2019, 2020).

Clearly, picturebooks matter for ITE programs and pre-service teacher learning. A growing body of research has also suggested the importance of picturebooks offering diverse representation and social justice themes as essential text for teacher development, both in ITE settings and among in-service teachers (Daly & Short, 2022; Daly & Kelly-Ware, 2024; Flores et al., 2019; Hammett & Bainbridge, 2009). In their comprehensive review of relevant research examining the role of children’s literature in cultivating pre-service teachers as transformative intellectuals, Flores et al. (2019) highlighted the significance of integrating children’s picturebooks into ITE coursework to broaden pre-service teachers’ understandings of their future students’ sociocultural resources. Daly and Kelly-Ware (2024) similarly found that pre-service teachers’ written responses to picturebooks that featured social justice themes mediated their critical reading of power in picturebooks. Their analysis illustrated how picturebooks were valuable pedagogical texts for supporting teachers’ critical understanding of “diversity, difference, and inclusion necessary to work with diverse students and their families” (p. 10). Hammett and Bainbridge (2009) also found that reading and discussion of picturebooks that featured multiple and diverse representations of Canadians provided robust opportunities for pre-service teachers across different Canadian ITE settings to explore cultural identities and ideologies and how pre-service teachers’ responses to the picturebooks revealed discourses of racism and whiteness. Their analysis illustrated how many of the teachers, in their discussion of the literature, demonstrated color blindness and evasiveness in their assertions of the invisibility of any kind of diversity. Together, these findings offer important implications for ITE programs seeking to prepare teachers as more inclusive educators and confirm the significance of picturebooks with diverse representation as curricular material to do so.

Other relevant research has illustrated the importance of not only exposure but also time and guidance for in-service and pre-service teachers alike to read and respond to picturebooks with diverse representations for critical and transformative discussion. For example, in their six-week study of pre-service teachers’ responses to dual language picturebooks featuring different linguistic practices, Daly and Short (2022) found that pre-service teachers could develop critical language awareness through picturebooks. Specifically, they noted how access and opportunities to investigate the diverse representation of language in the picturebooks nurtured a view of ‘language as a resource’ among the communities featured.

The extant research reviewed highlights not only the promise of picturebooks with diverse representation and social justice themes as salient pedagogical materials for ITE settings, but also the significance of the picturebooks pedagogy itself needed to mediate inclusive classroom learning. Unfortunately, in today’s educational climate, the practice of using picturebooks solely to teach isolated skills is increasingly prevalent. Pre-service teachers are encountering school settings where picturebook reading for pleasure has been limited, and where picturebooks featuring diverse racial, linguistic, or ethnic communities and social justice themes are merely ‘plugged’ into scripted curricula, without opportunities for students to engage with or respond to the sociocultural portrayals presented (Ascenzi-Moreno & Quiñones, 2022; Zapata, 2022). ITE programs and instructors who share picturebooks with diverse representation need guidance to ensure that the aesthetic and sociocultural features of picturebooks are not only considered but deeply taught to school-age readers, writers, and artists. Additionally, further research explorations of picturebook theory and pedagogy are needed for pre-service teachers to not only support reading/writing engagement but also provide spaces for students to affirm their identities. To begin to address this need, we draw on data from Jamaila’s classroom to answer the following research question: What literature-based approaches can ITE settings learn from classrooms like Jamaila’s that can deepen the knowledge and skills needed to teach students to read justice-oriented picturebooks deeply? Findings point to the significance of teacher guidance during immersive and collaborative picturebook experiences and when students apply ‘slow looking’ to justice-oriented picturebooks. These key principles of our analysis are presented as core findings. To provide essential context for the findings, the theoretical framing and methods follow next.

1.2. Theoretical Framing: ‘Slow Looking’ at Justice-Oriented Picturebooks

Children’s literature researcher Kathy Short (2018) has pointed to the saliency of wordless picturebooks as visual storyworlds (or visual narratives), and additional recent research focused on readers’ responses to justice-oriented picturebooks has provided needed findings about visual storyworlds in other picturebooks for critical discussion in the classroom. Specifically, research has noted how readers may experience artistically motivated transformation (Martínez, 2014) when they enter into and interact with a picturebook’s storyworld. Building upon rich picturebook research focused on the synergy of print and illustrated narratives in picturebooks, classroom picturebook researchers have also offered salient findings about how students and their teachers read in pictures and words (e.g., Arizpe, 2021; Martinez et al., 2020; Pantaleo, 2018).

More recently, researchers have also uncovered how the visual narratives in justice-oriented picturebooks portray readers’ racial, linguistic, and ethnic identities in ways that both allow them to visually see themselves and represent their communities and others in the classroom in affirming and inclusive ways (Ascenzi-Moreno & Quiñones, 2022; Piper & Jackson, 2022). Centering visual storyworlds in justice-oriented picturebooks has also proven to be a generative approach to supporting critical discussions (Zapata et al., 2017; Wissman, 2022; Gardner, 2017). Collectively, scholars have concluded that teachers who provided instructional scaffolding to students as they read, respond to visual metaphors, and attune to the semiotic meanings presented throughout the visual storyworlds afforded opportunities for students to respond, interrogate, critique, connect, resist, and appreciate the experiences and critical meanings in justice-oriented picturebooks (Sipe, 2008; Arizpe et al., 2023).

In this paper, we refer to picturebooks as a text form that braids together illustrated and print narratives across a diversity of genres (fictive, poetry, informational) written for young students (Sipe, 2011). Often, picturebooks are written with children in mind; however, picturebooks are often also shared in middle, secondary, and higher education settings due to the ways they access complex themes and issues. We purposefully utilize ‘picturebook’ as one word to convey the aesthetic coherence of a form that integrates both print and visual narratives (and often other modalities). The act of reading picturebooks has been defined as the act of reconciling both illustrated and print narratives by literature scholars (Serafini, 2024; Sipe, 2011). We also build upon the notion of the picturebook as sociopolitical art (Zapata, 2022) and scholarship that points to a justice-oriented turn in children’s literature (Thomas, 2016; Zapata et al., 2023). Drawing on Rosenblatt’s (1969) theory of reading as a transaction and Ching’s (2005) discussion of power in children’s multicultural literature, we define the act of reading children’s picturebooks as an aesthetic and efferent experience that extends beyond the promotion of cultural awareness and sensitivity. Justice-oriented picturebooks, texts that center more ethical and equitable, anti-oppressive representations and resist white, cisgender, ableist, standardizing English norms can nurture students’ positive schooling experiences through story. By using the term ‘justice-oriented picturebooks’, we approach picturebooks featuring diverse representation as sociopolitical art and amplify the aesthetic and socio-political messaging picturebooks offer readers.

Given the significance of visual storyworlds in justice-oriented picturebooks, pre-service teachers should develop pedagogical approaches that consider the significance of the visual narrative. In this paper, we advocate for the pre-service teacher as a picturebook curator (Zapata, 2022; Eeds & Peterson, 1991; Villareal et al., 2015), an educator who provides picturebook readers with guidance as they navigate picturebooks, particularly the visual narratives. Pantaleo (2020) provides guidance for picturebook curators, suggesting picturebooks urge readers to engage in what she calls ‘slow looking’ towards deep reading. Pantaleo unpacks the nuances of the picturebook format, and how and why it requires and rewards ‘slow looking‘ by readers. Her discussion and theorization of ‘slow looking’ is grounded in Tishman’s (2017) work, defining ‘slow looking’ as “taking the time to carefully observe more than meets the eye at first glance” (p. 2). Both Tishman and Pantaleo emphasize ‘slow looking’ as a learned skill and the importance of providing readers both guidance and opportunities for engaging in ‘slow looking’ to develop fluency in visual analysis.

For this analysis, we build upon the theories of visual storyworlds and ‘slow looking’ in applying them to justice-oriented picturebooks, establishing them also as essential and inclusive pedagogy for ITE programs. Throughout the analytical close reading of illustrations, teachers become curators of picturebook storyworlds to support discussion of justice-oriented picturebooks and students’ practices of ‘slow looking’. Drawing from a qualitative analysis of one fifth-grade reader’s response to a picturebook that features a character of similar observable characteristics, or phenotype, and guided by the scholarship on ‘slow looking’ (Pantaleo, 2020), we examine two key principles ITE settings can offer that can deepen the knowledge and skills needed to teach students to read justice-oriented picturebooks effectively.

2. Materials and Methods

To answer the research question “What literature-based approaches can ITE settings learn from classrooms like Jamaila’s that can deepen the knowledge and skills needed to teach students to read justice-oriented picturebooks effectively?”, we draw from a year-long, multi-site qualitative research study. The focused analysis on Jamaila presented in this paper builds upon the ongoing analysis of a larger study focused on how teachers and students read and respond to justice-oriented picturebooks. The participating teachers, including Jamaila’s teacher, and Angie have an ongoing research partnership. Over the previous 4 years, they have met 3–4 times per school year to reflect on their practices as curators of justice-oriented picturebooks. The classroom practices reflected in the data reflect the teacher’s own guided invitations in response to these discussions. Although the teacher provided guided invitations as to how a picturebook could become an artistic mentor text, she challenged her fifth graders to move beyond conventional interactions with a mentor text (i.e., imitation). For example, through immersion experiences with justice-oriented picturebooks (including flooding the room with picturebooks for students’ self-selection), read aloud, modeling noticing and interpreting visual storyworlds, providing opportunities for students to write and make in response to the literature, and intentionally creating opportunities for children to collectively enter discussions, the teacher nurtured classroom conditions for students to collaborate and ‘slow look’ at picturebooks (Zapata, 2023). By collaborative, we mean that the teacher and students worked together towards a shared goal of understanding. It is important to note that ‘slow looking’ was never explicitly named or taught by the teacher but was a practice that emerged among students in response to the classroom literature conditions she nurtured and the ways the teacher encouraged students’ ‘slow looking’ practices (as observed in the data presented in the findings).

2.1. Context and Focus Participant

This article focuses on one student and her teacher in a class of twelve girls and eight boys participating in a larger qualitative research study conducted at Mariposa Elementary School (a pseudonym), near a university in the Midwest United States. Due to the location, many of the school’s families had close ties to the local university, whether as faculty or international graduate students, and many of the students at Mariposa identified as English Language Learners (ELL). This larger study benefited from Mariposa’s racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse student population in examining how elementary students from first-, fourth-, and fifth-grade classrooms engaged in reading and responding to justice-oriented picturebooks featuring topics such as family, immigration, and linguistic diversity.

The focal student, Jamaila (a pseudonym), identifies as a bilingual, Black female who migrated from Northeastern Africa. At the time of this study, she was receiving ELL services for support in her English language development. The teacher identifies as a white, English-speaking female with a commitment to better representation in the literature she shares with students. At the time of data collection, she was completing her tenth year of teaching at Mariposa, with one year of teaching previously completed elsewhere.

2.2. Data Sources and Data Collection

For this study, data were sourced from video observations, field notes, analytic memos, an extensive archive of student artifacts, and transcripts of in-the-moment retrospective interviews with the student (Jamaila) as she read and responded to picturebooks during an intensive 10-day period. Research team members served as participant observers during data collection in this fifth-grade classroom. Audio–video recordings were produced focused on reading and writing (about 2.5 h) during each class period. These video recordings include the teacher’s instructional time, the research team’s interactions with students for follow-up interviews, and students’ independent work. During these follow-up interviews, students were asked to share their reflections and insights regarding their independent work and how they related to or were inspired by the linguistically diverse picturebook that they had self-selected to read. Photographs (approximately 388 photos) of student-created artifacts were also collected and produced an extensive data archive. Field notes were crafted during the class period and refined during reviews of the video recordings. Also incorporated into these field notes were insights gathered from transcripts and field notes from our teacher/researcher collaborative analysis meetings using Corsaro (1984) field note methods. From these robust field notes, analytic memos were crafted to inventory and synthesize data as they related to emerging themes. Collecting multiple data types allowed for greater triangulation in the study and served the analysis.

In total, the research team compiled 388 pages of field notes, comprising 149 pages of analytic memos, approximately 715 min of video recordings over the ten days, and a thick archive of student artifacts such as writer’s notebook entries and photos of artistic creations. Of the data, 25% focused on the focal participant featured in this analysis.

2.3. Analysis

Data collection and analysis were guided by the aforementioned research question. We employed Machado et al.’s (2024) understanding of conducting research with sensitivity to students who are “multiply marginalized by intersecting oppressions (e.g., multilingual students of color)” (Machado et al., 2024, p. 245) to direct methods of care when interacting with students and the pieces of themselves and their knowledge that they shared with us. Thus, we endeavored to create space and prioritize the search for students’ brilliance by acknowledging the researcher–participant power dynamics at play and centering student voices by inviting them to share their experiences and linguistic identities.

To specifically guide our method of data analysis, we used an inductive method across multiple tiers of analysis (Bhattacharya, 2017). We first examined all the data and identified “units of meaning” (Bhattacharya, 2017, p. 150), then grouped these units into categories, which we analyzed for crosscutting patterns and themes. Meanwhile, we kept a record of researcher subjectivities and related our questions and insights to our theoretical and methodological frameworks. First, as part of an ongoing analysis phase, we transcribed each of the video recordings and each read the transcripts to gain greater familiarity with the data. As we read the transcripts, we noted dialogue and interactions that remained salient moments related to our focus on how elementary students engaged with linguistically diverse picturebooks. To follow, these notations were then organized into reflective analytic memos, noting patterns within the data pertaining to these classroom engagements as an additional focused phase of analysis. For this analysis, focused on teacher instruction and student learning, we designed an additional tier of analysis that required an additional examination of our field notes while incorporating attention to the student-created artifacts and the instructional opportunities that mediated them. Through this iterative process, we identified key themes focused on the 10-day focused literature study and organized those themes to highlight how Jamaila engaged with linguistically diverse picturebooks and the significance of the teachers’ thoughtful mediations.

2.4. Research Positionality and Limitations to the Study

The researchers and authors of this article all identify as able-bodied women educators. Angie has years of experience as a bilingual educator in Texas public schools and identifies as the daughter of Peruvian immigrant parents. Sarah taught in a K-3 self-contained special education classroom in an urban public school and identifies as white. Mary taught upper elementary grades at a small parochial school in Virginia and identifies as white. At the time of this study and currently, all three are teacher educators and researchers at higher education institutions in the Midwest United States. Each is committed to engaging in teaching and research focusing on teacher development, especially in leveraging and holding up voices of multiply marginalized students.

Acknowledging that we teach and research from the worldviews that we currently hold, our positions within the study can serve as limitations to the integrity of the data and analysis. We addressed this through ongoing peer debriefing both with the teacher and with one another to address any bias. We acknowledge that the findings presented are specific to this context; however, transferability from qualitative research can allow interested readers to apply findings to similar contexts based on our detailed descriptions of the study context.

3. Presentation of Themes and Findings

To directly address our research questions focused on the literature-based approaches with justice-oriented picturebooks that ITE programs and instructors can take up, we identify two primary themes focused on entering and exploring visual storyworlds. We detail these findings below, focusing on the visual and broader material and multimodal ways that Jamaila read and responded to picturebooks as mentor texts for writing, drawing, and identifying affirmation, and with a focus on essential ‘slow-looking’ pedagogies for ITE programs sharing justice-oriented picturebooks.

3.1. Theme 1: Entering Visual Storyworlds: The Significance of Teacher Guidance During Immersive and Collaborative Picturebook Experiences with Justice-Oriented Picturebooks

Over several weeks in early 2020, Jamaila and her peers participated in a literature exploration that explored how authors and illustrators represent people’s cultural and linguistic identities in picturebooks. As the teacher explained what the literature study would encompass, she introduced her fifth graders to the collection of diverse picturebooks in which they would immerse themselves. Nearly every day during the literature exploration, Jamaila journeyed into the visual storyworlds within the picturebooks through whole-class, small-group, and personal readings and interactions. The wide and varied collection gathered by the teacher to serve this topic fostered Jamaila’s understanding of various sociocultural experiences that were familiar and new to her.

The collection of justice-oriented picturebooks in the literature exploration was intentionally curated to highlight a variety of languages (e.g., Arabic, Spanish, Cherokee) and language varieties (e.g., Black English), as well as stories that highlighted characters’ language experiences (e.g., I’m New Here, O’Brien, 2015). (See Zapata et al., 2024 for more guidance on text selection for this collection). The criteria, focused on representation of diverse linguistic representation, were guided by the inclusion of authentic representations of linguistic diversity; the presence of award-winning titles, authors, and illustrators; and the intention of building a wide and varied collection that would nuance singular narratives of linguistic communities. Although some books mirrored students’ languages and identities, most of the collection served as windows (Bishop, 1990) for Jamaila and her peers. During an interview, Whitney expressed her desire for her fifth graders to visit rich and authentic storyworlds that featured languages and identities that were less familiar to them, so that together, they could negotiate the sociopolitical discourses and issues around language and identity.

Interacting with a justice-oriented picturebook about an unfamiliar community did not preclude students from discovering moments in the storyworld connected to their identities and experiences. On one day of the literature exploration, after an extended period in a book flood experience (See Figure 1) where students self-selected texts from the collection to read, the teacher gathered a small group of students, including Jamaila, to share their observations. One student shared a spread from Just a Minute: A Trickster Tale and Counting Book (Morales, 2003) and her thoughts about the character Grandma Beetle and the Diá de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) holiday in Mexico. The teacher focused students’ attention on Grandma Beetle and how the illustrator had depicted her.

Teacher:

How can you tell [she’s a grandma] if you didn’t read this page or [know] that these are her grandkids?

Jamaila:

All the girls I can tell by their hair. They have the same thickness.

Teacher:

Mmm!

Jamaila:

And so, your mom usually tells you that families pass that, and they have the same skin color. I think.

Teacher:

Yeah. And the fact that they all have the same thickness of hair and color of hair, and their facial features are the same and their skin color is similar to hers, we can infer that they’re family. Now, is that how families always work?

All Girls:

No.

Teacher:

No, but that helps us understand.

Even though she did not share the same racial/ethnic identity as Grandma Beetle and her grandchildren, Jamaila commented during the group discussion on how some mothers explain to their children that oftentimes families inherit similar physical traits, such as hair thickness or skin shade. Through this storyworld connection and the opportunity to engage in collaborative literature discussion guided by the teacher, Jamaila could share her understandings about racial/ethnic identities, which also enabled the teacher to pose a question to disrupt the group’s assumptions (“Is that how families always work?”).

As a complement to the immersive experiences with the collection and collaborative literature discussions, the teacher also presented inquiry questions to develop her fifth graders’ sociocultural understandings about characters’ identities and languages. The questions she posed began broadly, initially asking her students to capture in their writer’s notebook their observations about how language is depicted in a picturebook of their choosing. In response to this invitation, during the book flood experience, Jamaila chose My Very Own Room/Mi Propio Cuartito (Pérez & Gonzalez, 2000). She observed how the main character lives in a two-bedroom house with her parents and five brothers and how she must share a room with her brothers. The teacher guided Jamaila to consider the main character’s language by asking, “If she’s trying to room with her brothers, [the main character’s] register probably changes when she’s talking to them?” Jamaila nodded her head in agreement. Here, the teacher began to deepen Jamaila’s understanding of the relationship between language and family by noting that the main character was likely to switch their register when interacting with her brothers.

Each subsequent day, the focus of the teacher’s inquiry questions became more explicit, which invited her fifth graders to think more deeply about how language and identities were being portrayed in the picturebooks. For instance, after presenting how author Monica Brown and illustrator Sara Palacios depicted Marisol McDonald’s identity of being bilingual in Marisol McDonald Doesn’t Match (Brown & Palacios, 2018), the teacher asked her students to select an illustration from a diverse picturebook where the character’s language or identity does not “match” their own. She pointed out the following:

We’re trying to find pictures that are maybe a little bit different than our identity. Because then, we can look at the things that are a little bit harder to talk about, like where people live and the language they speak that’s different than our own and if their skin color is different than our own. Because we’re kind of taught sometimes to not talk about those things. It’s more respectful to not notice that. … It’s okay to notice that when you’re reading Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut (Barnes, 2017) [to] notice that people are African American in this book and [to] ask myself, “Well, why? Why did the author and illustrator include African American people in this book?” … Sometimes different people are left out of books, or different people are left out of stories … and that’s what we’re going to start asking ourselves, “Why do illustrations look like this? Why does the language sound like this?”

Through this guided invitation to read picturebooks, the teacher explained to her fifth graders how the picturebooks can showcase people’s stories that have been “left out” and how the picturebooks can also give readers a context to talk about identities and aspects of identity that they may have been told were not appropriate to notice or discuss. In response, Jamaila chose to explore the storyworld in Between Us and Abuela: A Family Story from the Border (Perkins, 2019), a story of a Latine family preparing gifts to give to Abuela for Las Posada when they visit her in the enforcement zone between the United States and Mexico. In response to the teacher’s invitation, Jamaila chose to focus on the illustration where the main character, María, decides to make a kite out of her younger brother’s picture for their abuela. In that same scene, a border officer tells them they cannot pass anything through the fence. Jamaila’s choice of illustration responded to Whitney’s provocation to find an identity experience unlike her own and a story that is not typically shared.

The significance of teacher guidance during immersive and collaborative experiences with justice-oriented picturebooks is salient in the data focused on Jamaila. Access to a book flood composed of a wide and varied collection provided an immersive experience where she could self-select texts, provided foundational reading opportunities to explore storyworlds that were both similar and different to her own life, and was made possible by the teachers’ preparation and guidance. The opportunity to share and discuss her observations from her reading were enhanced by the teacher’s invitation to focus on exploring new experiences and how linguistic diversity was featured in the picturebook. Clearly, access to justice-oriented picturebooks is significant across the data; what this inductive analysis of Jamaila’s reading and picturebook discussions also reveal is that teachers’ thoughtful and explicit instructional mediations can serve to amplify both students’ personal connections to the texts and explorations of sociocultural diversity featured in justice-oriented picturebooks.

3.2. Theme Two: Exploring Visual Storyworlds: Engaging in ‘Slow Looking’ Across Modes of Meaning

In addition to thinking about and describing how authors and illustrators represent a character’s cultural and linguistic identities in a diverse picturebook, the teacher challenged her fifth-grade students to consider how they would represent someone’s language and identity as writers and illustrators. It was common for the teacher to position her students as picturebook makers during their reading from the collection. For example, the teacher asked her students, “How would I <as a picturebook maker> represent someone’s language and identity?” and “Why would I represent language and identity this way?” By asking students to read linguistically diverse picturebooks from the perspective of a writer and artist, the teacher was positioning students to engage in ‘slow looking’ with the picturebook illustrations, not just the print, and to consider the way visual and print narratives worked together to portray a linguistically diverse community.

Jamaila frequently thought from the position of an artist and writer when reading from the collection of picturebooks and when discussing themes of linguistic diversity related to the study. For example, Jamaila and her peers participated in a “Shoes Clues” discussion activity in which they visualized a person who might be wearing a pair of shoes displayed on the SmartBoard. In response to an image of athletic shoes, Jamaila wrote, “A teenager who’s like outgoing and says stuff like “Yo” or [likes] basketball.” During a whole class discussion of the images, she went on to comment, “If I was going to put [the shoes] on a real person, it would be like the one we read in Yo, Jo! (Isadora, 2007). I think the people who were dancing in the street.” The teacher had previously read aloud the picturebook Yo, Jo! at the start of the literature exploration, and now Jamaila imagined characters from the picturebook wearing the featured athletic shoes. Yo, Jo! (Isadora, 2007) features the joyful language of a young boy’s interactions with people he encounters in his linguistically and racially diverse neighborhood community. Jamaila’s transactions with this picturebook and the invitation to reflect on the relationship between language and identity fostered her social imagination (Wissman, 2022) to envision potential storyworlds for characters based on sociocultural aspects of their identities.

Jamaila was able to deepen her exploration of language and identity through the collection of picturebooks, from which she self-selected one with which to engage in ‘slow looking’. After a week of free reading from the book flood, Jamaila self-selected one text to read deeply and to ‘slow look’ at as a mentor text for her self-portrait. As an extension of the literature exploration focused on picturebooks’ representations of languages and identities, the teacher had invited the fifth graders to experiment with a range of materials and media and to seek out picturebooks to use as mentor texts as they began to visually craft their self-portraits.

To facilitate the drawing of her face, Jamaila turned to the illustration of the female protagonist on the cover of Yo Soy Muslim (Gonzalez, 2017) as her self-selected mentor text. Yo Soy Muslim is a picturebook featuring Mark Gonzalez’s poetry and Merkdokt Amini’s illustrations. As an illustrated poem to his daughter, Gonzalez’s prose lovingly calls his daughter to take pride in who she is despite those who may question her belonging. A young girl is visually featured throughout the picturebook as a primary character of distinct ethnic and racial descent with specific physical markers including a smooth round face, large almond-shaped eyes, a darker skin shade, and textured hair. Jamaila returned to this text across many days, ‘slow looking’ at the details of the visual storyworld. When it came time to begin her self-portrait, Jamaila focused on the daughter’s nose in Yo Soy Muslim as she sketched her own nose on paper. During this process of slow-looking, Jamaila also paired her reading of the picturebook with a photograph of herself on a classroom iPad and utilized both visuals as models for her self-portrait. As the teacher circulated among her students, she stopped to confer with students, including Jamaila, who wondered if it was okay to replicate technique used by the artist to illustrate the daughter’s nose. Their conversation went as follows:

Jamaila:

Can I … do the nose like she did? [She touches the illustrator’s name on the cover of the book.]

Teacher:

Okay. Do you see your nose in that picture?

Jamaila:

Yeah.

Teacher:

Let’s see. [Whitney holds the book up next to a picture of Jamaila on her iPad.]

Jamaila:

Her nose [pointing to the daughter’s nose] is more bent down, as you can see. Mine is like this.

Teacher:

So, yours is maybe going to be a little more rounded than bent.

Jamaila:

Mmm hmm. …

Teacher:

Yeah. That’s such a good detail to think about. … We’ll put them [the book and the iPad] physically next to each other so you have one location to look. It’s hard to look at two places.

When characterizing the physical aspects of her own identities, Jamaila sought out an authentic representation of an illustrated female character with a similar phenotype. The availability of the picturebooks as well as the repeated opportunities to engage in ‘slow looking’ regarding characters’ language and identities forged a space in which Jamaila could attend to her own unique features regarding her ethnic identity and physical attributes. Jamaila adopted not only illustrated but also digital modes of visual literacy to develop her composition. The freedom to engage in ‘slow looking’ and craft across these modes of meaning only served to deepen her extended engagement of self-study and identify an illustrator to guide her through the crafting of a self-portrait that she believed accurately portrayed her (See Figure 2).

In the day that followed this experience, the teacher highlighted Jamaila’s engagement with Yo Soy Muslim (Gonzalez, 2017) with the class.

Teacher:

[Jamaila] started comparing her nose [that] she found on the cover.

Jamaila:

[nods head]

Teacher:

[holds up the book] An example that she thought was kind of similar to her. Would you agree?

Jamaila:

Mmm hmm. [nods head]

Teacher:

She used the illustrations as a mentor to help her draw herself. … She has the way another illustrator, another artist would show eyes, or the nose and lips. And here’s what I saw when I was walking past Jamaila. She is trying to look at that nose so closely and then she’s actually touching her face and looking at how her nose is made.

Teacher:

Does it look exactly like this? [Holds the book next to Jamaila’s face.] Okay, what do you think? Is that exactly Jamaila’s nose?

Class:

No. But it’s really close.

Teacher:

It’s close. And what did we notice about [the daughter’s] nose [that is] different from yours?

Jamaila:

[The daughter’s] is bigger and wider and mine is more like not as wide.

Teacher:

She realized, “Okay. I could draw it sort of like this, but I need to change it up just a bit”. So that it looks more like your nose. But to do that she looked at an artist and she also looked at herself.

Here, the teacher shared with her fifth-grade class how Jamaila leveraged the artwork in a justice-oriented picturebook to draw an authentic self-portrait. She remarked how Jamaila’s process did not involve using the cover as a visual reference but that Jamaila engaged in ‘slow looking’ by touching and tracing her face as she studied the daughter’s nose. This embodied ‘slow looking’ across the picturebook and her own face helped Jamaila to determine the physical differences between the daughter’s nose and her own nose. It is important to note that the teacher and students were able to engage in this discussion in a sensitive and inclusive manner given the community of mutual respect that was already established among Jamaila, her peers, and the teacher.

To support her students in the design of their self-portraits, Whitney encouraged her students to emulate Jamaila’s approach of ‘slow looking’ at the illustrations featured in picturebooks as they crafted their own self-portraits.

Teacher: So, today what you could do, and it might work, and it might not, but if you’re looking at yourself and you’re thinking, “Okay, how do I get my nose and lips just right? How do I get my skin shade just right?” Then maybe you could also look on our table for picturebooks and or an artist that has a similar style to you, a similar language to you, a similar nose to you that you want to use as a mentor, or you want to use as an example? … Jamaila used the cover of Yo Soy Muslim because she noticed that “Oh! That kind of looks like my nose … and maybe I need to change it a little bit.”

Although the teacher describes how a picturebook could become an artistic mentor text, she challenged her fifth graders to move beyond conventional student interactions with a mentor text (i.e., imitation). She emphasized the need for a more complex, focused, and creative engagement that entails not only attending to artists’ styles and how they portray people’s physical features, such as skin shade, but to also consider how it can be refined and shifted to serve their own compositions. If Jamaila had duplicated the daughter’s nose in Yo Soy Muslim precisely, she would not have authentically represented her own identities in her self-portrait. Instead, Jamaila used her observations from ‘slow looking’ at the illustration, paired them with her observations from the digital photograph, and refined a design to serve her own self-portrait. What resulted from the ‘slow looking’ is a more demanding meaning-making process that not only deepened her reading and composing practice but also affirmed her identity and physical attributes.

4. Implications for Teacher Education

These findings offer conceptual and practical approaches to prepare teachers to guide students through not only picturebooks understood broadly, but more specifically justice-oriented picturebooks in ITE settings. As presented and interpreted in the findings, building wide and varied collections that students can access and self-select from; facilitating immersive picturebooks experiences like book floods; providing explicit inquiry questions that focus on a sociocultural-focused theme; and inviting students to notice, share, and discuss personal connections and difference are just some of the forms of exemplar guidance ITE programs can consider. Additionally, these literature-based approaches become essential practice to counter the limitations pre-service teachers may encounter in scripted classroom curriculums.

For this analysis, we emphasize collaborative discussions and ‘slow looking’ as essential pedagogical approaches for pre-service teachers sharing justice-oriented picturebooks. At the heart of ‘slow looking’ work is careful and close observation and interrogation of the visual storyworld, and collaborative discussions serve as a foundation upon which these literature explorations float. In Jamaila’s classroom, we observed how significant it was that the teacher took a position as an inclusive picturebook curator who provided guidance, feedback, and time for students to collaboratively discuss and engage in ‘slow looking’ regarding their encounters with justice-oriented picturebooks. For example, as featured in the data, Jamaila’s robust engagement with justice-oriented picturebooks were a result of not only Jamaila’s personal connections and interests in the visual storyworld but also an outcome of her teacher’s thoughtful planning (which included collaborative discussion with students) and responsive guidance. Specifically, we point to the significance of the immersion experiences with justice-oriented picturebooks (including flooding the room with picturebooks for students to self-select from), the teacher’s facilitation of discussion of justice-oriented picturebooks, and the opportunities for students to write and make in response to the literature. Without these approaches, students’ reading of justice-oriented picturebooks would not have nurtured the learning conditions needed for students like Jamaila to self-select and build upon identity-affirming picturebooks.

To conclude, we offer the implications of this work that apply to ITE settings by unpacking the significance of literature-based approaches for supporting ITE teachers as inclusive picturebook curators. Broadly, it is important that ITE programs and their instructors embrace justice-oriented picturebook illustrations and visual storyworlds as essential material for instruction and inclusive practice. ITE settings can also launch pre-service teachers’ journeys as inclusive picturebook curators using the following strategies:

• Offering access, exemplars of practice (such as those presented in this paper), and immersive experiences with justice-oriented picturebooks;
• Supporting conditions of reading that nurture slow looking at justice-oriented picturebooks;
• Nurturing the practice of reading justice-oriented picturebooks as picturebook makers who examine and collaboratively discuss the sociocultural features observed.

We emphasize the significance of not only access to justice-oriented picturebooks but also pre-service teachers’ access to exemplary models of instruction with these texts. For example, although Jamaila had access to a robust collection of justice-oriented picturebooks, the teachers’ guided invitations and responsiveness to Jamaila’s engagement with picturebooks enhanced and deepened her experiences with the literature. Jamaila’s teacher also valued and encouraged ‘slow looking’ at justice-oriented picturebooks over time, championing and highlighting Jamaila’s ‘slow looking’ approach as effective reading practice for her peers to follow. The teacher also supported students’ reading of justice-oriented picturebooks as picturebook makers, nudging Jamaila to read from the stance of an artist and author, notice the sociocultural features of the text, and self-select picturebooks as mentor models and as identity texts. Pre-service teachers’ access to such models provides important foundations for their future teaching of justice-oriented picturebooks.

Learning from Jamaila and her teacher provides needed insights and next steps into the significance of justice-oriented picturebooks as salient texts for inclusive classroom environments and the pedagogical ‘how’ of sharing these texts in instruction. As discussed in the literature review, in ITE settings, pre-service teachers frequently learn how mentor texts, or literary exemplars, are pedagogical texts that elementary teachers can share in their ELA instruction to nurture students’ reading and writing practices. They similarly learn the importance of rich literature environments in their courses, thus helping pre-service teachers to understand that the literature approaches we implement and value have the potential to nurture the learning conditions that produce students’ robust engagement with justice-oriented picturebooks. By reclaiming children’s picturebooks as sociopolitical art and amplifying the importance of inclusive picturebook instruction, pre-service teachers can deepen the significance and the promise of justice-oriented picturebook instruction as teaching that can be both instructive for learning and affirming of students’ identities in schools. As observed in the findings, opportunities to receive justice-oriented picturebooks as art to collaboratively discuss and as identity text models to learn from as picturebooks makers are just two specific pedagogies that have implications for ITE courses to integrate.

The research presented in this manuscript positions the reading of justice-oriented picturebooks as an act of responding to depictions of racial, linguistic, and cultural diversity in the written and illustrated narratives and embraces the teacher as a picturebook curator with the power to enhance or dampen inclusive picturebook reading in the classroom. Through collaborative opportunities to respond to texts and classroom conditions that cultivate ‘slow looking’ practices among students, pre-service teachers can curate rich and inclusive classroom learning experiences with justice-oriented picturebooks. Nurturing pre-service teachers as classroom picturebook curators requires ITE programs and their instructors to focus on providing pedagogical guidance on how to collaboratively discuss and ‘slow look’ at visual narratives in justice-oriented picturebooks through an inclusive lens. Doing so will prevent the shallow reading of justice-oriented picturebooks and cultivate an inclusive learning environment for future students.

Ethics

Participation in this research study and data collection was voluntary, and a pseudonym or general pronoun is in place of the school, teacher, and student names to protect anonymity. Any specific identifying features associated with Jamaila were not included in this paper, and the analysis represents the collective experiences and collaboration of the research team. To bring an additional level of rigor and systematicity to the study, we utilized qualitative methodological strategies such as the triangulation of data from numerous sources, peer debriefing with colleagues, reflexivity in acknowledging researcher bias, and ensuring transparency in data collection and analysis (Thomas, 2016). To help ensure that we considered ethical commitments, we gained approval for this human subject research through our institution’s review board (Approval No: 2006950, University of Missouri).