Sixty seven secondary students from two kindergarten through grade twelve schools participated in this study, which explores the value of using picture books in secondary classrooms. Students unanimous support suggests that including picture books in secondary classrooms has far reaching impacts for the teacher and learner as it presents reasons…

Canadian multicultural picturebooks greatly influence both children's and educators' being and becoming. Identity is closely related to our engagement with literacy practices. In this article, two researchers who immigrated from mainland China engage in autobiographical narrative inquiry, a methodology that asks the researchers to self-face, and…

In this essay, I reflect on my lived experiences as a girl child growing up in my home country of Botswana, and also as a mother in a foreign country, Canada. I am experimenting with my personal essay and making connections with academic articles that will help me understand my behaviors, attitudes, and responses to challenging situations that…

Participation in a classroom-based study provided Grade 4 students with multiple opportunities to develop their visual meaning-making skills and competences, as well as their aesthetic understanding of and critical thinking about multimodal ensembles. Intentionally-designed instruction during the multifaceted research included a variety of…

In this article, the authors focus on children's and adults' analyses and interpretations of the artwork and design of Peter Brown's "Mr. Tiger Goes Wild." Sipe (2008b) noted how the body of research on "children's visual meaning making from picturebooks" would benefit from "more studies combining careful and theoretically…

Teacher educators and field placement supervisors in early childhood teacher education (ECTE) programs aid their students in learning a specific repertoire of tools and skills, including pedagogical tools they can mobilize in their future practice. However, these tools reify abstract notions about how to teach young children that are consistent…

Considering the arts model as a tool for promoting awareness, understanding, and support for people with autism and developmental disabilities, this paper discusses stories as a measure of societal thinking as well as a vehicle for societal change. The author's dual perspectives are shared as a researcher of books for children and young adults, as…

Research Findings: Prior research indicates that shared book reading is an effective method for teaching biological concepts to young children. Adult questioning during reading enhances children's comprehension. We investigated whether adult prompting during the reading of an electronic book enhanced children's understanding of a biological…

During two multifaceted, classroom-based research projects, Grade 7 students had opportunities to develop their understanding of metafictive devices and art and design elements by reading a selection of picturebooks and graphic novels. The students also had the opportunity to apply their knowledge and create their own multimodal print texts. This…

Picture books can be used to teach children to infer, hypothesise, question, identify, explain and compare. By making the "invisible visible" preservice teachers in Canada explored ways to enhance the development of critical science and literacy skills through the creation of picture books in collaboration with students in Grades 5 and…

In the spring of 2008, the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat of the Ontario Ministry of Education in Canada released a DVD that was one in a series designed to train literacy teachers in what the Ministry referred to as "high-yield" comprehension strategies. Using the lens of Critical Race Theory, this article analyses the picture book…

This paper draws on early data from a cross-Canada research project in which researchers at six Faculties of Education have been engaged in introducing picture books with multiple and diverse representations of Canadians to classes of pre-service teachers, inviting them to explore the pedagogical possibilities of the picture books and to discuss…