Developing Children's Critical Thinking through Picturebooks

A guide for primary and early years students and teachers

Mary Roche

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317642664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This accessible text will show students and class teachers how they can enable their pupils to become critical thinkers through the medium of picturebooks. By introducing children to the notion of making-meaning together through thinking and discussion, Roche focuses on carefully chosen picturebooks as a stimulus for discussion, and shows how they can constitute an accessible, multimodal resource for adding to literacy skills, while at the same time developing in pupils a far wider range of literary understanding.

By allowing time for thinking about and digesting the pictures as well as the text, and then engaging pupils in classroom discussion, this book highlights a powerful means of developing children's oral language ability, critical thinking, and visual literacy, while also acting as a rich resource for developing children's literary understanding. Throughout, Roche provides rich data and examples from real classroom practice.

This book also provides an overview of recent international research on doing 'interactive read alouds', on what critical literacy means, on what critical thinking means and on picturebooks themselves.

Lecturers on teacher education courses for early years or primary levels, classroom teachers, pre-service education students, and all those interested in promoting critical engagement and dialogue about literature will find this an engaging and very insightful text.

Chapter 1

‘Critical Thinking and Book Talk’

The ‘why’ factor

Narrowing visions of literacy

As pressure mounts to improve ‘learning outcomes’ in literacy and numeracy, there is a danger that the notion of literacy may narrow to ‘decoding’ and ‘encoding’, and the teaching of discrete sets of skills and competencies. Or that the idea of ‘engagement with literature’ may narrow to teaching ‘comprehension strategies’ such as inference and prediction. Or that a focus on devices such as plot, setting, characters and theme will suffice as bases for developing literary ‘meaning-making’ in children. These are all important aspects of literacy. But we must not stop there. The ‘Critical Thinking and Book Talk’ (CT&BT) (Roche 2010) approach, using carefully chosen picturebooks as stimuli for thinking, engagement and discussion, can constitute an accessible, multimodal resource for adding to these skills, while at the same time developing a far wider range of literary understanding than focusing solely on those skills permits.

When I first began trying to create a democratic educational experience for my pupils by using more dialogic pedagogies, my aim was to create the kind of classroom where, as Leland et al. (2005) describe,

…children expand their understandings of the purposes of literacy and begin to see how literacy relates to their interactions with others. The instructional approaches and the culture that children experience in these settings play a major role in shaping their emerging identities as cultural and literate beings.

(p 258)

This necessitated that I first become critical and I now believe that my best teachers were the children I worked with, along with my own reflections and theorising of what was happening as I struggled with ideas of critical literacy. As I became more critical I also realised how texts position readers. Janks (2010) states that all texts are positioned and positioning in that all texts work to position their readers. The ideal reader then, from the point of view of the writer (or speaker), Janks says, ‘is the one who buys into the text and its meanings’.

They are positioned by the writer’s points of view, and the linguistic (and other semiotic) choices made by the writer are designed to produce effects that position the reader. We can play with the word ‘design’ by saying that texts have designs on us as readers, listeners or viewers. They entice us into their way of seeing and understanding the world into their version of reality.

(Janks op.cit. p 61)

If texts position readers, I realised, then surely literacy pedagogies can also serve to position learner-readers. Leland et al. (2005, citing Comber 2003 p 13) suggest that, as early as preschool, children are acquiring qualitatively different repertoires of literacy practice. ‘While some children are involved in communicative practices that engage them in production, analysis, and response, others appear to be experiencing “piecemeal recycled literacies of replication and repetition”’ (Comber op. cit.). Leland et al. (op. cit.) state that common activities in the latter group ‘include filling in blanks, copying letters or words, and coloring in pictures’. This is problematic, they say, because it means that ‘some children are beginning their academic careers with a limited and ultimately dysfunctional view of what literacy is for and what it can do in the world’ (Leland et al. 2005 p 259).

What infant teacher among us has not at some point worried about the mindless prescription of workbooks that often accompany literacy textbooks: workbooks that are less about literacy and more about keeping children quiet? I know of several schools where the staff members have collectively decided to stop using commercially produced workbooks and have instead devised their own approaches to formative assessment and literacy skills consolidation. Children in these schools are not judged by how neatly they can ‘stay inside the lines’ or join dots, or connect cats to kittens with crayon lines. They are not positioned as passive consumers whose only choice is, perhaps, deciding what colours to use. Children in these schools are seen as active agents in their own learning.

If children can be thus positioned as different kinds of literate beings by the pedagogies they encounter, what about the teachers? Having been a teacher for many years I saw how ‘basal’ reading texts and their accompanying regurgitative-style workbooks could interrupt and ultimately stultify reading for pleasure. By basal texts I mean the kinds of textbooks that are generated by school book publishers and linked to the English curriculum content. In Janks’ (op. cit.) language we can ask ‘How do such texts position teachers?’ In my own case I saw how such programmes can contribute to reducing teachers to mere technicians delivering other people’s ideas. For example, ‘teacher-proof’ manuals often accompany these commercial basal reading schemes: manuals where even the teacher’s questions are decided in advance and where there seems to be no place for children’s questions; manuals where ‘activities’ for the children are designed by someone who does not know their different talents; manuals where comprehension is reduced to often meaningless regurgitation. And in each class that I taught during the early part of my career I recognised children who were like the little reader I had been, who had read their textbooks during the summer holidays as soon as they were bought, and who then sat in class, frustrated and bored in equal measure, as these same texts were ploughed through relentlessly, line by line. Occasionally some new insights were developed but not often enough to create any kind of learning excitement. Discussion, in the classrooms in which I was a pupil, was a non-event. We passively imbibed the teachers’/textbook designers’ ‘standard one-right answers’ and kept our own gradually dwindling ideas to ourselves. Our teachers were deeply committed and professional but transmission pedagogy prevailed.

However, as I developed as a teacher, I also saw the opposite. As one who used picturebooks for enjoyment and as springboards for discussion, I saw how a whole classroom could be animated in sharing ideas and learning from each other, practising what Littleton and Mercer (2013) call ‘interthinking’. I could see the learning taking place; the recognition in the eyes, the buzz of excitement and engagement. I could take advantage of such ‘light bulb’ moments – teaching moments. And often I could see myself learning too, about the book, yes, but also about the people who populated my classrooms and whom I got to know and love as individuals through hearing them think out loud. It was what led me to develop Critical Thinking and Book Talk.

I am not advocating that we mount white chargers and launch a crusade against basal reading schemes. I am not suggesting that we stop teaching reading skills such as phonics either. I would hope that after reading this book you might be persuaded to make space in your classrooms, potential classrooms, libraries, nurseries or homes for good quality picturebooks. Even more importantly – I am hoping that you will make space for discussing these books with your children.

In a Guardian newspaper report entitled ‘Children missing out on the joys of a good book’ (Brown, 7 July 2013, p 14) Maggie Brown states that ‘82% of [250] teachers blame the government’s “target-driven” education policies for the fact that fewer children are reading for pleasure. Two-thirds of the teachers polled said they lacked time in the school day to introduce a variety of books and saw this as a ‘’major barrier to being able to develop a love of reading’’’. The reasons why fewer children may be reading for pleasure are many and complex, but interactive reading, such as will be explained later in the CT&BT approach, might go some small way towards addressing this problem.

A simple enough process

• That story was so cool! Let’s do it again. (George, aged 3)

• Thinking is a bit like swimming because it takes you a while to get good at it but soon you can go deeper. (Marlee, aged 9)

• I knew I was really getting good at thinking cos I could see loads of different ideas. Like, normally, you’d never do that kind of thinking by yourself – but it really happens when we all tell our thoughts and give each other ideas. (Heidi, aged 10)

• I was a bit cynical when you started the philosophy tutorial by showing us Once Upon an Ordinary School Day but afterwards at lunch everyone at our table was talking about it and we were amazed at how a children’s storybook opened up all kinds of discussions about the whole complexity of education – like what constitutes ‘ordinary’ in teaching and learning. (Ruth, a student teacher, Year 1 undergraduate)

• You have no idea what you’ve started! My whole family has been continuously debating what The Wolf [Barbelet 1992] represents since we discussed it at our workshop last Wednesday. (Deirdre, teacher with several years’ experience)

These quotes represent a cross section of responses from people who have been exposed to the ‘Critical Thinking and Book Talk’ approach to reading picturebooks together and discussing them. I think you’ll agree that enjoyment and engagement are evident. On the surface it is a simple enough approach: all you need is a good picturebook and a child or a group of children who can see the pictures and hear the story. The discussion will be prompted by a question from the adult, who is a participant in the process, or by questions the book has raised for the children. In a classroom situation, the children take turns democratically in sharing ideas, agreeing or disagreeing respectfully with each other and with the teacher. It will obviously be a less formal process at home.

It certainly seems simple. As the quotes above show, student teachers seem to ‘get’ it. Children of all ages seem to enjoy it. Many teachers seem instinctively to recognise the common sense of this dialogic practice. But while they support the idea conceptually, especially when shown videos of classes engaged in dialogue, many teachers say that they lack specific knowledge about suitable ‘good’ books, and more general knowledge about critical thinking, questioning and leading discussions. Most confess they know little or nothing about decoding images. Throughout my many years of working with teachers the statement that has been made most often and most plaintively is ‘But you seem to know instinctively what questions to ask. You see things in the story and in the pictures that I’d never see! You know when to stay quiet’. My response is: you learn to do it by doing it. There is a skill involved. Like any other skill you need to do it to get better at it. You wouldn’t consider that you could learn to cycle just by watching videos about cycling, reading books about cycling or attending talks about cycling. At some point you would need to get up on your bicycle. However, we will also see a little later that, as well as this seemingly simple skill-based premise, there are several other factors to be considered.

Staying with the skills-base idea for a moment however, it can be argued that, as they engage in the process of talking and thinking, children will develop several sets of skills too. They learn tolerance for diverse points of view as well as the social skills of turn-taking, listening actively and courteous response – all traits of civilised social citizens. Margaret Meek wrote in 1988 that ‘everyone knows that the most significant things about reading are the most obvious’ and she goes on to say, citing Smith (1979) that ‘children learn to read by reading’ (p 3). Children learn to talk by talking and listening. They learn to think by thinking. They have been doing so since birth and perhaps even before birth. Both skills are developed to a greater or lesser degree by encouragement, modelling, and enthusiasm on the part of more experienced other readers, talkers and thinkers as Vygotsky (1978) argued.

More knowledgeable others and experience through interaction

Vygotsky focused on the connections between people and the sociocultural context in which they act and interact in shared experiences (Crawford, 1996). Wertsch (1988) consolidates Vygotsky’s (1978) claim that higher mental functioning in individuals has social origins. Vygotsky (op. cit.) suggests that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the process of cognitive development. He also suggested that ‘more knowledgeable others’ (MKO) scaffold an individual’s learning. The MKO refers to anyone who has a better understanding or a higher ability level than the learner. Although normally a teacher or an older adult, the MKO could also be peers or younger people. We will see examples of children acting as MKOs throughout this book because this is what happens during CT&BT classroom discussions. Children can act as MKOs for peers through modelling better thinking, or demonstrating a more articulate speaking ability, or simply by being more socially competent and confident. CT&BT discussions can also be a demonstration or application of Vytgotsky’s (1978) ‘Zone of Proximal Development’ (ZPD). The ZPD is the distance between a student’s ability to perform a task under adult guidance and/or with peer collaboration and the student’s ability to solve the problem independently. According to Vygotsky, it was in this zone or space that learning occurred.

Many schools still hold primarily to transmission or instruction models of teaching in which a teacher or lecturer ‘transmits’ information to students. These are largely monologic classrooms with the dominant monologue being that of the teacher. Children answer in response to teacher-directed closed questions. Constructivists like Vygotsky promote learning contexts in which students play an active role in learning. This will entail having a dialogic classroom where views are exchanged equitably. The idea of teacher-as-expert and student-as-empty-vessel is less visible in such classrooms. Teachers can and should be learners. This means that the roles of teacher and learner might have to shift in order to facilitate the creation of a classroom culture of trust and on-going participation in community. Education is a social process, as Dewey (1963) said:

The principle that development of experience comes about through interaction means that education is essentially a social process. This quality is realized in the degree in which individuals form a community group. It is absurd to exclude the teacher from membership in the group. As the most mature member of the group he has a peculiar responsibility for the conduct of the interactions and intercommunications which are the very life of the group as a community.

(p 58, my emphasis)

Caring relationships

Human relationships are at the heart of every classroom. The pedagogical relationship must be grounded in reciprocal care and trust according to Noddings (1992). Caring sees the creation of trusting relationships as the foundation for building an effective academic and social climate for schooling (Chaskin and Rauner 1995, Erickson 1993). Lin (2001), citing Noblit et al. (1995), suggests that caring may not be visible or explicit in an educational environment ‘yet it guides the interactions and organization ...