– A guide for primary and early years students and teachers
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.
Table of Contents:
- Critical Thinking and Book Talk’ – The ‘why’ factor
- Comprehension, making meaning, literacy, critical thinking and critical literacy
- Interactive, or dialogic, reading aloud
- A focus on oral language development
- Some picturebook theory
- Critical Thinking and Book Talk in the Classroom
- Practical advice 8. Conclusion
About the Author:
Mary Roche is a Lecturer in Education at an ITE college in Ireland. A primary teacher for many years, Mary holds an MA in Education from UWE Bristol, UK (2000) and a PhD from University of Limerick, Ireland (2007). She has taught at undergraduate and postgraduate level in several academic settings. She is author of Developing Children’s Critical Thinking through Picturebooks (2015) which received an award from the UKLA Academic Book Award committee 2015. Her research interests include Self-Study Action Research, Philosophy with Children, Critical Pedagogy, Critical Literacy and Teacher CPD. She has worked with Education Centres nationally providing in-service professional development for teachers in creating dialogical and critical classrooms, and has developed resources for National Council for Curriculum Assessment (Aistear Toolkit). Mary has presented and keynoted at several conferences both nationally and in the UK, and has published in RAI journal (2010); OMEP journal (2010), EARJ (2011) and International Journal for Transformative Research (2014).
