Undergraduate Education Majors’ (Critical) Encounters With Picturebooks About Immigration

The primary audience for picturebooks is of course children, but which children? More than 30 years ago, Rudine Sims Bishop introduced the metaphor of mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors to describe how children either see themselves represented in children's books or not. She argued that all three are important but serve different functions; readers from dominant identity and cultural groups are likely to see themselves mirrored in books, whereas those from historically marginalized groups are mostly able to access books as windows into the lives of dominant groups. Although mainstream publishing has become more diverse since Sims’ influential work, it remains the case that many white children—and their predominantly white teachers—may not have much experience reading picturebooks that represent the experiences of those from historically marginalized groups. In the present article, we analyze how 22 undergraduate education majors at a predominantly white university critically analyzed four picturebooks about the challenges associated with immigration to the United States, both historically and in contemporary times. We combined Lewison et al.'s “four dimensions” critical literacy framework with an established scoring criteria to examine students’ written assignments. In particular, we present findings for one criterion that mapped onto the critical literacy dimension of “focusing on the sociopolitical.” Findings indicate that while most students did identify underlying messages in the four picturebooks, they did so with varying degrees of sophistication, suggesting that there remained a need for deeper critical reading, especially among students who have not themselves experienced immigration.