Designing STEM-Integrated picture books for young children: preservice teachers as authors

The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine preservice early childhood teachers’ (PSTs) epistemic framing of integrated STEM pedagogy as represented through children’s picture books they designed as part of a 14-week mathematics education course grounded in the Early STEM Integrated Teaching Framework. Eight storybooks coauthored by thirty-nine PSTs were examined as epistemic artifacts through the Four Resources Model. The findings demonstrate how literacy- and design-based narrative and multimodal decisions made by PSTs before having contact with young children prefigure their access to literacy and STEM-related practices. Predictable storylines, repeated patterns, and embedded STEM vocabulary were often used to provide opportunities for early access to literacy practices in these books. Opportunities to extend phonological play and explicit print cues were less developed. Additionally, PSTs tended to situate STEM concepts within relatable, emotionally engaging problem contexts that aligned inquiry/design-based reasoning with determining story outcomes, while providing fewer cues for mechanistic STEM explanations or for sense-making with evidence. Investigation-based STEM practices and causal explanation were overall less explicit across the picture book collection. Ethically and environmentally responsive themes through narratives were also a relative strength among PST book designs.