Honors Senior Theses/Projects
Date of Award
Summer 2020
Exit Requirement
Undergraduate Honors Thesis/Project
Department
Honors Program
Faculty Advisor
Marie LeJeune
Honors Program Director
Dr. Gavin Keulks
Abstract
In my project I will be analyzing how physical disabilities are portrayed in children’s literature. Specifically, I will be doing a content analysis of four picture-books that have won the Schneider Family award, which is given to books that embody the disability experience for child or adult audiences. Using the guided questions from the article “Beyond the Medal: Representations of Disability in Caldecott Winners,” I am going to determine if the characters with disabilities are portrayed in an ableist way. Appropriate representation is important for marginalized people, including people who have disabilities. Providing picturebooks that embrace disability rather than marginalize it has a positive impact on all children in a classroom. The goal of my project is to create an understanding of the importance of non-ableist representation of characters with disabilities in picturebooks. After using the article to analyze the picturebooks, I will use the picturebooks that represent disabilities in an appropriate way as the basis of lesson plans to use in an elementary school classroom. The lesson plans will be centered around the importance of inclusion and lead to a discussion with students about why it is important to learn about people that might be different from them. I hope that my lesson plans will be useful in my own future classrooms, and potentially the classrooms of other educators too.
Recommended Citation
Tew, Rebecca J., "Representation in Children’s Literature: An Analysis of Disability in Picturebooks" (2020). Honors Senior Theses/Projects. 233.
https://digitalcommons.wou.edu/honors_theses/233
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