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This column details how Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) supported readers' critical and aesthetic responses to diverse picturebooks focused on social justice issues.
ADDING TO THE LONG-STANDING calls for diversity in children's literature (Bishop, 1990; Larrick, 1965), recent efforts through national editorials (C. Myers, 2014; W. D. Myers, 2014) and grassroots movements on social media (e.g., #WeNeedDiverseBooks, #ReadInColor) have brought new and needed momentum to the discussion (Thomas, 2016). Together, these efforts have highlighted students' access to diverse literature-books that reflect varied voices and faces, experiences, and histories-as a moral imperative, particularly in the context of today's sociopolitical landscape in which people and institutions (e.g., schools) are struggling to reconcile issues of racism and xenophobia.
In this column, two classroom teachers and a university researcher extend the call for students' engagement with more diverse texts by emphasizing the visual elements in diverse picturebooks as essential resources for critical classroom discussions. We suggest that through the reading of images reflecting relevant issues of equity and diversity, students not only cultivate the reading habits needed to engage critically with text but also develop the empathy needed to engage fully. We utilize Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) (Cappello & Walker, 2016; Franco & Unrath, 2015; Housen, 2001; Yenawine, 2013; Yenawine & Miller, 2014) as a generative pedagogical approach that can support students' critical reading of diverse picturebooks. Initially developed over 30 years ago by cognitive psychologist Abigail Housen and veteran museum educator Philip Yenawine, VTS has been adopted by many educators as a teaching approach to cultivate critical thinking in the reading of visuals across context and content areas.
We draw on research literature on visual literacies that emphasizes the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in visual form. This scholarship decenters definitions of literacy that have historically privileged written text (Serafini, 2015; Wiseman, Mäkinen, & Kupiainen, 2016). Nonlinguistic representations in literature can serve as a valuable scaffold for negotiating content, including the more complex issues and histories often presented in diverse literature. Students should have multiple pathways for their expression of relevant insights and feelings related to the complex issues experienced in response to diverse literature. Visual literacies provide needed additional means for meaning making and discussion in the classroom (Callow, 2008; Cowan &...