The Brightest Part of the Forest: A Grit Analysis of an Ontario Children’s Book Award

Abstract

This study explores how grit manifests in the nominees of Ontario’s Forest of Reading Blue Spruce Award children’s literature competition from 2013-2018. Performing a document analysis (Bowen, 2009), we used a modified version of Duckworth’s (2018) grit scale to gauge the grittiness of the nominees’ protagonists. We found that 28 of the 60 titles portrayed grit with 19 of those titles scoring four or higher on the modified grit scale indicating that protagonists had consistently high scores for the various aspects of grit. Our paper concludes with a discussion about implications to educators seeking to use these books to engage students in discussions about grit and resilience.