Research Projects

Challenging Picturebooks in Education

What should students read? The choice of texts in the classroom has important
pedagogical implications for both novice and experienced readers. Exploring Challenging Picturebooks in Education: International Perspectives on Language and Literature Learning highlights challenging picturebooks as a supplement or alternative to traditional teaching materials. Reading education should involve high-quality literature.
Children need reading material according to their ability to decode texts,
but also with potential to challenge them cognitively and emotionally, develop
their ability to understand, and enhance their joy and motivation for reading. We
aim to explore the potential and contribution of challenging picturebooks for
these educational purposes and concerns.
In doing so, we wish to challenge the predominance of textbooks on all school
levels and level-based leaflets and early readers in elementary reading education.
These reading materials seldom stimulate children’s reading motivation as
they typically lack an interesting plot, humor, excitement, or other properties
of literary and artistic quality. Based upon a behavioristic approach to learning,
these materials start with short, simple words, and sentences that are gradually
expanded in order to develop the student’s ability to decode the text. In the
twenty-first century, however, reading education involves more than mere decoding. It is a socially situated practice, which must consider the learners’ motivation and understanding of a wide array of communicative practices ( Arizpe, Colomer, and Martinez-Roldán 2014; Arizpe, Farrar, and McAdam 2018 : 371–372; Guthrie and Wigfield 2000 ; Kachorsky et al. 2017; New London Group 1996; Nikolajeva 2003 , 2014 ).
We suggest a rethinking of language and literature education, focusing on
learning material of high literary and aesthetic quality, explorative and crossdisciplinary approaches, and adaptation to the individual student’s challenges, needs, and competencies. Through theoretical considerations, picturebook analyses, and empirical studies in kindergartens, primary and secondary schools in different countries, we will explore how challenging picturebooks may supplement or replace traditional teaching materials, stimulate students’ motivation for reading, and develop their multimodal literacy. (Published by Routledge 2022)

Inclusive Learning with Challenging Picturebooks

Challenging Picturebooks and Inclusion: Promoting Educational Equity through Visual Literacy reveals how challenging picturebooks — with their synthesis of visual complexity, thematic depth, and formal innovation — forge pathways to inclusive learning. By integrating theoretical insights with practical applications from a transnational range of pedagogical contexts, this volume equips scholars of educational research and children’s literature with a robust framework for assessing the potential of challenging picturebooks to advance inclusive learning and educational equity through a focus on visual literacy.

            Inclusive Learning with Challenging Picturebooks examines the critical intersection where inclusive learning meets challenging picturebooks as transformative vehicles that promote equitable learning for all from early childhood through adult education. Building on the foundation established in Exploring Challenging Picturebooks in Education (Routledge 2022), this collection presents international perspectives that both theorize and exemplify how educators can use challenging picturebooks to develop essential dimensions of inclusive learning by affording equitable access to texts imbued with critical and aesthetic complexity.

            The volume progresses from theoretical approaches to inclusive learning with picturebooks to targeted analyses of sample texts that resist othering, disrupt aesthetic conventions, enhance affective engagement, and reconfigure traditional education. The chapters investigate how challenging picturebooks support inclusive learning beyond the classroom, particularly in pedagogical contexts marked by war, disability, historical trauma, or contested identities. Each chapter illustrates how the multimodal dynamic of picturebooks creates opportunities for inclusive learning that cultivates critical literacy, empathy, and personal agency among diverse populations. (Forthcoming by Routledge 2026)