Angry Like Me

Abstract

In this article we take on a challenging picture book, The Heart and the Bottle written and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers, and how one preschool boy’s response changed us. As part of a three-center initiative to discuss hard feelings and grief with preschool learners, we teamed with six preschool teachers to read and work through this text. We explore how both the preschoolers’ and the teachers’ responses challenged us to look at how the disjoint between pedagogy (literature that says we should teach these types of texts) and practice (how this classroom experience actually unfolds) leaves much room for continued support. Drawing from Jessica Whitelaw’s call for the role of disquieting texts in children’s lives, this article holds both the imperative for these texts, and the difficulties of using them, at its heart (2017).