Abstract
There is compelling evidence on the effectiveness of bibliotherapy for facilitating one’s development. Arguably, in teacher education, bibliotherapy has been shown to facilitate prospective teachers’ professional development. However, teacher educators may experience difficulties in finding relevant reading to stimulate prospective teachers’ identification process, which is essential if the application of pedagogical bibliotherapy is to be successful. This study is situated in a mathematics education course for prospective elementary school teachers and explores the features of relevant pedagogical reading via analysis of four prospective elementary school teachers’ identification processes with two case descriptions. The identification here relates to the reading of the so-called true stories; prospective teachers read stories of other prospective teachers from the same teacher education context. We outline the recommendations for the selection of reading material when applying pedagogical bibliotherapy in order to assist prospective teachers’ professional development.
Highlights
In this paper, we discuss bibliotherapy, known as the use of reading to promote affective change and personal development (Lenkowsky 1987)
In order to discuss the selection of relevant reading for the application of bibliotherapy in teacher education, we examined here prospective elementary school teachers’ reflections upon the bibliotherapy—reading of the case descriptions in their portfolios (N = 87)
Due to a long-time span of the application of bibliotherapy and a large body of data we obtained in mathematics education course for prospective elementary school teachers, we re-examined the data in terms of what we could learn from those identification processes for the purposes of better selecting the reading for our prospective teachers
Summary
We discuss bibliotherapy, known as the use of reading to promote affective change and personal development (Lenkowsky 1987). I.e. as a psychotherapeutic approach under the label of ‘clinical bibliotherapy’ and ‘developmental bibliotherapy’, used for facilitating one’s personal growth and development (Hynes and Hynes-Berry 1986). Both applications have found great success in a variety of contexts and for various purposes. Bibliotherapy has been applied widely for addressing various socio-emotional challenges and promoting well-being in children and youth (see for review, Montgomery and Maunders 2015; Lewis et al 2015; Vale Lucas and Soares 2013), and adults as well
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