Student Teachers and Kindergarten Children Talking about Picturebooks Focusing School in Didactic Research Labs at University

Abstract

Within the project“Lehren, Lernen und Forschen in Werkstätten” (Teaching, Learning and Researching in Laboratories) from 2016-2019, German didactic seminars were held in the “Lern- und Forschungswerkstatt Grundschule” (LuFo) (Primary Education Research Lab) at the Technische Universität (TU) of Dresden. The seminars, which were attended by primary education student teachers, dealt with telling stories to wordless picturebooks, reading aloud picturebooks about school or other literary themes. The student teachers dealt with selected picturebooks from the perspective of literature didactics, visual literacy studies and empirical research on reception of literature. They designed didactic arrangements in the sense of inquiry-based learning and invited kindergarten and primary school children to the LuFo to explore the stories told in the picturebooks together with them. The study is based on the student teachers' seminar papers in which they describe their projects, give didactic reasons for the selection of literature and analyse their interactions with the children around the picturebooks. Using the example of picturebooks about school, the study uses the Key Incident Analysis to ask which books the student teachers choose and how they receive them, in what form they discuss them with the children and how they shape the reading situations and finally, how they reflect on their own learning processes. The results give an insight into both the processes of reflection of the primary school student teachers and the processes of literary learning of the children.