Teachers’ Responses to Teacher Images in Picturebooks

Elizabeth Imperio Isidro,Kathryn Button

doi:10.20360/g27g74

Abstract

Many studies look into the responses to literature of students and how these responses may affect their identities. However, rarely do studies look into teachers’ responses to literature as far as their teacher identities are concerned. This study focuses on a beginning teacher’s responses to select children’s picturebooks and how his responses reflect his current school contexts and experiences, his emerging teacher identity, and the values he holds in teaching.

Highlights

We, as many other Children’s Literature teachers, utilize the Reader Response approach (Rosenblatt, 1978) in encouraging students to make personal meaning out of reading literature
We first provide some background on teacher images, in children’s literature, and we focus primarily on the responses teachers make towards these teacher images in picture books
By focusing on just these two teachers, we believe we are able to still capture the essence of response in relation to one’s experiences and contexts while addressing space limitations of this paper. These findings are presented by first giving a description of each teacher’s brief background and context. This is followed by an analysis of the types of responses each teacher made to the teacher images found in the books

Summary

Introduction

As many other Children’s Literature teachers, utilize the Reader Response approach (Rosenblatt, 1978) in encouraging students to make personal meaning out of reading literature. While a student’s response to one character over another is neither right nor wrong, this became a puzzle in the back of our minds Since they were studying to become teachers in the near future, should they not respond more readily to Mrs Twinkle, the teacher in the story? This puzzle eventually led us to revisit Reader Response within the context of teacher education It was not long before we noticed a strong symmetry between the journey of becoming a teacher and response—as both look at the active role of the learner/ reader in making meaning out of texts (whether texts are the material or experiences in the classroom involved in learning to teach or texts as in pieces of literature). Holt-Reynolds’ (1992) asserted that students come to the program with schema about teaching and learning, enough for them “to make sense out of the subject matter of teaching” (p. 327) but do we as teacher educators view pre-service teachers as capable of constructing knowledge themselves based on their earlier life experiences and their current contexts within the teacher education program?

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Conclusion