Deepening Student Engagement with Diverse Picturebooks

Zapata demonstrates how to reinvigorate aesthetic and critical response in early childhood and elementary classrooms through literature explorations of diverse picturebook collections. Drawing on classroom practices, she offers approaches and guiding principles that can be tailored to individual contexts through an anti-oppressive lens. Her approach is informed by the ethical work of integrating diverse children’s picturebooks in the classroom, a desire to cultivate a critical literature classroom landscape that resists stereotypical representations of people of color in literature, and a commitment to recentering critical engagement of diverse picturebooks. Part of the Principles in Practice imprint, the book draws on NCTE’s position statement Preparing Teachers with Knowledge of Children’s and Young Adult Literature.