Picture Book Characters with Disabilities: Patterns and Trends in a Context of Radical Change

Abstract

This study, framed through a lens of Radical Change, examines selected Canadian and American picture books featuring characters with disabilities. While aspects of diversity such as cultural difference are consciously included in contemporary children’s books, differences related to disability are often absent. In this study, qualitative content analysis identifies patterns, trends, and themes related to characterizations that involve disabilities, proposing critical literacy as a framework through which children may interrogate messages in text and illustration.

Evaluation of the Effect of Aesthetic Education Practice in Children’s Picture Books Based on Data Mining Technology

“…All thread computation costs and inter-thread communication costs are substituted into formula (12) to obtain the total cost W s of the topology critical path as: For a single tuple, formulas ( 9) and ( 11) substituted into formula (13), and the total topological critical path cost W s is:…”

“…Together with words, they have a narrative function, which means that the pictures in picture books are always associated with meaning, conveying the knowledge and experience of the world. When children enjoy a good story, they will pursue something beyond the story [13]. Faced with a text with multiple layers, they will think about the symbolic meaning of the picture or the deep meaning formed by the interweaving of the picture and the text [14].…”

Disrupting ableism: Strengths-based representations of disability in children’s picture books

“…The context and conceptual framing for our analysis was the social model of disability (Oliver, 1990). Recent content analyses of children's picture books that include characters with disabilities have been related to disability broadly (Emmerson, et al, 2014) have considered the intersections of race, gender, and disability (Koss, 2015) or have been focused on specific disabilities (Azano, et al, 2017;Golos & Moses, 2011). Because we were interested in strengths-based representations and how these could help teachers and young children analyze and disrupt ableist views, we selected picture books written for children ages 5 to 8 from the IRIS curated booklist.…”

Repositioning Disability in Children’s Picture Books Through Classroom Read-Alouds

“…Positive portrayals of disability in children's books can have broad effects, impacting beliefs of not only the children who read or listen to them, but also the teachers, parents, and caregivers who encounter these books through their work with children (Pennell et al, 2018). When teachers select inclusive books to share with children, they can inspire critical conversations about disability, paving the way for authentic social change in how it is viewed (Emmerson et al, 2014).…”