Picturebooks as prompts for Intercultural Citizenship Education: an analysis of teacher-made materials

Activity: Talk or presentationOral presentation

Description

Intercultural Citizenship Education (ICE) combines the intercultural communicative competence of language education and civic action of citizenship education (Byram, 2008). It requires that teachers and their children take action beyond their classrooms and, through English, engage with other teachers and children to ‘reflect together, propose and instigate change in their respective societies’ and become a ‘community of intercultural citizens’ (Byram et al., 2008: xxii-xxiii). Picturebooks, a form of children’s literature where pictures and words interanimate to create meaning, often touch on relevant topics and themes which prompt meaning-making, reflection and discussion (Mourão, 2015), and facilitate access to the concepts of interculturality and citizenship education in the classroom (Bland, 2018; Short, 2009).

Intercultural Citizenship Education through Picturebooks in early English Language Learning (ICEPELL) is an Erasmus+ project which aims to support practitioners to confidently integrate ICE into their EFL lessons and library sessions with children aged 5 to 12 years old. One of its intellectual outputs is a collection of ICEKits, teaching packs developed by practitioners for practitioners, around picturebooks. This paper presents a small piece of research that takes a close look at a corpus of 15 practitioner made ICEKits, with a view to analyzing how they support mediation of the picurebook as a scaffold for interculturality and citizenship, as well as how successfully they integrate the taking action component. The results point to all ICEKits including well-structured mediation strategies, however taking action is less successfully employed. We will discuss possible reasons for this and outline implications for teacher education and materials development.

Period18 Feb 2022
Event titleTaking Action! : – Conference on Social Justice in Language Classrooms and Teacher Education.
Event typeConference
Conference number1
LocationDortmund, GermanyShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational