Picturebooks as vehicles: Creating materials for pedagogical action

Picturebooks have long been positioned as vehicles to support teachers and their learners to explore compelling and challenging themes in early English language education and more recently to support the development of intercultural and citizenship education. This article reports on the materials development phase of a professional development course which formed part of an Erasmus+ project. Its main goal was to enable teacher-participants to confidently plan for, manage and assess intercultural citizenship education through picturebooks in early ELT and to successfully co-create a set of pedagogical materials. Based on a reflective practice approach, we highlight how the professional development course incorporated the applied science, craft and reflective model over two course iterations to support a collaborative picturebook-based materials writing process. An evaluation of the draft materials was undertaken to assess the strengths and weaknesses of teaching and learning sequences for intercultural awareness and citizenship, and to inform and shape two subsequent course iterations. We conclude this paper with reflections on how we addressed certain challenges that we encountered to support teacher-participants to craft materials around picturebooks for intercultural citizenship education.