M. Farrell

Visualizing Intercultural Literacy: Engaging Critically with Diversity and Migration in the Classroom through an Image-Based Approach.

Accessible forms of language, learning and literacy, as well as strategies that support intercultural communication are needed for the diverse population of refugee, asylum seeker and migrant children within schools. The research project Journeys from Images to Words explored the potential of visual texts to address these issues. Working in Glasgow primary schools within critical pedagogical frameworks that invite sharing of personal narratives and of cultural knowledge, the researchers examined and evaluated an image-based approach, both for reading and responding to a selection of childrens texts and for obtaining an insight into the home literacy practices of diverse communities. In this article, a ‘generative theme’, as used by Paulo Freire is used to examine how students engaged with reading visual texts, shared their responses and extended their intercultural understanding. The results from this project provide evidence for the inclusion of visual texts and methodologies within critical pedagogies in order to develop intercultural literacy in the classroom.

Jings! Crivens! Help Ma Boab!: it's a Scottish picturebook

A nations literature has traditionally been seen as a reflection of the values, tensions, myths, and psychology that identify national character. In the construction of culture and identity there are many shared values that can be discerned and revealed through story and literature. But no literary genre teaches us more about a culture and its values than the literature published for a societys children. In Britain the concept of a literary national identity is further complicated because the United Kingdom is made up of four separate nations and each constituent part claims its own distinctive identity. Within childrens literature the picturebook “genre” presents an extremely rich context for the exposition of national identity, using as it does both written text and images. This article suggests that Scottish picturebooks are distinctive and challenge young readers, especially Scottish readers, to discover and recognize who they are in the face of mass market globalization in childrens book publishing and thus presents particular opportunities to examine issues of identity in both the cultural and educational environment.