Across the globe, students have been away from schools and their teachers, but literacy learning has continued. In many countries, students’ literacy proficiency is often measured via high‐stakes assessment tests. However, such tests do not make visible students’ literacy lives away from formal learning settings, so students are positioned as task responders, rather than as agentive readers and writers. The authors explore the fluidity and diversity of literacy events and practices for students and their teachers observed during the recent period of COVID‐19 lockdown restrictions.
The use of picture books has been illuminated as a potential to address important topics such as STEM, fluency, and social justice. Unique genres such as hybrid texts and wordless picture books are also worth considering for instruction. This article explores new perspectives on using picture books. Potentials for using wordless picture books beyond the early grades to support literacy across the curriculum are shared first. Next, we discuss how some picture books lend themselves to the engineering design cycle and can be used as an organizing idea for instruction which focuses on integrating the STEM disciplines. To continue, the prospect of utilizing picture books to strengthen reading fluency while engaging students in rich content area material is discussed. The potentials for using banned and challenged picture books to teach social justice is discussed next. We conclude by presenting practical strategies, picture books to consider for each of the areas, and lessons learned.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.