Are picturebooks only for little kids? Professor Deborah Dean says that all students, no matter the age, can engage with course content through these seemingly simple books.
Imagine you are a new high school teacher and your students are rowdy, unable to focus. To get their attention, you begin to read a picturebook. Initially, you are met with puzzled looks. However, as soon as you start reading, the confusion slowly fades away. Little by little, your students give you their full attention, and you begin the lesson.
English Department Chair Deborah Dean (English Education) experienced this very scenario when she used picturebooks in her own high school classroom. Amazed at the effect picturebooks had on her students, she decided to discuss the benefits further in her 2024 book Power in Pictures: Using Picturebooks to Energize Secondary ELA Instruction. Though picturebooks are commonly meant to entertain children, Dean believes these types of books teach her students important skills and unify her classroom as students discover their own identities.
Multimodality
Dean believes picturebooks are the best preparation for everyday texts like social media, the news, TV, and more because of the books’ multimodal nature. For example, picturebooks use multiple modes—pictures, words, and, when read aloud, sound—to communicate meaning. When modes are combined to determine meaning, students’ reading comprehension, vocabulary, and ability to think critically increases.
In the classroom, Dean recommends using picturebooks as scaffolds for all types of learners. Multilingual learners, she noticed, relied heavily on pictures to determine meaning and were often more effective at this “image-centric” skill than native English speakers. When Dean read out loud, multilingual students began to connect the images to new words, increasing their vocabulary.
And the same strategy worked for students who spoke English as their first language. One student told Dean that when Dean read aloud, the student understood more words than when they read them just from the page.
Classroom Unity
Students come to school with all sorts of learning backgrounds, including dyslexia, dysgraphia, ADHD, and many more difficulties. Dean uses picturebooks to acknowledge these struggles and, in effect, to create a space “that feels very comfortable to talk about some of the challenges that we have as readers and writers.”
Once, she read a picturebook about a boy with dyslexia to her high school class. Afterward, Dean discussed the book and its character with her students, talking about all the famous people with dyslexia and celebrating this particular challenge rather than seeing it as an obstacle.
When reading these stories, students start finding themselves in the pages and begin crafting their own identities as readers and writers, no matter the difficulty they might have. Dean says, “It’s important to have times in class where students can read a few picturebooks about what it means to be a reader, talk about it, and then ask the question, ‘Is this like me?’”
The more students read, the more they will learn about new identities, new genres, and new problems. Dean recognizes that there will be times when there isn’t an answer for every student’s struggle, but she hopes that multimodal reading skills might help students navigate new scenarios. “We have to learn to adapt a little bit,” she says, “to live with some ambiguity, not always having a clear-cut resolution at the end of the story.”
To learn more about the use of picturebooks in the classroom, find Dean’s book here.