Student Experiences of a Diversity-Positive Chapter Book: An Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis Using an Arts-Informed Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study aimed to understand the lived experience of school-aged children engaging with a diversity-positive chapter book in a classroom setting. Participants were 9 third-grade students and 26 sixth-grade students and their respective teachers in a Canadian urban school. An interpretive phenomenological analysis with an arts-informed approach was utilized to collect and interpret data. Before the study, I created a children’s chapter book, The Book of Can’t and Don’t, exploring the friendship between a fictional child living on the autism spectrum and her new cousin internationally adopted from Haiti. Book creation involved implementing feedback from people with disabilities, racial minorities, immigrants, and community professionals. Teachers read the story to students over four weeks, with two chapters read aloud per week. In addition, once a week, the students participated in a Draw and Write activity where they drew scenes inspired by each week’s readings. The following major themes emerged in the coding process: a) expression of negative emotions, b) expression of positive emotions, c) experiencing or noticing individual differences, and d) experiences of emotional or internal conflict resolution. Most student responses described experiences from their lives that they perceived as emotionally equivalent to experiences of the characters in the book. Notable developmental differences were observed between students in third grade and students in the fifth-sixth grade classroom. Third-grade children often described caregiver separation and nighttime fears (e.g., ghosts). The older students tended to describe the fear of embarrassment in peer social situations, fear of peer rejection, and individual differences as a component of their identity (e.g., race). I expected more responses where students discussed disabilities, race, or other individual differences. However, only a few student responses mentioned these themes. Extant literature supports the idea that school-aged children are at a developmental age where they are peer-oriented and desire to assimilate with peers. Both abilities to understand the emotional state of others and self-concept continue to develop during this period. As children approach adolescence, self-concept separate from others grows in importance, and children become increasingly independent from adult caregivers. The results from this study support the use of The Book of Can’t and Don’t as a tool for a) facilitating discussion in classrooms on social and emotional learning and intersectionality, b) creating opportunities for validation and acceptance of students with individual differences, and c) creating a sense of community in classroom settings by putting students and teachers into the mindset for shared understanding.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".