Children speaking with children Visualizing engagement through contemporary Canadian picture books in French classrooms

This qualitative study explored children's responses to contemporary Canadian picture books in two primary French classrooms in an urban public school in Montréal. The thesis documents a collaborative literacy project Les enfants qui parlent aux enfants (Children Speaking with Children) involving my work with sixty-four children and two teachers in Grades One and Two French classrooms. The teachers and children read and responded to a selection of Canadian picture books exploring themes related to identity, belonging, and relationships. Listening to children's voices was central to both the research methodology and the conceptual framework for this collaborative literacy project. Literacy is a social and cultural practice that is relational, situated, and dialogical. An "imagined community" (Anderson, 2006) can emerge as children and teachers deeply engage with "visual literature" (Salisbury & Styles, 2012) to provoke new ways of seeing, listening, and imagining in diverse classrooms. Scholars are increasingly paying attention to the visual (Kress & Van Leeuwen, 1996; Mitchell, 2011; Rose, 2012) and yet there is still much to be learned about children's engagements with images and words in contemporary picture books. The study set out to explore the following broad question, How may listening to young children's responses to contemporary picture books, in word and image, inform our understanding of young children's engagements with literature in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms?Within that question, I also explored a sub-question: What is the role of the teacher in supporting children's engagement with picture books? The shared experience of participating in stories and responding through drawing, painting, writing, and dialogue contributed to the community of the culturally, linguistically, religiously, and ethnically diverse primary classrooms. The findings underscored the children's interest in expressing their thoughts and feelings in response to stories. The wide-ranging variety of visual responses to stories also indicated the individual ways that children engage creatively with literature, particularly when given time and space to respond. Teachers played an important role in guiding children's engagements with the complexity of words and images and in listening children's responses. Children's encounters with contemporary picture books that are counter-narratives (Bradford, 2007) are critical to deepening a sense of community in which diverse voices, and rights, are heard, respected, and understood. The study has important implications for language and literacy pedagogy, particularly in revealing the need to ensure that all children have opportunities to feel a sense of belonging and connection. Counter-narratives in contemporary visual literature for children offer "a more expansive landscape upon which to dream" of possibilities for future destinations (Myers, 2014, para. 14). I conclude that, for children and teachers, engaging deeply with picture books involves slowing down to fully appreciate the richness of the stories.

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