School in Children's Literature and Children's Literature in School

Even though large numbers of young people are still denied access to education, schooling is a relatively common experience for children and adolescents across the world. As such, it is often depicted, visually and verbally, in children's and young adult fiction and nonfiction. At the same time, children's and young adult literature has, or ought to have, an important place in classrooms and school or class libraries. The texts published in this special "School in Children's Literature and Children's Literature in School" issue explore widely varied subthemes, from teachers exploring sadness and grief with their students through picturebooks, to the textual and visual depiction of immigrant children in school settings, to how parents respond to lesbian and/or gay (LG) picturebooks and their potential use in elementary classrooms, to dual-language picturebooks intended to enhance the visibility and learning of indigenous languages.

In "Necessary Discomfort: Three Preschool Classrooms Break Open The Heart and the Bottle and Sit with Hard Feelings," Shoshana Magnet and Catherine-Laura Dunnington present their findings from a project they built around Oliver Jeffers's picturebook The Heart and the Bottle (2010). Drawing from Jessica Whitelaw's assertions about the power of disquieting picture-books as places of possibility for growth and development, preschool teachers employed listening, discussing, movement, and mark-making, inviting their preschool learners to sit with the hard feelings Jeffers's picturebook evokes. They conclude that because we are too little habituated to sitting with discomfort and sad feelings as we read books aloud, teaching this book is a brave and challenging act.

Yoo Kyung Sung and Kristi DeMar write about "Schooling and Post-Immigration Experiences in Latinx Children's Literature." They investigate the representation of immigrant children's school experiences in Latinx literature published in the United States within the past ten years. In an attempt to rehumanize the discussion surrounding Latinx immigrants without denying their voices, Sung and DeMar look beyond the media snapshots of children in border-town detention centers and into their picturebook depictions in school spaces.

"'The Sky Didn't Fall or Anything': A Mother's Response to Lesbian-and Gay-Inclusive Picturebooks in Elementary Schools in the United States," by Stephen Adam Crawley, focuses on components from a larger qualitative study in which parents responded to LG picturebooks and their potential use in elementary classrooms. Crawley analyzes and shares the responses of one mother whose daughter attends a public elementary school in the US Southeast. Drawing from data generated via semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and online surveys in which the mother read and responded to more than thirty picturebooks, Crawley demonstrates how, over time, she moved from endorsing the books' availability and use in elementary classrooms, to considering schools' book-selection processes, to self-initiating action by reading one of the LG picturebooks in her daughter's class.

Nicola Daly writes the fourth peer-reviewed article in this issue, titled "Exploring Author Motivation, Intended Audience, and Text Layout in Dual-Language Picturebooks." Through this study, Daly seeks to understand the factors influencing the writing and layout of dual-language picturebooks featuring English and an indigenous language. Semi-structured interviews with five authors were conducted, and findings indicated that authors were often motivated to produce bilingual picturebooks that would increase the visibility and status of indigenous languages both at school and at home. They also design their books as language learning supports and resources that can contribute to the revitalization of the indigenous languages. The authors made decisions about the layout—or linguistic landscape—created in their picturebooks that related to their imagined reader and the purpose of their book, and in doing so were creative in establishing new norms.

The robust "Children and Their Books" section of this special issue includes a report by a librarian-parent duo who have been running a successful graphic novel club for third graders; a piece about Room to Read, which collaborates with local communities, partner organizations, and governments across sixteen countries of Asia and Africa to transform the lives of millions of children; and the...