Teachers as Zookeepers? How Picture Books Describe Classroom Management

Maich, Kimberly and Belcher, Christina and Hardy, Monte (2019) Teachers as Zookeepers? How Picture Books Describe Classroom Management. Language and Literacy, 21 (4). ISSN 1496-0974

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Abstract

Engaging the lens of classroom management, this research explores how teachers have been represented in children’s picture books as classroom managers. Picture books from the A-Zoo 7thEdition (2005) serve as a foundational data set to explore how the personification of teachers and the reality of the teaching experience are mirrored over time. Charteris’s heuristic of epistemological shudders(2014) —identifying a paradox which opens up possibilities for meaning making—was utilized alongside Krippendorff’s (1989) content analysis framework. Findings inform how the representation of teachers has portrayed a postmodern, deconstructive worldview regarding classroom management and professional representation, inviting further study into society’s ongoing perceptions of the teacher.

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