What is it about?
In recent years, the importance of embedding children’s racial, cultural, and ability identities has received greater attention in the field of speech-language therapy. Picture books have become one common way of embedding children’s identities in therapy sessions. Picture books are a powerful tool for sharing communities’ identities, histories, triumphs, and joy. Yet, existing discussions about picture books have seldom included the interrogation of their language ideologies. Ideologies of “good” languaging are important to consider when selecting picture books. Even when books are written and illustrated by community insiders that come from minoritized backgrounds, they can still reify standardized views of languaging that reify various forms of oppression including linguistic racism, able- ism (including audism and oralism), xenophobia, and so forth, and these ideas directly impact how youth see themselves or their subjectivities. In this tutorial, we model the application of an inquiry tool to interrogate ideologies of “good” langua- ging in children’s picture books and how to have critical conversations about these language ideologies in ways that are just, affirming, and linguistically sustaining for children who are racially and linguistically minoritized. Three children’s books were selected to exemplify the analysis across four dimensions: context, power rela- tions, assumptions and beliefs, and impact on subjectivities.
Why is it important?
To resist the harm imposed on evolving subjectivities in youth, it is of essence that children’s literature be analyzed beyond representation of demographics and the positionalities of authors. The hope is that through this work, preservice and in-service teachers and speech-language pathologists co- create learning communities and engage in conversations about how their materials uphold these ideologies or dogmas of “good” languaging in an effort to provide humanizing and affirming learning spaces for children.