More than Just Pictures: Using Picture Books to Broaden Young Learners’ Disability Understanding

Abstract

This paper describes a research-intervention path that aims to deal explicitly and consciously with the topic of disability in the classroom, providing children with honest images of disabilities in order to stimulate their awareness, understanding and acceptance. The project, realized by Primary Education Degree students in some Aosta Valley schools, was based on the use of picture books as an educational mediator in which images and text merge together to tell a story, thus becoming a tool used to deal with complex and delicate subjects that characterize the reality in which every child lives, including that of disability.

Keywords

• picture books
• disability
• illustration/text relationship
• apprenticeship
• educational proposal