PhD project that aims to foster critical hope and dialogue among 7th-grade students in Norway and Denmark through wordless picturebooks.
The project explores how wordless picturebooks or silent picturebooks about war and migration in literature education may foster critical hope, dialogue, and reflection among seventh-grade students in Norway and Denmark. The study is conducted in diverse classrooms with pupils with different experiences and positionalities, including majority-group students and racialized minority students.
War, displacement, and migration are major global challenges that raise important questions about human rights and social justice in a time marked by increasing xenophobia, far-right calls for “remigration,” and hate speech.
The aim of the project is to develop knowledge about how students respond to three different silent books about war and migration, and how teachers can facilitate critical and anti-racist conversations about why wars occur and why migrants and refugees may encounter unequal treatment and opportunities in society.
In addition, teachers are interviewed about the experiences, strategies, and selection criteria that inform their evaluations when they are presented with a range of wordless picturebooks about war and migration. The project pays particular attention to issues of human rights, social justice, and students’ and teachers’ reflections on global and national power relations and inequalities.
The project is relevant for teachers, students, teacher educators, and others interested in children’s engagement with literature and critical dialogue in schools.
The project employs Feminist Participatory Action Research (FPAR) as its methodological framework. The researcher collaborates with Norwegian and Danish language teachers to plan, implement, and further develop teaching activities. Data are collected through classroom observations, creative student activities which are video- and audio recorded, semi-structured group interviews with students, and interviews with teachers.
Camilla Jensen's publications (nva.sikt.no)
Candidate
Supervisors
Nina Christensen, Aarhus University
