期刊名称：Children's Literature in English Language Education
电子版ISSN：2195-5212
出版年度：2019
卷号：7
期号：2
页码：61-78
出版社：CLELEjournal
摘要：Children with disabilities remain underrepresented in children’s picturebooks, so many children find they do not have characters that they can relate to. For some authors it may not occur to them to include a disabled character; or publishers may be reluctant to publish books about disability. When characters with disabilities are portrayed, they often reinforce society’s discomfort with disability by representing this as something to be overcome and tolerated, rather than challenging the realities of a disabling society. This paper identifies two types of literature, inclusion and immersive , that provide different representations of disability, as depicted in Susan Laughs (Willis & Ross, 1999) and Amazing (Antony, 2019a). The paper also shows how children in the Primary English Language Teaching (PELT) classroom can develop social awareness of disability by introducing the concept of the social model of disability in an age-appropriate way using Winnie the Witch (Thomas & Paul, 1987). Two further picturebooks, Perfectly Norman (Percival, 2017) and Kind (Green, 2019) are briefly discussed. Criteria are provided to enable educators to critically examine, select and use picturebooks which reflect qualitative representation of disability, and encourage meaningful discussion about inclusion when mediated by the educator from a critical disability studies lens. By encouraging social model thinking through picturebooks in the PELT classroom, teachers can embrace their wider professional remit by going beyond the teaching of language alone.
关键词：picturebooks; primary; representation; disability; inclusion and immersive literature; social model
