Parents and educators may want children to engage empathetically and analytically with complex issues such as mental illness, unequal access to housing, antisemitism and racism, yet may find it challenging to do so. This workshop will model using high-quality picture books as a way to frame these discussions, inviting not only reflection via age-appropriate depictions of social privilege, exclusion, and trauma but also readerly creativity in response to the books’ uses of art and imagination.

Picture books are complex cultural artifacts, serving as accessible, age-appropriate gateways to the discussion of identity formation and social institutions. Participants will work collaboratively, implementing a range of focalizing strategies and analytical frameworks to construct evidence-based interpretive claims about the visual, verbal, and historical narratives told by classic and contemporary picture books. This guided practice enables participants to discover and decode multiple narratives in a single text, implement culturally responsive literacy practices, and formulate text-based arguments using critical terminology.

Students are disadvantaged when they cannot read for themselves texts written in challenging forms (the early modern English of Shakespeare’s plays, the syntactically complex style of foundational U.S. documents, poetry, etc.), often relying on overly simplified or even inaccurate online summaries. Students cannot critically analyze texts they can’t decode, and citizens cannot follow an “Originalist” legal or political argument if they do not understand the sentence elements basic to literal meaning (grammar, syntax, diction, figurative language, etc.). This workshop utilizes word games, group play, and performance to teach the “basics.”

The Common Core State Standards require study of Shakespeare’s plays, but why? How can 21st-century students engage his work in ways that enable them to appreciate, appropriate and adapt, reject, or otherwise respond meaningfully to such culturally weighted texts? This workshop can be tailored to specific plays, thematic topics, and skills, as desired, and can include strategies for teaching one or more of the following: close reading of poetry and prose; individual or group performance preparation; media literacy through analysis of stage and film productions; cultural literacy through comparative analysis of textual variants and adaptations.