REVIEWS

Aaron Bradbury, early childhood academic, shares his review of The Research-Informed Teaching Revolution. And as for the picture books, they are sure to have children giggling!

Teaching Controversial Issues

This chapter describes recent research findings on homelessness in the United States and its relationship to poverty and other related factors. It also provides an introduction to text clusters, a curricular resource that includes high-quality and award-winning picture books and is anchored in the Way-In and Stay-In books. It continues by presenting a text cluster on the topic of homelessness, along with a variety of research-based instructional strategies that K-8 teachers can use with this text cluster, as well as with other text clusters on controversial issues. It ends with some final thoughts.

Plurilingual and Literacy Competencies in Preschool

This chapter describes a didactic proposal with the main goal of introducing plurilingual and literacy competencies in early school years. Furthermore, the chapter offers a linguistic and intercultural analysis of two picture books that can be used at preschool to promote L2 learning and cultural awareness. Firstly, the legislation regarding preschool is commented on and related to L2 development and acquisition at this stage. Then secondly, children's literature is regarded as an intercultural vehicle and connected to “culture” in a preschool content and language integrated learning (CLIL) setting. Thirdly, two picture books are analysed with respect to their potential as language learning materials and cultural triggers, and finally, some brief reflections are made.

Gender Representation in Perpustakaan Intan

There is little research on gender-related children's picture books in Indonesia. In this article, we discuss the disclosure of gender representation in a picture book entitled Perpustakaan Intan. The high number appearances of women, the actions pinned on women, and the clothes displayed in both text and images are materials for visualizing women and men. Previous studies have revealed that men dominate the number of appearances in books. However, this book displays women more often than men. On the one hand, this raises the question of whether this means women are in power, and on the other hand, men are portrayed as powerless. Utilizing the multimodality approach, the results show that although women appear more in the narrative, women are still represented as less powerful.