This paper examines how picturebooks create dialogic spaces in which young children articulate and extend their understandings of human rights. Drawing on a qualitative study with children aged 5 to 9 in three primary schools in England, it explores how literary engagement and participatory methods support meaning-making around concepts often viewed as too complex for young learners. Picturebooks function as mediating texts for human rights dialogue, enabling children to explore the rights and freedoms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The study is informed by reader response and narrative perspectives that view meaning-making as emerging through interaction between reader, text and context (Sipe, 2008), alongside contemporary picturebook scholarship foregrounding multimodality and children’s active interpretive engagement (Arizpe and Styles, 2016). Children engaged in whole-text discussions of Dreams of Freedom, created rights-themed pages and participated in focus groups. An Integrated Framework for Analysing Children’s Responses to Picturebooks traced analytical reasoning, personal connection, intertextual reference and affective response. Visual analysis and poetic inquiry were used to examine and represent children’s contributions. Findings show that children move fluidly between text and lived experience, drawing on family narratives and peer dialogue to negotiate meanings of rights. Across the data, dimensions of thinking emerged that may not always be visible through discussion alone. The paper reflects on participation and power in researching children’s ideas and argues that combining an integrated response framework with visual analysis and poetic inquiry offers rigorous ways to recognise children’s voice, agency and critical imagination within literacy research and classroom contexts.

Authors:
Rebecca Simpson-Hargreaves, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

About the Presenter(s)
Rebecca Simpson-Hargreaves is currently a Senior Lecturer in Education at the University of Manchester. Her interests lie in empowerment of children through classroom practice, in particular through poetry and children's literature.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rsimpsonhargreaves

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