Making tutorial films on picturebooks in teacher education

Abstract

In this article we analyze two films about picturebooks, made in student-led groups in a children’s literature course at university level. We also investigate the self-assessments the students wrote. The assignment was designed to explore specific Norwegian picturebooks, in this case Snill (What a girl!) by Gro Dahle and Svein Nyhus and Garmanns hemmelighet (Garmann’s secret) by Stian Hole. Our aim is to highlight ways this assignment expanded the students’ knowledge on picturebooks and literature didactics. For this purpose, we build upon picturebook theory, theories on multimodality and theories on collaborative learning processes.

Our findings support results and ideas in other studies on how to use and produce multimodal artefacts and digitized media in collaborative learning contexts (Jewitt, 2006; Jewitt, 2013; Kress & Selander, 2011; Selander, 2015), and studies on the potential of collaborative teaching and learning processes, and of students’ self-assessments (Alexander, 2017). Both films present and discuss the interplay between words and images in ways that demonstrate solid knowledge of picturebook theory. The analyses also indicate that this kind of film-making project may foster a high degree of student engagement suited to achieve in-depth knowledge on topics within the field of children’s literature.