Student Teachers and Kindergarten Children Talking about Picturebooks Focusing School in Didactic Research Labs at University

Abstract

As part of the project “Lehren, Lernen und Forschen in Werkstätten” (Teaching, Learning and Researching in Laboratories) from 2016 to 2019, seminars on German language and literature didactics were held at the “Lern- und Forschungswerkstatt Grundschule” (LuFo, Primary Education Research Lab) at the Technische Universität (TU) of Dresden. The seminars, which were attended by student primary school teachers, dealt with telling stories using wordless picturebooks, reading aloud picturebooks about school or other topics. The student teachers dealt with selected picturebooks from the perspective of literature didactics, visual literacy studies and empirical research on reading engagement. They designed didactic arrangements (different kinds of didactically based activities by students with children in a literary-aesthetic context) following the principles of inquiry-based learning and invited kindergarten and primary school children to the LuFo to explore the stories told in the picturebooks together. The study is based on the student teachers' seminar papers in which they describe their projects, give didactic reasons for the selection of literature and analyse their interactions with the children around the picturebooks. Using the example of picturebooks about school, the study uses Key Incident Analysis to ask which books the student teachers chose and how they read them, how they talked to and interacted with the children about them and how they shaped the reading situations. Finally, they asked how they reflected on their own learning processes. The results give an insight into both the processes of reflection of the primary school student teachers and the processes of literary learning of the children.