Social-Emotional Intelligence and Picture Books: Visual Modality as a Challenging Stimulus for Discussion with Preschoolers
Social-Emotional Intelligence and Picture Books: Visual Modality as a Challenging Stimulus for Discussion with Preschoolers Katerina Dermata Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Greece Abstract. The chapter explores how illustration offers young readers a range of visual challenges in interpreting the emotions and the social-emotional skills demonstrated by literary characters when reading picture books. Literature studies focus either in the texts or in the response of the readers; our research attempts to combine two aspects: the creation and the interpretation. The author studies the choices of the creators – emphasizing on the illustration, and how those choices affect children’s interpretation. To achieve this, the author applies a dual research design called the Social-Emotional Profile (SEP) and Book-based Social Emotional Thinking (BEST). The first approach focuses on visual elements that sketch the social-emotional skills of the literary characters. The second approach is an empirical program of reading with preschoolers to explore the way young readers interpret social-emotional skills based on the visual elements. This work involves an experimental process which combines theory from the fields of children’s literature and cognitive literary approach, visual studies, social-emotional intelligence and applied educational research. The corpus of the study consists of five Greek awarded children’s books published from 2014 to 2017. The initial findings indicate that discussing with preschoolers about the social-emotional profile of the literary characters is a challenging procedure, due to the complex nature of picture books and the special characteristics of preschoolers as readers. Insights gained from the implementing the procedure identify visual elements and choices made by the creators as playing key roles to the interpretation of the SEP of the literary characters. Keywords: Critical thinking, emotional-social skills, picture books, preschool education, visual perception Read Full Text Here
