Rereading the Past, Imagining Just Futures: A Generative Method of Historicizing Forced Displacement in Children’s Literature

Abstract

Based on critical content analyses of picturebooks about children who have sought refuge, we outline a scaffolded method for social studies teachers and teacher educators to historicize forced displacement in children’s literature. The method integrates critical literacy, culturally sustaining pedagogies, and inquiry-based social studies frameworks to work toward anti-racist decolonizing stances in education. Drawing from excerpts of representative picturebooks, we share generative questions and instructional resources that invite both teachers and students to investigate the historical and sociopolitical contexts of these narratives, and to deliberately construct counter-narratives, challenging underlying values and assumptions that reproduce persistent hierarchies of power. A generative method of historicizing forced displacement in children’s literature aims to nurture critical understanding of geopolitical interconnectedness of countries and cultures, and to develop a sense of shared responsibility for preventing and addressing forced displacement as a collective humanitarian injustice.

Keywords:

• Children’s literature
• critical literacy
• forced displacement
• refugees
• critical refugee studies