We Liked Reading with You as it Was Something We Chose to Do: Situating Reading Picturebooks in the Lives of Children: An Exploration of Children, Reading and Identity in a School Setting.

This thesis is concerned with minority children reading picturebooks. The research question privileges pupil voice on the question of the everyday experience of learning to read at school. It explores minority children’s interactions with the picturebook at school, from their own perspectives. The research also considers children’s identifications and disidentifications with themes and characters in multicultural picturebooks. The overarching theoretical approach focuses upon viewing reading as a social practice, and on foregrounding the materiality of the book as an object for study, as well as upon seeing children as social actors. The study is distinctive in its use of participative methods. The research design included a peer research element, where older children were trained to take on the role of interviewer. Fieldwork consisted of one year of qualitative research in a multicultural central London primary school. The main findings were unexpected; the children reflected in complex ways upon the organisation and hierarchies of reading they encountered at school, and reading was a practice highly fraught with emotion. Books were used as a site for resistance, and agency against adults, messages in the books themselves and what the children saw as desirable ‘not’ to be. Race and friendship are two key dimensions negotiated by the children in their discussions of multicultural book illustrations with their classmates. Many children in the research did not speak English at home, and narratives about faith, language, and migration were significant in the children’s constructions of their own subjectivities built from, and projected onto the books we read