This dissertation presents a framework for using children’s literature as part of an elementary preservice teacher preparation program in a more inclusive and cross-curricular manner. This humanities-oriented study draws on Matthews’s (1982) Philosophy of Childhood as an additional conceptualization of childhood that transcends more typical psychological and sociological foundations in teacher education. Using repeated and recursive readings of key texts from the fields of education, library science, and English, I provide insight into delineations and connections that apply to children’s literature in teacher education. Analysis of scholarship, children’s literature texts and teaching stories provides important understandings in the development of this multidisciplinary framework. This framework can also be read as a teaching repertoire and as such represents multiple roles enacted in the pursuit of teaching children’s literature. These roles are teacher as reading coach, literary critic, and reading curator. The author argues that preservice teachers need to experience each of these three roles as students and readers in children’s literature coursework. It is through these new and expanded experiences, as well as explicit metacognitive modeling, that preservice teachers are guided towards the possibility of enacting a more complex pedagogy with children’s literature.
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