Everyone in the Honors College at ECU is required to complete a Signature Honors Project before graduation. There are two options for the project - a group project with the group we are put in during our freshman year Honors courses or an individual thesis project. I chose the thesis option so I could do something related to my major, and my classmate and friend Hannah and I found a way to work on the project together. Hannah is a Secondary English Education major who is also a Centennial Fellow and a Maynard scholar. Since my area of study is elementary and hers is secondary, we both did a content analysis on disability-focused books we might use in the classroom, but I focused on picture books and she focused on young adult novels. Because Hannah and I technically completed separate projects even though we worked on them together, her project is not on this website, but if you are interested in the portrayal of disabilities in young adult literature, feel free to contact me by filling out the form on the home page of this site and I can ask Hannah for information regarding the results of her project.
We chose to complete a content analysis as our Signature Honors Project because we both love books, and as a reading concentration and an English major, we will both be teaching with books practically all the time in our future careers and in our practicums and internship. We needed to learn how to analyze the books we put in our classroom libraries and use in lesson plans so in the future, we can make sure to create inclusive, literacy-rich environments in our classrooms. Inclusivity in teaching literacy means not only providing and using books that include minority populations (people of color, very young children, the elderly, people with disabilities, etc.), but also using these books to teach standards and springboard conversations about equity and ultimately normalize the idea that everyone is different and has unique strengths to bring to the community.
The unfortunate reality is many disability-focused book that are published do not show positive yet realistic portrayals of individuals with disabilities in children's literature (Brenna, 2009), and few critical studies have been conducted on such books to analyze the portrayal of disability in children's literature (Koc, Koc, & Ozdemir, 2010). Picture books can be used to promote positive views of individuals with disabilities when they are written with accuracy and sensitivity but can unintentionally perpetuate harmful stereotypes and promote negative views of and interactions with people with disabilities if not written well. Therefore, it is important that educators are aware of what portrayals of characters with disabilities are appropriate for classroom use and what portrayals could harm students or cause them to think incorrectly about disability (Koc, Koc, & Ozdemir, 2010).
To begin the project, I read works by other scholars and professionals in the fields of disability studies, education, and literature. The types of works I read included general information about teaching students with disabilities, how disability and other minority populations are represented and constructed in disabilities, tips for analyzing disability-focused literature, and other examples of content analyses on different topics. I completed an abstract on each work after reading to make a note of how these works might help me in my project. These are the works that comprised the Literature Review section of my final paper, embedded in the "Final Content Analysis Paper" tab of this site and are further discussed in the Discussion section of the same paper.
After the review of literature, I completed an annotated bibliography on three children's picture books and one short young adult novel, each containing a character with a disability; this paper is embedded in the "Annotated Bibliography" tab of this site. To complete this annotated bibliography, I used Bersani and Myers's (2008/2009) recommendations for analyzing children's books for ableism. The four books analyzed were: My Three Best Friends and Me, Zulay by Cari Best, Just Because by Rebecca Elliott, Be Good to Eddie Lee by Virginia Fleming, and Girls Like Us by Gail Giles.
Next came the biggest chunk of work and the "big dance" of the project, as Papa Elf would say: the content analysis. I conducted my content analysis on the following four children's picture books: Silent Star by Bill Wise, The Girl Who Thought in Pictures by Julia Finley Mosca, Emmanuel's Dream by Laurie Ann Thompson, and Just Ask! by Sonia Sotomayor. I first read through each book one time without making notes of any kind, then read through the books for coding purposes. I coded for three main research questions and a miscellaneous category for each book; my research questions are as follows:
1. Who tells the story of individuals with disabilities? Do authors have disabilities, have family members or close friends with disabilities, or have they done extensive research and talked to people with disabilities before writing the books?
2. What challenges do characters with disabilities face in children’s literature and how do they overcome these challenges?
3.What types of relationships are shown between characters with disabilities and characters without disabilities?
I used color-coded sticky notes to code each book for each question and then put quotes from the text and my own comments into charts for each question for each book. This is Short's (2016) process for critical content analyses and is described in more detail in my final paper. Once I finished coding each book, I wrote the final paper, one section at a time, which includes my review of literature, theoretical framework, methodology, findings, and discussion.
There were a lot more steps involved in the project, including making the big decision not to do a group project, finding a faculty mentor - two of them actually, wonderful professors within the College of Education, deciding what do to, deciding which dimension of diversity to analyze, choosing books to analyze, finding places to present, making sure I was registered for the semester hours I get for completing the project, and a whole lot of rewriting and rewriting the many papers I wrote throughout this project. But I won't go into all those details. :)