Early Childhood Education Commons^™

Picturebooks And Gender : Making Informed Choices For Equitable Early Childhood Classrooms., Kathryn F. Whitmore, Christie Angleton, Emily L. Zuccaro

Faculty Scholarship

We examine picturebooks through a feminist lens, understanding that children’s literature and media can limit and expand how young children access gender representations. We describe four categories that increase teacher knowledge to select books with multiple and varied gender representations for children in their classrooms. These four categories are gender binaries, discourses of childhood innocence, intersectionality, and heteronormativity. We illustrate each category with two quality books that maintain and disrupt each theme. We hope teachers will find the categories useful for thoughtfully selecting books for classroom libraries, read aloud, and discussion.