Challenging Picturebooks and Domestic Geographies

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought new ways of facing the world and its multiple realities. Picturebooks, as a crossover genre, help in the process of understanding new contexts while offering literature as therapy. The new challenges of the 21st century require the implementation of methodologies that focus both on words and on other modes of representation to construct knowledge, and to this end, literacy education through challenging picturebooks involves paying attention to the diverse pedagogical demands of a global, aesthetic, and multimodal world. This chapter supports the notion of visual literacy as a multidimensional concept and proposes the approach to different picturebooks dealing with neighbours and neighbourhoods through the pedagogy of the multiliteracies, in order to enhance the transformation of the self and the global and local understanding of the current world. A learning path for teachers is designed according to the four knowledge processes: experiencing, conceptualizing, analyzing, and applying.