Children’s Books for Building Character and Empathy

Abstract

One focus of Invitational Theory and Practice is creating positive environments that summon each individual to “develop intellectually, socially, physically, emotionally, and morally” (Purkey & Novak, 2008). Children’s literature is a rich resource for teachers and parents to focus on emotional and moral development. This article will provide background information on the nature of literary response and the characteristics of literature that engender responses related to character and moral development. Examples and related activities teachers can use to help children process the stories will be shared. To appreciate the power of children’s literature to impact children’s character and empathy, it helps to examine the nature of literary response. In The Reader, the Text, and the Poem (1938), Louise Rosenblatt outlined her Literary Transaction Theory. As illustrated in Figure 1, each of us comes to the reading experience with our own set of background experiences. Those experiences will influence how we interpret the texts we read. This is also true for authors, who draw upon their own pools of experience in writing their books. The important thing to remember about this is that it is not static. As our experiences change, we will interpret texts in new and different ways. Authors may even come back to their own writings with new interpretations over time.