Innate Justice in Children’s Books
A tool for interpreting and engaging with picture books
Throughout the course of my master’s degree and thesis writing, I developed a tool I believed would allow educators, parents, caregivers, etc. understand how a children’s book was supporting or hindering the emergence of our innate wisdom and sense of justice. This tool exists and operates within an innate justice framework. Read this article to learn more about what I mean by “innate justice.”
The purpose of developing an innate justice framework was not only to provide a holistic approach to children’s literature, it was also to help teachers and parents identify a book’s hindrances and nourishments and, in turn, understand how to engage with children and the story in ways that supports the emergence of innate justice.
But I don’t expect all teachers and parents to have the ability to sit down with a one-hundred-plus page thesis, digest its contents, and regurgitate it into practical skills for read-aloud or bedtime stories.
This was how the reflection tool came to be. In the early days of kid-lit analyses, I felt lost. Similar to current critical approaches, general reviews of early children’s books (the Horn Book, Kirkus Reviews, New York Times, etc.) were siloed by genre, topic, demographic, themes of justice…
