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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Deconstructing Stereotypes Through Reading Children’s Literature as Intergenerational Play: The Case of the Stepmother

subject

description

One of the key roles within stepfamilies, the role of stepmother has been and still is stigmatized with an aura of wickedness, produced by folk and fairy tales as well as by the media. As a review of theoretical frameworks of children’s literature indicates, there is a shortage of methodological proposals for handling such controversial topics in literary education. Thus, the objective of this chapter is to present and test a methodology for analyzing the capacity of children’s literature to shape social understanding of such intergenerational topics. This study was based on the exploration of the picture book by Gonzalez and Alberdi entitled La novia de papa tambien me quiere (My Dad’s Girlfriend Loves Me Too, 2009) in Spain. I propose a three-stage method which uses picture books addressing the aforementioned issue. My findings show that students interact with picture books, merging their own stories with the literary one in order to achieve a better understanding of what a stepmother is.