Research: Building Elementary Teacher Candidates’ Comfort and Knowledge for Selecting Children’s Literature Depicting Disabilities

Experiences with children’s literature can serve as bibliotherapy by building readers’ empathy, understanding, and comfort with disabled characters. However, elementary generalist teacher candidates rarely experience this learning in teacher education coursework focused on pedagogy. This exploratory formative design/development study found that teacher candidates’ self-reported comfort choosing children’s literature depicting disability significantly increased following reading and meeting an author of literature depicting disability. Specifically, despite concerns about navigating texts with outdated or offensive terminology, teacher candidates felt that their students could connect with these characters. Implications for teacher education are discussed.