Visual Literacy in Teacher Education: Narrative Reconstruction and AI Mediation in Warja Lavater’s Cendrillon

This study examines the development of visual literacy in teacher education through a classroom experience based on Cendrillon, the coded picturebook by Warja Lavater. The activity required students to reconstruct the sequence of the book’s twenty scenes, assign each scene to a narrative phase, provide a verbal description, and generate a new version of the story using generative artificial intelligence. The participants were 234 students from undergraduate teacher education degrees and the Master’s Degree in Educational Research, organized into 52 subgroups and classified according to their reading habits and self-reported familiarity with traditional fairy tales. Data were analyzed using indicators of sequential reconstruction, distribution of narrative phases, verbal description, and AI-mediated narrative reformulation. The results showed that, descriptively, groups with stronger reading habits achieved higher overall scores in the sequential reconstruction task; however, these differences did not reach statistical significance in the exploratory inferential models, and self-reported familiarity with traditional folktales alone did not guarantee greater accuracy. Narrative phase assignment was predominantly concentrated in the development of the story, while verbal descriptions followed a different pattern from the sequential ordering. The AI-generated stories retained part of the students’ original vocabulary but incorporated a greater proportion of newly generated lexical items. The findings suggest that coded picturebooks provide a valuable framework for examining visual literacy as a process involving narrative reconstruction, verbal transduction, and critical engagement with generative artificial intelligence.