Future teachers facing children's and young adult literature texts: the reading diary as a strategy for their literary training

Abstract

The discovering of children's literature is one of the current challenges in teacher education. The balance between compulsory reading and reading for pleasure, as well the development of interpretative skills, requires the search for new strategies. This paper presents an experience involving students of the Early Childhood Education Degree (N=103), based on the use of a reading diary as a learning support tool. Students were required to keep a personal diary documenting their reflections on the readings made in the course “Teaching Children's Literature”. They submitted entries periodically in order to receive feedback from their lecturers, culminating in the submission of a final document. The aim is to explore the perceptions of both students and instructors regarding this strategy. To this end, two questionnaires were used to gather information on the learning outcomes achieved, and the challenges encountered throughout the process. Both students and lecturers considered that the diary facilitated a deeper engagement with the texts and encouraged the development of more personal and elaborated reader responses. Students reported difficulties mainly related to textual organisation and writing skills, whereas lecturers highlighted the workload involved in supervising this task. The study concludes that the reading diary is an effective strategy for the training of future mediators.