Author Identifier
Warwick Norman: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2160-7357
Date of Award
2026
Keywords
Metaficition, postmodern picturebooks, dialogic teaching principles, metafictive devices, critical literacy, critical visual literacy
Document Type
Thesis
Publisher
Edith Cowan University
Degree Name
Master of Education
School
School of Education
First Supervisor
Catherine Ferguson
Second Supervisor
Helen Adams
Third Supervisor
Amelia Ruscoe
Abstract
Picturebooks offer students the opportunity to develop deeper understandings of complex issues that surround their daily lives. This opportunity is further enhanced in a shared learning environment where open-ended comments and questions are used by teachers to stimulate children’s thinking and to invite them to search for explanations for their views and opinions.
The teachers best positioned to make better use of picturebooks for exploration of complex issues, are middle and upper primary classroom teachers. As dialogic interactions between teachers and students are critically important for student learning, dialogic teaching and its five principles of being collective, reciprocal, supportive, cumulative, and purposeful formed the framework for the research, based on the methodology of explanatory sequential mixed methods, and part of a pragmatic paradigm.
The research commenced with a quantitative survey to staff of five International Baccalaureate colleges, all based in the Western Australia metropolitan area. This was followed by a qualitative study of five participants, who volunteered to be involved in further research. All five came for the same college and were either Year 4 or Year 5 classroom teachers. They participated in a five-phase process, over a three-month timeframe. The phases included a pre-workshop interview, a two-part workshop to increase understandings of postmodern picturebooks and the principles of dialogic teaching, a post-workshop interview, a lesson observation, then completing the research with a post workshop interview and lesson review.
The research found that middle and upper primary classroom teachers involved in the study wanted to continue using postmodern picturebooks to teach critical visual literacy through a dialogic teaching approach in future lessons. There were differences in their approaches to exploring metafictive devices with students, but all discovered that the process offered more differentiation and a greater buy-in from their students than by their previous literacy teaching approaches.
For the future of upper primary teaching in a Western Australian context, it is hoped that by educating students on specific metafictive devices found in postmodern picturebooks, teachers will be better able to teach critical visual literacy in a differentiated environment where the students interact and explore the text through a dialogic approach.
Access Note
Access to this thesis is embargoed until 30th April 2027
Recommended Citation
Norman, W. K. (2026). Using metaficitive devices to explore the postmodern picturebook. Edith Cowan University. https://doi.org/10.25958/a0ps-kw44
Included in
Early Childhood Education Commons, Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research Commons