Reading to think. The non-fiction picturebook in the development of critical thinking

Abstract

Among the educational challenges to be faced by the information society, the development of critical thinking is one of the objectives most highlighted in reports and curricular plans. Such an objective is proposed with the intention of building democratic societies, which is in turn a complex and difficult goal to concretise in teaching programmes. In this sense, in-depth reading, argumentative skills and information competency are often identified as necessary skills that require the coexistence of printed and digital formats, according to various studies. Within this framework, the non-fiction picturebook aimed at children favours these skills due to its characteristics, as can be concluded from this study. Thus, based on the review of the catalogues of 61 publishers and the analysis of 250 non-fictional works, the keys to the construction of these books are presented through the selection of a representative corpus that is provided as a proposed reading programme in Primary Education. Titles such as Supongamos (Da Coll, 2015), or La declaración de los derechos de las niñas y los niños (Brami y Billon-Spagnol, 2018) are therefore considered to be particularly appropriate for training critical readers.