Recently, I had a chance to read “The Durable,
Dynamic Nature of Genre and Science: A Purpose-Driven Typology of Science Trade
Books” by Professor Laura May and five of her Georgia State University
colleagues. The article appeared in the September 2019 issue of Reading Research Quarterly, which is published
by the International Literacy Association.
I’ll be honest. The title gave me absolutely no hint of what the article
was about, but I trusted the person who sent it to me, and the term “science
trade books” sounded promising. So I decided to give it a whirl, and boy am I
glad I did.
The article describes a study in which the six researchers read and analyzed
the 400 children’s books that appeared on the National Science Teachers
Association’s (NSTA) Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K-12 (OSTB) list
between 2010 and 2017. This list includes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry titles.
In a nutshell, the researchers identified two broad, function-based categories
of science books for children:
Accepted Knowledge: These books explain/describe widely-accepted
science knowledge or concepts and typically have an expository writing style.
Lived Lives of Scientists: These books explore the nature of
science or scientific inquiry (how people develop and change scientific understandings).
They feature a narrative writing style and chronological sequence text
structure.
The researchers divided each of these categories into various subgroups,
which they call “genres.” Overall, the “typology” the researchers developed to
better understand the range of OSTBs has a lot in common with my 5 Kinds of Nonfiction classification system, which is both
exciting and reassuring.
should “leverage science trade book genres to support the different components of
science education.” In other words, all the OSTB books have educational value,
but should be used in different ways based on their characteristics. While Accepted
Knowledge books work well for introducing and reinforcing NGSS’s Disciplinary
Core Ideas, Lived Lives of Scientists books are generally better suited for
demonstrating the NGSS’s eight Science Practices in action.
But there’s also a takeaway for the creators of these books. The
researchers’ genre categories reveal patterns, or trends, that are worth studying
because they show what works. They provide an overview of the techniques children’s
book writers have used to present the “what” and “how” of science in manuscripts
that were acquired by publishers and then selected as models of excellence by NSTA’s
panel of experts.
Thank you, Dr. May, for giving science writers a powerful new tool for
thinking about how to organize the ideas and information we collect and then select
a lens for sharing the science concepts and processes we’re passionate about with
young readers.
This post first appeared on Darcy Pattison’s blog on March 17, as part of a blog series leading up to the 2020 NSTA conference.
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One Response
Interesting, Melissa. Here is the link to read the article. Fee may be required. https://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/rrq.274