We proudly present... : book trailer and lap books as methods for engaging with current children's literature at university

Abstract

Children's literature is firmly anchored as an independent module in the German didactics degree programme for primary school teachers at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. Student teachers attend at least one seminar and one lecture that introduce them to the development of children's literature as well as different genres. As part of this particular seminar, student teachers deal with current children's literature. Based on the nominations for the German Children‘s Literature Award, book trailers and lap books are developed. The central question of the teaching research project is to what extent do product-orientated methods contribute to an in-depth examination of the literary object. Do they help to recognise special features in the literary work, to work out central statements and to process them in a new literary-aesthetic way? This article will introduce the concept of the module and the methods in more detail. Based on individual works by student teachers, the aim is to detect how the examination of the book takes place and what effect can be achieved with it. The study takes a qualitative approach and reconstructs individual cases while building on the work of literary evaluation using booktubes or blogs (Brendel-Perpina, 2019). Based on the results, considerations are made on the importance of engaging with children's literature for the professionalization of primary school student teachers during their studies and the transfer to school (cf. Winkler, 2019; Maiwald, 2016).