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Abstract

Little Red Riding Hood is a story hundreds of years old and is most commonly known for its central message, don’t talk to strangers. This is an important message to convey to young children, but with a plethora of contemporary versions of Little Red Riding Hood living in classrooms and libraries around the world, it becomes increasingly more obvious that more can be gleaned from these diverse versions of Little Red Riding Hood than one simple moral. In light of this, I seek to understand the connections between themes commonly found in immigrant children’s literature and themes found in diverse versions of Little Red Riding Hood. To explore this topic, I examined ten different picture book versions of Little Red Riding Hood for immigrant literature themes. I used an inductive qualitative model, and framed the study using critical content analysis (Johnson et al., 2016). While exploring the texts and illustrations of the books, I considered specific immigrant literature themes: language, culture, names, power, difference, and representation. Rosenblatt’s (1994) theory of transactional reading and Butler’s (1995) For a Careful Reading offer insight into the unrealized potential hidden within a text and its illustrations. The findings buttress the notion that while gathering a central moral to a story can be beneficial, there remain equally or more beneficial themes to be gleaned when teachers are afforded time and energy to pursue quality children’s literature for their early childhood and elementary classrooms.

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