Refugee-themed picture books for ethical understanding in curriculum English

This study looked at the curricular resource potential of refugee-themed picturebooks for embedding an ethics of responsibility for linguistic diversity into the subject of English studied by all students in English dominant western societies. Selected picturebooks were analysed in terms of a Levinasean ethics of responsibility for alterity (Ippolito, 2010) in order to probe the possibilities of a supplement or alternative to the ethics of empathy long established in the literary component of English. The analyses looked at the books as multimodal artefacts (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009; Mourão, 2012), understanding the linguistic modes of the texts from a translingual perspective (Canagarajah, 2014). This perspective construes language as mobile semiotic resources that are rendered meaningful through the performances of interlocutors in a given communicative situation. From the analyses, findings were produced about (1) representations of the monolingual sameness of everyday life in Australia as an English dominant society and (2) the translingual dispositions called forth when language variation enters into the linguistic text. It is concluded that the ethics of responsibility for alterity holds out promise for tapping the curricular resource potential of refugee-themed picturebooks for embedding ethics into the language awareness component sometimes incorporated into English.