Award Date

May 2025

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Communication

First Committee Member

Emma Bloomfield

Second Committee Member

David Gruber

Third Committee Member

Nicholas Tatum

Fourth Committee Member

Katherine Walker

Number of Pages

140

Abstract

Children’s books are some of the earliest forms of entertainment and education a person will interact with in their lifetime. Simultaneously weaving a tale and teaching a lesson, children’s books, therefore, have the great potential to communicate important lessons and mindsets at young ages. Utilizing narrative theory (Fisher, 1984) and ecocriticism (Glotfelty, 1996), while also considering environmental ideologies and narrative components (Bloomfield, 2024), this study explores the functions of environmental children’s books and how they might communicate environmental messaging and encourage ecological thinking. Following a narrative analysis of 46 environmental children’s books, the results of this study indicate that there are three primary functions to environmental children’s books—pedagogy, representation, and identification—that work together to encourage young readers to behave and think ecologically. Significantly, environmental children’s books place a great emphasis on visual aids and illustrations—an essential component to this medium but missing from narrative theory—and foster ecological action, in both image and words.

Keywords

activism; Children's books; environmental; messaging; narratives; Storytellling

Disciplines

Communication | Environmental Education

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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