Children's Ethical Reasoning and Meaning-making Through Wordless Picture Books: A Multiple Case Study

Abstract

This study investigates how young children engage with wordless picture books in relation to their ethical reasoning and meaning-making processes. Conducted as a qualitative multiple case study encompassing five cases and a total of 25 children, the research is based on analyses of data derived from classroom interactions and children's drawings. The findings indicate that wordless visual narratives enable children to interpret emotions, reason through uncertainty, consider multiple narrative possibilities simultaneously, and develop ethical evaluations. Emotional interpretation was identified as the starting point of interaction with the narrative, with these interpretations orienting children toward ethical themes such as care, responsibility, justice, exclusion, and harm. The absence of written text supported children's open, flexible, and probabilistic engagement with narratives; in particular, moments in which the boundaries between imagination and reality were temporarily suspended strengthened exploratory and dialogic meaning making. Children's interpretations were grounded in experience-based contexts, including family life, school experiences, peer relationships, and environmental awareness. The study also reveals that children are positioned not only as interpreters but also as subjects who develop ethical and narrative agency. Overall, the findings demonstrate that wordless picture books offer powerful narrative tools that support emotional, ethical, and context-sensitive meaning-making in early childhood literacy contexts.