“Meow meOW MEOWWW,” the student read, getting louder. Embodying Mr. Wuffles, he started hissing and scratching at the pages, until a classmate interjected, “I don’t think this is what cats sound like”. The student then pointed to the open page of the wordless book Mr. Wuffles!, which featured an illustration of Mr. Wuffles (a cat) wrestling with a miniature spaceship. Still concerned by his classmate’s interjection, he looked at me and asked if he was reading the right way. Suddenly pulled from being an observer to an active participant in their discussion, I was taken aback. I have been observing and getting to know wordless picture books, witnessing how they invite students to engage in interactive storytelling and narrative freedom over what to say and how to say it. To dictate how a student should read a wordless book felt like a contradiction.
This winter, I started my CONNECT Research Internship with Dr. Christine Lee and Demonstration Teacher Arlen Nava in the primary dual language classrooms. I’ve had the opportunity to observe students as they read and tell stories with wordless picture books. Recently, the class discussed the importance of narrating stories from a perspective. Students are invited to demonstrate how a wordless book can be narrated from either a third-person or first-person perspective. In the vignette above, the students were playing with telling stories from different perspectives, with the moment described above showing the student was reading as the cat (Mr. Wuffles) in the first-person.
These moments of experimenting with perspective and narration at the Lab School remind me of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 2000), when Freire discusses the problematic practice of information merely being narrated, or deposited into students by the teacher – which he terms the banking concept of education. To Freire, the banking concept of education results in a “narration sickness”:
“This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient, listening objects (the students). The contents, whether values or empirical dimensions of reality, tend in the process of being narrated to become lifeless and petrified. Education is suffering from narration sickness” (Freire, 2000, p. 71)
When the content of learning is narrated solely by the teacher to the students, it becomes “petrified,” or stagnant. This is Freire’s “narration sickness”: the surrounding world is set in stone and unchanging, with very little agency for students to explore and learn. Wordless books, with their distinct lack of a pre-written narrative, invite students to become the narrators themselves, rather than being narrated to. For me, the student who read Mr. Wuffles! as Mr. Wuffles demonstrated how wordless books offer a cure to narration sickness because they allow students to narrate in the first-person as they see the world. Rather than being petrified, Mr. Wuffles is brought to life through sound and emotion in the student’s own way.
I also saw how wordless books supported students in having agency over how and who got to narrate stories. For example, while reading Polo and Lily, one student was reading as Polo in the first-person, then switched to reading in the third-person for Lily. Another student interrupted him and reminded, pointing to Lily, “No, no no, that’s Amy. That’s Amy.” Amy was another student the group had pre-assigned to read as Lily, and the students associated Lily’s parts of the story as something Amy was responsible for. This was because the students not only began to view themselves as the narrator, but identify themselves as the characters in the story. Just as the students are dynamic and living, so are the characters. They aligned, granting time to a character and granting time to themselves, and since the books are wordless, they freely negotiate amongst themselves how narration is shared. Thus, not only do the students confront narration sickness in terms of the books’ content, but also in recognizing that whoever gets to narrate gets to control the story.
Far from “dull and petrified,” the story becomes malleable, with meaning actively constructed by who gets to narrate. As one student articulated during a group discussion, practicing reading in the first-person “helps you to write your own book in the future.” In other words, these wordless books offer narrative freedom, which positions the students as authors, rather than mere readers of a story. This is a clear deviation from the passive reading and listening they would conduct under banking education’s narration sickness.
While recording these observations, I was struck by wordless books’ narrative freedom (loud noises, interjections, and debates over who gets to read), which would otherwise be labeled as “disruptive.” But I think that’s the perfect antidote to Freire’s “narration sickness.” As students are given the chance to become the narrator, rather than the narrated to, what’s thought of as “correct” becomes flexible. Knowledge of the world is not stagnant, but something the students have an active role in constructing and experimenting with.
I even learned to reassess my own biases resulting from narration sickness. When I first entered the classroom and began recording data, I would often ask Dr. Lee questions like, “What do we do if a student is making a lot of loud, random noises while reading?” or “Do we still transcribe if a student is goofing around?” Implicit in my questions was a fear that students would disrupt something, some “proper” flow, or narration, of knowledge. But as I spent more time with the students and wordless books, I came to recognize that “disruption” is exactly what’s happening, and that’s a good thing. The wordless books offer a welcome disruption from being narrated to, into becoming the narrator.
References
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). Bloomsbury Academic.
Kathalia (Kat) Wong is a third-year UCLA student double majoring in English and Education Social Transformation, with a minor in Professional Writing. She is interested in studying how literacy can encourage students’ metacognition and sense of educational autonomy. She joined as a CONNECT Research Intern under Dr. Christine Lee’s supervision in Winter 2026.
This blog post comes from CONNECT research project, Storytelling with Wordless Books. Questions about this study can be directed to Dr. Christine Lee, clee@labschool.ucla.edu.