For her doctoral dissertation, “Reading Power With and Through Dolly Parton's Imagination Library: A Critical Content Analysis,” Jennifer Stone, MS, CCC-SLP, examined the 60 books provided by Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library (DPIL) to the children who entered kindergarten in 2022. Established in 1995, DPIL is a book gifting program that mails free books to children in participating areas from birth until age five.

Millions of children nationwide received the books. Today the program is publicly funded for all children in 21 states. Given the wide reach of the program—which is expected to continue expanding—Stone undertook this research because of her desire to understand how the discourses of race, gender, class, ability, and literacy are represented in books that are distributed to an entire community. Stone, who successfully defended her dissertation this semester and will receive her PhD in May, received the James J. Gallagher Dissertation Award from the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute (FPG) in 2023.

She says that this common reading experience provides a community literacy environment, which she investigated through both deductive and inductive methods. Through a page-by-page analysis of the texts, she examined the frequency and types of mentions of race, gender, class, ability, and literacy. In addition, she explored how these elements were represented and the impact they might have on families who read the books.

She discovered that DPIL—which she says is evidence-oriented and interested in best practices—chooses books that do a good job of including frequent representations of racial diversity, with inclusive pictures and illustrations. However, there is less authentic representation of authors and illustrators, with mostly white illustrators and authors creating stories about children of color. All the books perpetuate gender norms and heteronormative relationships. Similarly, the distributed books lack diverse family structure relationships and focus on the middle class. Additionally, characters’ families in books rarely engage in the family reading practice the books are intended to promote.

This spring, Stone shared her findings with the leadership at the Dollywood Foundation, which runs the library. She noted that the books often conflate race and gender; the five families in the books who do not live in single-family homes are all families of color. Some of their apartments are depicted as places from which children needed to or wanted to escape. The books do not represent diversity of ability, since all the characters are portrayed as fit and able. Stone says that while her research was well received, she does not know if it will impact the book selection process.

The Imagination Library is committed to the idea of choosing books that are not political, says Stone. She says that the leadership believe that if they choose politically fueled books, parents might discard them, which will be detrimental to reading. “Children who have two mommies or two daddies are political in the United States,” she says. “I think that the Dollywood leaders were surprised to learn that there were no characters with disabilities in the books, but I don't think they were surprised by the heteronormativity. They see excluding diverse family structures as a way to remain apolitical and keep the focus on reading.”

In her inductive analysis, Stone discovered three themes: reading to succeed; living the American dream; and perfecting parenting. She says that these reflect the idea that everybody can grow up and live the American dream if they follow the standard path. In Stone’s perception, the reading tips included on the flaps of the books distributed by the library place a heavy burden on parents as the responsible parties for ensuring their children are ready for kindergarten.

“I am concerned about putting pressure on parents,” she says. “I have a great deal of interest in supporting parents, listening to them, and understanding their lived experiences and wisdom and supporting them in resisting the pressures that I see society placing on them.” She believes that the United States needs to do a better job supporting parents and recognizing that systems must be in place to ensure families’ success.  She says that the DPIL collection of books has a theme of childism, seeing children as being less than other citizens in society, with the expectation that children’s job is to grow up and be part of society rather than being valued for who they are in each moment.

Stone is collaborating with other students doing similar evaluations on collections of books. Using a rubric she created for her research, she specializes in conducting intersectional critical content analyses. She notes that many of the content analyses she utilized during her research used a single perspective, viewed with a lens such as race or disability. Stone combined these different perspectives, which is unique in the field, to better understand how characters are represented within these thematic collections.

In addition to publishing her work in academic journals, Stone is launching a consulting practice focused on intersectional work. She is working with parents and agencies that specialize in early childhood to catalyze relationships that center liberatory thinking. Liberatory thinking is recognizing our own assumptions about ourselves and others so that we can interrupt the biases that undermine our relationships, then nurture equitable relationships. Stone says that when parents, caregivers, teachers, and policy makers engage in liberatory thinking, they work first to recognize the cultural biases that affect their beliefs about children, then reimagine their practices so that they honor children’s agency, instead of shaping their behavior. By doing so, she believes, people and agencies investing in early childhood programs can unleash children’s natural empathy, compassion, curiosity, and creativity―resources our society needs desperately today.

Stone says that the Gallagher Award was a huge honor particularly since it was decided on by her FPG colleagues. “The award felt like a vote of confidence in this work that I felt a little tender about,” she says. “The impetus of this research was my experience and concern about how I had contributed to systemic oppressions. The award felt like my colleagues saying, 'This is important work that matters to us and our communities.'”