Dinosaur Roar
The aim of the Dinosaur Roar project is to review popular children’s dinosaur encyclopaedias and set out recommendations for good pedagogical design for a new series of encyclopaedias.
In 2021, Dr Aneesh Barai and Dr Yinka Olusoga were commissioned by the children’s entertainment and scientific education company Nurture Rights to support their design for new educational material around dinosaurs. Nurture Rights reviewed the market of children’s dinosaur encyclopaedias and identified the four most popular English-language encyclopaedias, and the researchers undertook a reflexive thematic analysis of the encyclopaedias in relation to how they taught scientific concepts.
This work built on the expertise of Dr Barai in critically analysing children’s literature and media, and Dr Olusoga’s in the social construction of children and childhood in art and popular culture. Aneesh and Yinka are also both long-standing dinosaur fans, fascinated with them since our own childhoods, and so were delighted to take on this project. This project was funded by the Northern Powerhouse Innovation Fund (NPIF).
The main goal of the research was to inform the development of child-friendly and pedagogically-sound material for future dinosaur-related materials, and more broadly for scientific education for children. The initial steer from Nurture Rights invited us to think about, among other elements: the use of language, the passing of time, and the representations of scale and size, and to analyse four dinosaur encyclopaedias by Usborne and DK that were the highest-selling in their genre at the time.
We analysed the ways that these books were designed, their interactive elements (such as pop-up parts and quizzes), the ways the integrated visual elements, attempted to make the world of dinosaurs accessible to a young audience, and the soundness of their approach to explaining scientific concepts. Further, we noted the importance, and the significant lack, of diversity in the types of children represented in these books, finally the multisensory ways that they sometimes sought to engage their child readers.
Overall, our final report identified numerous strengths and areas for development in the ways that dinosaur encyclopaedias currently engage and education child readers, and Nurture Rights felt empowered by our report to create their own highly effective, inclusive and child-friendly encyclopaedia.
Principal Investigators: Dr Aneesh Barai, Lecturer in Education and Children’s Culture, School of Education; Dr Yinka Olusoga, Lecturer in Education, School of Education.