The Problem with Cartwheel’s Blankets: How My Two Blankets Depicts Language Learning

Dr Kylie Zee Bradfield is a Lecturer in the School of Learning and Teaching within the Faculty of Education, Monash University.

In classrooms around the world, including in Australia, linguistic diversity is increasingly common. Many children arrive at school with rich repertoires of languages, dialects, stories, and cultural knowledge. At the same time, the books we offer them can sometimes tell a more limited story about language, learning, and belonging. Children’s literature has enormous power: it can affirm identities, build empathy, and open windows into unfamiliar worlds. But it can also, at times, reinforce narrow ideas about language and identity, especially when particular experiences are presented as typical or inevitable.

One of the most celebrated Australian picturebooks about migration, My Two Blankets by Irena Kobald and Freya Blackwood, offers a useful example of this tension. Beautifully illustrated and emotionally resonant, it has been widely praised for depicting some of the challenges of adjusting to a new country. But when we look closely at how the book represents language learning, another story may also be present and one that doesn’t always align with contemporary understandings of multilingual children’s identities and linguistic lives.

A Beautiful Book with a Potentially Narrow Message

In My Two Blankets, Cartwheel, a young refugee, arrives in a new country where the language feels like a waterfall of strange sounds. Her home language is represented through the metaphor of a warm, comforting old blanket, and the new language becomes a new blanket she must gradually weave for herself.

It’s a powerful image, and one that many children and adults find moving. However, the metaphor can also carry an ideology we may not always pause to question: the idea that languages exist in separate, sealed-off spaces. In this story, Cartwheel’s languages don’t appear to touch, overlap, mix, or influence one another. Learning the new language is depicted as weaving an entirely separate blanket, rather than drawing on a full linguistic repertoire that might be integrated in more complex ways. For some monolingual readers, this can be a particularly accessible narrative. But it may not reflect the lived language practices of many multilingual children, whose communication often includes overlap, movement, and hybridity across languages and modes.

Real Multilingualism Often Isn’t Two Blankets: It’s More Like a Woven Tapestry

Research in language education and sociolinguistics often presents a more dynamic picture of multilingualism. Rather than treating their languages as fully separate systems in everyday practice, many children draw creatively and fluidly on their linguistic resources. They may blend, mix, borrow, and shift (sometimes within the same interaction) depending on audience, context, and purpose. This is frequently discussed as translanguaging, and it is commonly understood not as confusion, but as a communicative strength!

Many multilingual children may, for example:

• use more than one language strategically to communicate

• draw on home languages to make sense of school learning

• shift between languages depending on context, audience, and purpose

• experience their languages as interconnected, even if they sometimes keep them separate in particular settings

  
  

Importantly, linguistic diversity can be an extraordinary resource, especially when children’s full repertoires are recognised and valued. When multilingualism is depicted as two separate blankets, it can unintentionally reinforce the idea that children must “leave behind” their original language to succeed in the new one. It may also suggest that maintaining a home language makes learning a new language harder. Many researchers argue that strong home-language development can support additional language learning and broader academic growth.

So while having two blankets is a compelling metaphor, many children’s multilingual experiences might look less like separation and more like an evolving, interwoven repertoire…something closer to one large, warm, intricately woven tapestry!

Why Representation Matters More Than Ever

Picturebooks are never neutral. They carry cultural messages about power, belonging, and identity, even when unintentionally. For multilingual children, seeing their linguistic realities simplified or reduced can sometimes send a subtle message: certain ways of speaking may not be fully recognised here. Linguistic representation matters, because it can shape what children come to believe is “normal,” “valued,” or “allowed” in classrooms and communities.

When children rarely see multilingual characters using their languages fluidly, creatively, and proudly, some may come to infer that only one language (often English) is legitimate in school or valued in society. This can influence confidence, participation, and aspects of identity development, particularly in contexts where children’s home languages are not affirmed.

On the other hand, picturebooks that portray multilingualism in more varied and authentic ways can:

• validate children’s linguistic identities

• support emotional well-being

• affirm their right to use all their languages

• challenge monolingual assumptions in schools

• help monolingual children notice and appreciate the linguistic richness around them

Children deserve stories that frame language learning not as replacement, but as growth, where new languages don’t necessarily push out old ones, but can become part of an expanding repertoire.

So What Do We Do With My Two Blankets?

We don’t need to stop reading it. It remains a gentle, beautifully crafted book about migration and belonging, and it may resonate deeply for many readers. But it can also be worth reading it critically (and teaching it critically) especially if it is being used to represent multilingualism.

We can ask children (and ourselves):

• Does Cartwheel ever use both languages at the same time?

• Do you think she might mix them sometimes in real life?

• What might her old and new languages sound like together?

• What other metaphors could describe her language learning?

And we can pair the book with stories that depict multilingualism in additional ways—books that include code-switching, multiple scripts, and characters who use their full linguistic repertoires proudly and creatively.

A Call for Stories to Keep Evolving

As classrooms grow more linguistically diverse, picturebooks need to evolve as well. Children benefit from stories that reflect the complexity and variety of multilingual lives—stories where languages can blend, dance, overlap, and grow together. My Two Blankets is a beautiful beginning. But it’s not the only story.

Reference:

Kobald, I. (2014). My two blankets. Illus. F. Blackwood. Little Hare Books.