Reading and Reinterpreting Picture Books on Children’s Television: Implications for Young Children’s Narrative Literacy

Bookaboo is a television programme aiming to promote literacy and reading among young children. In each episode, a celebrity reads a book to Bookaboo, a dog who plays the drums in a rock band, in order to help him overcome stage fright. Using the episode featuring the picture book (Cowell and Layton in That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown, 2006) as a case study, this article explores how this type of adaptation of picture books transforms the original narrative, with implications for children’s developing narrative literacy. Taking a multimodal social semiotic perspective, this study investigates the changes in meaning which result from the employment of semiotic resources such as animation, sound, and camera movement in the representation of the book on the television show. We argue that the deployment of such resources can subtly reshape the meanings expressed through the modes of language and images in the original picture book, potentially affecting the child viewer’s engagement with the narrative. Examining the use of these resources in the picture book’s televisual representation is thus an important first step towards developing frameworks for evaluating the ability of television programmes that incorporate picture book reading to support children’s literacy.     

Pictures in Pictures: Art History and Art Museums in Children’s Picture Books

Children’s picture books that recreate, parody, or fictionalize famous artworks and introduce the art museum experience, a genre to which I will refer as “children’s art books,” have become increasingly popular over the past decade. This essay explores the pedagogical implications of this trend through the family program “Picture Books and Picture Looks” conducted at the Art Institute of Chicago. Program sessions were observed to learn the extent to which picture books featuring the painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 (Seurat) informed and impacted children’s experiences with the original artwork. The books Katie’s Sunday Afternoon (Mayhew, 2005), Babar’s Museum of Art (De Brunhoff, 2003), and Willy’s Pictures (Browne, 2000) provided the foundation for the program. In addition to these three books, The Dot (Reynolds, 2003), which does not include a reference to La Grande Jatte (Seurat, 1884–1886), acted as a “control” variable. This research demonstrates that while most picture books can be used to establish a level of comfort in an environment that is new to children, those that directly referenced the painting provided a base level of knowledge from which children could confidently draw upon encountering the original work. The research further indicated that, when used in conjunction with original artworks, children’s art books provide unique and distinct entry points for talking about art. The inclusion of artwork in children’s picture books elicits an enthusiasm and recognition that enhances the museum experience, and such books can be effective tools for enabling reflective, imaginative experiences with art.     

Intercultural Rhetoric,Technology Transfer,and Writing in U.S.–Mexico Border Maquilas

This article explores the transfer of U.S. technologies to three maquilas, or joint U.S.–Mexican manufacturing facilities in northern Mexico. Drawing on case study methods, it focuses on the rhetorical strategies that Mexican engineers and manufacturing personnel used to translate U.S. technologies and corresponding documentation for their Mexican contexts. It also suggests ways U.S. technical communicators can adapt their documentation to be more effective for these U.S.–Mexican intercultural rhetorical contexts.     

Whitewashing Nature: Sanitized Depictions of Biology in Children’s Books and Parent–Child Conversation

The biological world includes many negatively valenced activities, like predation, parasitism, and disease. Do children’s books cover these activities? And how do parents discuss them with their children? In a content analysis of children’s nature books (Study 1), we found that negatively valenced concepts were rarely depicted across genres and reading levels. When parents encountered negative information in books (Studies 2–3), they did not omit it but rather elaborated on it, adding their own comments and questions, and their children (ages 3–11) were more likely to remember the negative information but less likely to generalize that information beyond the animal in the book. These findings suggest that early input relevant to biological competition may hamper children’s developing understanding of ecology and evolution.     

Role of Computers in Educating Young Children: U.S. and Japanese Teachers’ Perspectives

This study was conducted with kindergarten teachers in the United States and Japan with respect to their beliefs about the role of computers in educating young children. Overall findings indicated significant differences in responses of teachers in the two countries. Generally, U.S. teachers had a more positive attitude toward computers in educating young children, while the Japanese teachers had more concerns. The teachers’ own sense of competence with computers was not related to their beliefs about computers and young children in either country. Respondents from both countries identified a lack of resources and clear guidelines for integrating computers in the classroom as challenges. These findings highlighted the need for training of early childhood teachers in integrating and using computers in the classroom.     

Optimism and Wishful Thinking: Consistency Across Populations in Children’s Expectations for the Future

Two studies investigated 5- to 10-year-olds’ (N = 194) positivity bias when forecasting the future. Children from two geographic locations (mostly Caucasian, higher income college town; mostly African American, lower income urban community) completed a future expectations task (FET). For multiple scenarios, children predicted whether a positive versus negative (optimism items) or a positive versus extraordinary positive (wishful thinking items) outcome would occur, including its likelihood. In both samples, optimism and wishful thinking decreased with age, optimism was higher than wishful thinking, children did not show a comparative self-optimism bias, and individual differences in the FET optimism score correlated with self-reported dispositional optimism and hope. Exploratory comparisons revealed between-sample equivalence in responses to all measures, except for less tempered wishful thinking in the urban community.     

What’s in a Name? A Critical Literacy and Functional Linguistic Analysis of Immigrant Acculturation in Contemporary Picture Books

This article investigates how immigrant children’s acculturation experiences are characterized through the symbolic literary feature of name in children’s literature and how the language of the text functions to communicate these messages. We draw on the theoretical frameworks of Critical Literacy (CL) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to inform our analysis, showcasing how the connection and interrelation of these theories maximizes the potential for meaning-making. Texts were examined to reveal dominant themes around acculturation communicated through the use of protagonists’ names and trends in the language used to construct young readers’ understandings. Findings indicate that the construct of a name is a key theme in the literature used to forge a cultural identity for immigrant children, generate cultural conflict, and stimulate others’ judgment.     

Tracking the environment in Australian children’s literature: the Children’s Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year Awards 1955-2014

Popular and accessible before television and the internet, picture books capture the context of the time they were created and influence the generations of children who consume them. Depictions of the natural world have changed across several generations of picture books as seen in illustrations of all 249 books of an influential collection, the Children’s Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year Awards shortlists from 1955 to 2014. This study found that natural environments became proportionally less present in picture books over time while depictions of built environments increased. The presence of wild animals and native Australian animals also decreased over time. Sustainability themes and more realistic depictions of wild animals and biodiversity increased over time which reflects a growing ecological or environmental awareness, and diversification of environmental themes in recent picture books of this prominent Collection.     

The Progress of Sugar: Consumption as Complicity in Children’s Books about Slavery and Manufacturing, 1790–2015

This paper analyzes “production stories,” a genre of information literature and media responsible for teaching children how everyday things are made. As nineteenth-century families increasingly consumed tropical commodities produced by slave labor, including sugar, tea, coffee, rum, and tobacco, the production story developed in Britain and the United States as a way to explain to children where everyday household goods originate, making global trade networks visible in the home. These “production stories” developed strategies for raising or eliding ethical questions posed by who makes things, under what conditions, and for whom. Focusing on stories of sugar production, I find that production stories reveal surprising details about technical processes for making things, but conceal the human cost of production. They also end with consumption, when children use the products, symbolically affirming the conditions under which they were made. Drawing on scholarship from the history of technology and the history of the Atlantic slave trade, I contend that problematic representations of manufacturing processes feed into and support whitewashed histories for children. I conclude by analyzing contemporary picturebooks that resist certain genre patterns and encourage positive identification with enslaved black characters, who like child readers, are at once makers, readers, and consumers.

     

Fictions, Nation-building and Ideologies of Belonging in Children’s Literature: An Analysis of Tunzi the Faithful Shadow

This article demonstrates, through Michael Gascoigne’s Tunzi the Faithful Shadow (1988), that literature for children is sometimes employed by the government into the service of propagating dominant state ideologies in Zimbabwean schools. Such texts disseminate issues of inclusion and exclusion that characterise all nation building projects. I argue, through a reading of Tunzi the Faithful Shadow, that texts for children studied in Zimbabwean schools have been shaped by a distinctly Zimbabwean socio-historical context which includes, but is not limited to, the formation of a new national sensibility after the liberation war and the political unrest in the emerging nation.     

The All-Heterosexual World of Children’s Nonfiction: A Critical Content Analysis of LGBTQ Identities in Orbis Pictus Award Books, 1990–2017

Despite increased attention toward children’s nonfiction and informational texts in recent decades, there is still little research that investigates the ways in which various cultural identities are depicted in nonfiction children’s books. Focusing specifically on the 143 winners and honor recipients of the Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction Literature for Children (1990–2017), this article reports the findings of a critical content analysis of depictions of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) identified people in award-winning nonfiction youth literature. The authors look across this set of texts as a literary construction of the world, making explicit where and how LGBTQ people are visible in these award-winning books for young readers. By analyzing specific depictions of queer-identified people, the authors argue the creators of these books rely upon heteronormative constructions, queer erasure, and compulsory heterosexuality to minimize (and even eliminate) queerness.     

Maurice Gee’s Brilliant Borrowings of Maurice Gee and Significant Others: Realism and Postmodernism in Gee’s Books for Children and Adults

This paper examines the work of one of New Zealand’s most acclaimed writers, Maurice Gee, and the use of his children’s fiction as an experimental ground for postmodernist techniques further developed in his writing for adults. In particular, it considers Gee’s borrowings of his own and others’ non-fictional and fictional material, to produce richly literary, historical novels. The paper argues that realist and postmodernist features are woven into the children’s and adult books, but that the balance is differently skewed in each. It thus addresses an area largely atypical of the children’s novel, but one that should be of concern to children’s literature critics.     

Youth’s Sibling Relationships Across the Course of a Parent’s Military Deployment: Trajectories and Implications

The present exploratory study explored the trajectories and implications of at-home (military unaffiliated) parents’ perceptions of youth’s sibling relationships across the course of a parent’s military deployment. Participants included 109 families with at least two siblings (older sibling and younger siblings age: M = 10.85, SD = 3.92 and M = 7.89, SD = 3.58, respectively) and one parent serving in the National Guard. Data were collected via in-home interviews, at six time points across the deployment cycle. A series of multilevel models revealed increases in sibling disharmony during the months a deployed parent was away, but showed signs of recovery in the year after they returned. Increases in sibling disharmony were positively associated with increases in youth’s externalizing behaviors above and beyond the effects of parenting.     

Children’s Literature and Education: A Memoir of Dr. Lawrence Sipe

A personal reflection about Dr. Sipe as a teacher and a mentor.     

Independent Contributions of Mothers’ and Fathers’ Language and Literacy Practices: Associations With Children’s Kindergarten Skills Across Linguistically Diverse Households

Research Findings: Home language and literacy inputs have been consistently linked with enhanced language and literacy skills among children. Most studies have focused on maternal inputs among monolingual populations. Though the proportion of American children growing up in primarily non-English-speaking homes is growing and the role of fathers in early development is increasingly emphasized, less is known about these associations in primarily non-English-speaking households or how mothers and fathers independently contribute to children’s skills. Using a subsample of data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort (N = 5,450), this study assessed the frequency of maternal and paternal inputs during early childhood and their prospective connections with children’s English language and literacy skills at age 5 across White, Mexican, and Chinese children from linguistically diverse households. Analyses revealed significant differences in inputs by ethnic/language group membership and significant associations between both maternal and paternal inputs and children’s skills. These associations did not differ across ethnic/language group membership. Practice or Policy: These results point to the importance of promoting rich home language and literacy environments across diverse households regardless of the language in which they take place or the parent from which they derive.     

Student Agency: an Analysis of Students’ Networked Relations Across the Informal and Formal Learning Domains

Agency is a construct facilitating our examination of when and how young people extend their own learning across contexts. However, little is known about the role played by adolescent learners’ sense of agency. This paper reports two cases of students’ agentively employing and developing science literacy practices—one in Singapore and the other in the USA. The paper illustrates how these two adolescent learners in different ways creatively accessed, navigated and integrated in-school and out-of-school discourses to support and nurture their learning of physics. Data were gleaned from students’ work and interviews with students participating in a physics curricular programme in which they made linkages between their chosen out-of-school texts and several physics concepts learnt in school. The students’ agentive moves were identified by means of situational mapping, which involved a relational analysis of the students’ chosen artefacts and discourses across time and space. This relational analysis enabled us to address questions of student agency—how it can be effected, realised, construed and examined. It highlights possible ways to intervene in these networked relations to facilitate adolescents’ agentive moves in their learning endeavours.     

Knowledge-Sharing and Potential Virtual Communities of Practice in the U.S. Coast Guard’s Afloat Community: a Qualitative Pilot Study

Virtual communities of Practice (VCoP) offer a flexible option for professional development that may be employed by geographically dispersed communities. Due to unique and dynamic operational demands and a reduced training budget, the United States Coast Guard’s (USCG) afloat community has limited opportunity for formal professional development, but alternative learning options have yet to be formally researched. This qualitative pilot study employed purposeful sampling to conduct 6 one-on-one interviews of afloat members with varying degrees of afloat experience and total time in service. The interviews were used to elucidate the knowledge-sharing culture of the afloat community, including the degree to which afloat members are willing to exchange knowledge and how trust, reciprocity, and disposition towards online learning influence this exchange. Interviews were digitally recorded and manually transcribed. Emergent themes included willingness and desire to share knowledge, concerns regarding service reputation, provisions for anonymity, and altruistic information exchange.