While many traditional educational spaces rely on the ‘banking’ method, in Freire’s estimation, or a deeply institutionalized logic that wrongly conflates teaching with learning, in Illich’s mind, it is possible that picturebooks offer a unique possibility for transformative
! #)! education given their independent production. They are generated outside of these confines of institutional education and hence have certain freedoms to offer readers material that may be dismissed or excluded in these spaces.
Authors of picturebooks are often not conventional educators. Illustrators and writers alike tend to come from very diverse backgrounds (they are graphic artists, poets, academics, social scientists, stay-at-home parents, social workers and so on) – and as such often have some critical distance from traditional notions of ‘children’s education’ (Salisbury & Styles, 2012, p. 51). Maurice Sendak and Shaun Tan have been outspoken about this. The position outside of the academy gives authors the creative independence to generate critical work exploring otherwise taboo subjects. bell hooks’ picturebooks consider race and gender, Anthony Browne’s Voices in the Park (2000) considers conflictual perspectives, and class divisions, while John Marsden and Shaun Tan’s The Rabbits (2010) considers colonialism, cultural violence and migration, for instance.
As I have suggested, thinking about the picturebooks as having pedagogical implications is useful, because it acknowledges the ideological and social roles that these texts might play. While education has been monopolized by schools, both Illich and Freire see meaningful education functioning on a much more dispersed schema in which ‘authority’ over knowledge is not just in the hands of teachers, but shared among people with varying skills and knowledge (Illich, 1995; Freire, 2000). This allows for a wider rage of voices to be represented and for a re-evaluation of what it means to be educated. Illich stresses that “the current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring” (Illich, 1995, p. ii). Lewis’s assertion that picturebooks can reflect this leveling-out of authority when they are able to break away from the didactic tradition is congruent with Illich. Not only are other voices involved in teaching (with a diversity of picturebook makers sharing their stories), critical books further disperse authority over knowledge by making space for the reader to construct the narrative as well. In Lewis’ words: “The more that authorities dissolve and the more authors and artists abrogate responsibility for leading readers and viewers towards sense and meaning, then the more readers have to write the text they read” (Lewis, 2001, p. 91).
! $+! Part of this educational paradigm shift requires a persistent reframing of visual literacy. There is a long-engrained connection between conventional education or learning and the written word, while the image has often been relegated to the realm of un-academic frivolity, or a mere stepping-stone to traditional literacy (Arizpe, Colomer, Martínez- Roldán, 2014, p. 3). Research in this field, however, tends to emphasize referential and inferential skills needed to ‘read’ images, and the importance of focusing on visual literacy in an age more inundated with complex images than any other (ibid). Lewis remarks: “even though we are experienced readers of verbal text we are still learning how to read the picturebook, both in the sense of reading individual books, and in the sense of understanding how they work” (Lewis, 2001, p. 31). Since Lewis made this observation, a large body of research on visual literacy and criticality has emerged, addressing this gap (Heath 2006; Jewitt, 2008, Frey & Fisher, 2008). The Visual Journeys project, culminating in the book Visual Journeys Through Wordless Narratives (2014), applied this research in a grounded way to both the classroom and home literacy practices in effort to not only build on an understanding of how visuals work but to empower new arrival and local Glaswegian readers. Through a series of activities: verbal responses to texts, annotations, photography projects and so on, this Visual Journeys project unfolds some of the nuances of meaning- making with images. In continuing to embrace the profound pedagogical value of visual literacy within official and unofficial educational spaces, it will be possible to seize the transformative possibilities they hold for readers.
Radical Change: Techniques of transformation
This chapter has opened up a discussion of the possibilities that picturebooks engender for social transformation. To this point, I have been considering the picturebook as a form (its combination of image and word) and the general features that spring from this form (its textual gaps, its dialogical nature and so on). Engaging with Dresang’s work on Radical Change13 will turn the focus to the concrete techniques that are employed by picturebook !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
13 Michèle Anstey and Geoff Bull`s Evolving Pedagogies also offers picturebook theory tailored to shifting literacies in a digital environment. They unpack four central modes or modalities (Linguistic, Visual, Audio, Gestural, Spatial) and their key features. I have chosen to focus on Dresang’s work, however, which can be applied more directly to print picturebooks. Anstey and Bull place a larger focus on pedagogies and theory for understanding non-print media. They also focus on oral, textual and visual grammar (employing semiotic code, such as identifying vectors in images), which, as I discuss in the Visual Grammar section of this chapter are less relevant to my work than the more open-ended analysis Dresang offers.
! $*! makers in generating critical work. In other words, it will illuminate how the form of the picturebook delivers critical content. I acknowledge the difficulty of making the distinction between form and content – since, in Marshal McLuhan’s widely-cited words, ‘the medium is the message’ (1964, p. 9). To simplify, what I am highlighting when I single out ‘content’ is the ‘subjects or topics of exploration’ in picturebooks. Dresang highlights the ways in which the picturebook’s capacity to act as a transformative text hinges on its ability to embody both critical form and content. Or: Radical Change refers to texts pushing the boundaries of traditional literature, with the end of critically engaging readers through complex material, and addressing changes in literacy (including visual literacy) in a digital age (Dresang, 1998, p. 6). “Radical change texts” she suggests, “can provide the kinds of reading experiences that develop readers’ abilities to critically analyze, construct and deconstruct an array of texts and representational forms” (Sipe & Pantaleo, 2008, p. 44). Dresang traces three central radical change elements: changing forms and formats; changing perspectives; and, challenging boundaries. Each element embodies various methods for achieving radical change and I have provided a brief description using examples drawn from picturebooks that are typically identified as ‘postmodern’ (she cites as an example: Black and White by David Macaulay).
1) Changing Forms and Formats (p. 19)
- Graphics are presented in new forms and formats, such as hypertexts, digital texts and multimodal texts. These formats offer several modes of communication within one text: reading (including viewing or visual literacy); writing (including generating electronic texts, or the reader engaged in a form of authorship), speaking and listening. This might manifest itself in a combination of print text, visual images and audio (such as filmic, musical, or computer presentation media).
-Words and pictures also reach “new levels of synergy”, which suggests that they do not operate as separate parts within a text, but rather work in concert to create (often more rich) meaning (p. 20). In Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Book Lauren Child employs this technique by making text (for instance the word ‘big’) illustrative of its own meaning (so, the typographic choice, size, color and placement reflect ‘big’). The words are images, and images are words.
-Books use non-linear organization and format, which disturbs familiar structures used in books to deliver a story and hence challenges readers to engage differently and creatively through their disorientation (p. 21). John Scieszka exemplifies this in The Stinky Cheese
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Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, when readers are launched without introduction or
warning into a narrative told by the Little Red Hen, which is abruptly interrupted by a character from an entirely separate fairy tale: Jack (of Jack and the Beanstalk). Jack informs the Little Red Hen that the story cannot yet commence, because the title page needs to come first. The following page is marked, with over-sized black font and a distinctively ironic flair: “Title Page”. Not only has Scieszka demonstrated alinearity of form by starting and interrupting a narrative all before the title page, he has also importantly posed a story as a contestable entity (open to interjections from not only other characters, but readers, too). It emphasizes that the structure and layout (or form) of a text is deliberate, effects the telling of the story and is available for critiquing or ‘poking-fun at’.
-Books have “non sequential organization and format”, by which Dresang implies a similar revision and critique of traditional order (as noted just above) but in regards to disturbing the rote sequence of plots as opposed to the structural components of the book itself (p. 21). Child does this by having her protagonist cut out sections of the plot in a familiar fairytale book, and rearrange the plot by pasting the pieces (and adding new pieces) together in a new way. Similarly, Scieszka has characters from different tales interact and combines disparate plots in unfamiliar ways, and uses different perspectives to interrupt the narrative flow.
-There are multiple layers of meaning in a text (p. 22), for instance, an author may present conflicting information, pun or play with literal and figurative meanings of words and phrases, and employ allegory, or intertextual connections. This allows the reader to engage more actively in the reading process than narratives with singular and clearly delineated meaning or reading according to the author’s very plainly stated intent. In Voices in the
Park, meaning can be taken from each of the four narratives presented, and meaning can be
taken from viewing these narratives together as a whole.
-Interactive formats are used (p. 23). Following from devices that loan themselves to multiple layers of meaning (like intertextuality or word play), postmodern works provide readers with many openings to participate in the authorship or telling of a story (such as making speculations, responding to a direct question, finishing a rhyme and so on). Forms like hyper texts, digital texts and multimodal texts, and physical characteristics like pull tabs, textures, and layered images foster interactive engagement. Sometimes, as is the case in Child’s Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Book, the characters themselves demonstrate interaction with texts (Herb cuts and pastes a story to alter the way it unfolds).
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2) Changing Perspectives (p. 24)
- Multiple perspectives are offered within the text. The plot is made more complex by presenting different points of view on the same event. This complicates the sense of moral clarity in a situation and demands readers to take many voices into account in texts and also to reflect on the way in which their lived experiences are often experienced differently by others. Again, Browne’s Voices in the Park exemplifies this, as four characters present their personal accounts of walking through the same park.
- There is an inclusion of “previously unheard voices” (p. 25). Scieszka engages with this technique in a provocative way by offering the perspective of villains in familiar fables, which invites empathy for the often ‘untold side’ of a story. By previously unheard voices, Dresang also refers to dispossessed and underprivileged or persecuted communities, such as homeless populations, and people of certain ethnicities, races, sexualities or abilities.
- There is an inclusion of young characters, who “speak for themselves” (p. 25). As a reflection on the kind of critical and mindful young audience for whom postmodern authors such as Scieszka and Child are writing, their young characters embody critical, inquisitive, assertive and opinionated qualities. The protagonist, Herb, who displays agency in re- writing and writing narrative in Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Book, is an excellent example of this type of character.
3) Changing Boundaries (p. 26)
-There is an inclusion of “subjects previously forbidden”. Again, holding that the young reader is critical and socially aware, as opposed to being in need of moral reform/direction (as the didactic tradition suggests), postmodern authors introduce complex and conventionally taboo topics for young readers’ rumination. Such topics include global issues of famine, violence, death, domestic violence, mental illness, substance abuse, war and poverty. Duck, Death and the Tulip by Wolf Erlbruch, is a well-loved example of a dark story on death.
- There is an integration of “settings previously overlooked” (p. 27). While early children’s literature (during and post Romantic era) tended to sanitize and idealize settings and events, radical change literature introduces more complex and at times difficult settings such as ghettos or refugee camps. The integration of previously overlooked settings can also involve introducing readers into more playful, overlooked settings such as a villain’s home (e.g. the wolf’s home Scieszka’s book).
! $$! -Characters are “portrayed in new, complex ways” (p. 28). Rather than fitting neatly into understandings of good or bad, radical change characters demonstrate a range of qualities along a continuum of what might be considered ‘virtue’ and ‘human error’ – but ultimately it is left to the reader to make her own assessments of the character. Shaun Tan’s The Red
Tree, for instance, offers a portrayal of a young girl suffering from childhood depression.
She is reflective, cautious, anxious, sad and in certain moments, content and more optimistic.
-There is an introduction to “new types of communities” (ibid) – which relates closely to the integration of “unheard voices”, but speaks directly to groups who are often unrepresented (such as single mothers, transgendered communities, foster and adoptive families, or immigrant communities [as represented in Tan’s The Arrival]).
-Stories have unresolved endings (ibid). As previously noted, literature coming out of a didactic tradition generally aim for conclusive endings and decisive morals which can be drawn from them – however – contemporary examples fitting with radical change principles, stories are left open for the reader to draw her own conclusions or wonder about different possible situations that might follow. This requires a more participatory, engaged and critical form of reading a text and meaning making. Again, Voices in the Park is a powerful example of this – not only is each of the four encounters of the park inconclusive, the reader is also challenged to think about how they fit together to form a larger narrative, and what can be taken from it.