Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
KERRY MALLAN
First published 2014
Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA)
Laura St, Newtown, NSW 2042, Australia
PO Box 3106, Marrickville Metro, NSW 2204
Tel: (02) 8020 3900
Fax: (02) 8020 3933
Email: info@petaa.edu.au
Website: www.petaa.edu.au
ISBN 978-1-875622-97-9
Title: Picture books and beyond / edited by Kerry Mallan contributors, Cherie Allan [and 8 others].
ISBN: 9781875622979 (paperback)
Notes: Other contributors: Geraldine Massey, Keryy Mallan, Amy Cross, Clare Bradford,
KumarasingheDissanayake Mudiyanselage, LenUnsworth, Erica Hateley, CatherineSly.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Other Creators/Contributors:
Mallan, Kerry, editor.
Allan, Cherie.
Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA)
For details of the CAL licence for educational institutions, contact CAL, Level 15, 233 Castlereagh
Street, Sydney NSW 2000 Australia, Tel: (02) 9394 7600, Fax: (02) 9394 7601, email: info@copyright.
com.au
1
Remembering the past through picture books
Cherie Allan 12
2
Picturing sustainable futures
Geraldine Massey 25
3
The artful interpretation of science through picture books
Kerry Mallan and Amy Cross 41
4
Fantasy and its functions
Clare Bradford 61
5
Encouraging empathy through picture books about
migration
Kumarasinghe Dissanayake Mudiyanselage 75
6
Investigating point of view in picture books and
animated movie adaptations
Len Unsworth 92
7
Touching texts: Adaptations of Australian picture books
for tablets
Erica Hateley 108
8
Em ering 21st century readers: Integrating graphic
novels into primary classrooms
Cathy Sly 123
References 148
Index 154
About the contributors
Cherie Allan is currently teaching a number of childrens literature units at
Queensland University of Technology. She has also worked on several AustLit
childrens literature projects. She gained her PhD in 2010, and her book, Playing
with picturebooks: Postmodernism and the postmodernesque (2012), was awarded the
International Research Society for Childrens Literatures (IRSCL) Honor Book
Award in 2013. She is affiliated with the Children and Youth Research Centre at
QUT.
Clare Bradford is Professor of Literary Studies at Deakin University in Melbourne.
Her books include Reading race: Aboriginality in Australian childrens literature (2001),
which won the Childrens Literature Association Book Award and the International
Research Society for Childrens Literature Award; Unsettling narratives: Postcolonial
readings of childrens literature (2007); New world orders in contemporary childrens literature:
Utopian transformations (2009) [with Mallan, Stephens and McCallum]; and
Contemporary childrens literature and film (2011) [with Mallan]; and The Middle Ages in
childrens literature (2015). She was President of the International Research Society for
Childrens Literature from 2007 to 2011. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy
of Humanities.
Amy Cross is a Research Assistant at Queensland University of Technology, where
she works on a number of childrens literature projects including Asian-Australian
childrens literature, and Australian childrens book awards. She has a Masters
in Childrens Literature, and is a co-author of PETAA Paper 193 Developing
intercultural understanding through Asian-Australian childrens literature. She is
also a Project Support Officer for the Children and Youth Research Centre, QUT.
Erica Hateley is a Senior Lecturer in childrens and adolescent literature in the
Faculty of Education at Queensland University of Technology. The research for her
chapter was supported by the Australian Research Council under the Discovery
Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) scheme. Erica is passionate about the
possibilities and potential of literature in young peoples lives in classrooms,
libraries, and beyond and would love to hear about practitioners experiences with
picture books in all their forms. She can be reached at erica.hateley@qut.edu.au.
Kerry Mallan is a Professor in the Faculty of Education at Queensland University
of Technology and the Director of QUTs Children and Youth Research Centre. She
has published widely in childrens literature. Her most recent books are Secrets,
lies and childrens fiction (2013) and Contemporary approaches to childrens literature and film
with Clare Bradford (2011). She is a co-author of the PETAA Paper 193 Developing
intercultural understanding through Asian-Australian childrens literature.
While every effort has been made to trace and acknowledge copyright and ownership of all
included works, should any infringement have occurred, the publisher offers their apologies
and invite copyright owners to contact them.
Kerry Mallan
T
he title of this book Picture books and beyond suggests it is about the
known and the unknown, the familiar and the unfamiliar. Picture books
are known and familiar objects to many children and adults. They have
been variously described as art objects, cultural documents, hybrid texts and
verbal-visual art forms. They have also been variously categorised according to
their readership ranging from very young children to older readers, the latter can
extend through the primary years to high school and even into adulthood. Scholars
and students study picture books as part of an evolving literary and cultural
landscape which has given rise to new genres and trends, such as multicultural
picture books, environmental picture books, postmodern picture books, and
what Cherie Allan terms, postmodernesque picture books, that is, picturebooks
about postmodernity (Allan, 2012, p.141). Picture books are also the staple
literature in many early years and primary school classrooms for literacy and
literary development, thus supporting the designated strands for literacy, literature,
and language in the Australian Curriculum: English.
For some time now digitisation has been repurposing existing picture book
texts and developing new forms of storytelling and textreader interactivity. This
transformation is ongoing and the inclusion of beyond in our title is intended to
capture this state of change, which includes the adaptation of picture books to
e-versions and films, as well as the popularity of graphic novels in recent years.
Graphic novels and comics are both like and not like picture books. Again, we
could say that they go beyond picture books in that while they are similarly
visual narratives, they are nevertheless distinctive and different forms of visual-
verbal texts. The same could be said for film adaptations and e-versions of picture
books. All of these forms are an already present and familiar part of the textual
landscape, yet the ever-evolving nature of experimentation and innovation in
childrens literature generally means that the field is constantly reinventing itself.
Consequently, beyond points to a future that cannot be known.
There have been many texts published about picture books concerning the theory
and practice that arise from their study and pedagogical application. Some of
these are included at the end of this chapter. Picture books and beyond is intended to
complement these existing resources thereby adding to a long standing dialogue
between writers and readers about the intriguing complexities of picture books.
Our focus in this book is primarily on the texts themselves, whereby we bring
our own distinctive meaning-making repertoire of strategies to the discussions
drawn predominantly from childrens literature studies, English education, social
semiotics, and visual grammatics (see Unsworth & Macken-Horarik, in press).
The individual chapters explore their own themes, topics, or genres war, fantasy,
sustainability, science, migration, animation, tablet technology, and graphic novels
and offer readers different entry points for reading and re-reading picture books
and their digital and filmic manifestations. We also invite teachers and other
educators to go beyond these examples to discover other texts and create new
teaching and learning possibilities that foster skills, knowledge, dispositions, and
enjoyment for students.
In this chapter I briefly outline some general trends and influences, histories,
and changes that have contributed to both the picture book and its digital
transformation. This is intended to set up a dialogue with the chapters which
explore picture books and other texts as works in their own right, and as texts
that can support the learning areas and general capabilities of the Australian
Curriculum, and some of its cross-curriculum priorities.
Figure1
Front cover of two books by Aboriginal authors
and illustrators
Figure3
Another form of playful encounters with texts is subsumed under the umbrella An example of
term edutainment, which in recent years has become a marketing strategy used a postmodern
picture book,
to promote what David Buckingham terms fun learning (2007, p.143). While some The three pigs
examples of edutainment are guilty of extracting any fun out of learning, others
are more engaging, even playful, in the ways they inform and entertain. Computer
games are commonly cited as being part of this broader edutainment strategy,
but we can also see a similar strategy being employed in information-style picture
books, e-picture books and apps.
Information picture books rely heavily on eye-catching, detailed illustrations, and a
varied design and layout intended to make complex concepts and ideas more easily
accessible. By encouraging children to read in a non-linear fashion, these texts
mimic, to some extent, the browsing and random reading practices of hypertexts and
digital interactivity of games and web pages. This random reading can encourage
both superficial and close reading as readers navigate the often complex and
multilayered format of the text with its juxtaposition of words and visuals, different
fonts, and sometimes fold-out pages, flaps, and other interactive design features.