Exploring the Artwork in Picturebooks with Middle Years Students.

Abstract

Content analysis of middle years students' written responses reveal their understanding, appreciation, and interpretation of artwork in The Wolf's Story: What Really Happened to Little Red Riding Hood.A PICTUREBOOK IS an aesthetic object, an art form (Bader, 1976) worthy of study by readers of all ages. In picturebooks, total effect depends on text, illustrations, and reciprocity between these two sign systems, where we adjust our interpretation of in terms of words and our interpretation of words in terms of pictures (Sipe, 1998, p. 103). Many scholars have theorized about relationship between modes of image and writing in picturebooks, proposing terms, schemes, metaphors, and taxonomies to describe associations between visual and verbal texts. As well, findings of several studies have revealed elementary and middle school students' articulate and complex interpretative responses to picturebooks (e.g., Pantaleo, 2008, 2010, 2012; Roser, Martinez, & Fowler-Amato, 2011; Sipe, 2008c).Picturebooks were one format of multimodal text used during classroom-based research that is featured in this article. Although research conducted with a class of grade 7 students had several overarching purposes, two most relevant to this article were to investigate student development of visual meaning-making skills and competencies by focusing on specific visual elements of art and design in a selection of multimodal texts and to explore student comprehension, interpretation, and analysis of multimodal texts. This article focuses solely on students' responses to and interpretations of some of artwork in picturebook The Wolf's Story: What Really Happened to Little Red Riding Hood by Toby Forward (2005). As a result of content analysis of students' written responses to this particular picturebook, point of view, framing, and color are three semiotic resources of image featured in discussions below.Brief overviews of relevant literature and theoretical frameworks that guided exploratory study with grade 7 students are followed by descriptions of research context, instructional unit, and procedures used analyzing students' written responses. Excerpts from students' work reveal their observations and interpretations of particular images in The Wolf's Story. The article concludes with a consider - ation of various teaching and learning issues pertinent to exploration of artwork in picturebooks in middle years classrooms.The Artwork of PicturebooksAccording to Sipe (2008b), the literary of picturebooks includes learning to visual text of illustrational sequence (p. 18). As art objects, picturebooks are invaluable sources for developing [students'] visual aesthetic understanding (Sipe, 2008a, p. 131). As well as role of visual images in narrative of a picturebook, art medium, art style, elements and principles of design, and peritextual features can be considered when examining images in picturebooks. However, critical exploration of picturebooks in relation to these features requires a process of close looking, where readers go into in a systematic way (Doonan, 1993, p. 19).The findings of numerous studies have revealed how students, regardless of their cultural or linguistic background, academic ability, or age, have articulated insightful interpretations of artwork in picturebooks (e.g., Arizpe & Styles, 2003; Martens, Martens, Doyle, Loomis, & Aghalarov, 2012; O'Neil, 2011; Pantaleo, 2012; Sipe, 2008a; Walsh, 2003; Youngs, 2012). For example, analysis of data gathered during a multifaceted study by Arizpe and Styles showed how capably children, ages 4-11, read colours, borders, body language, framing devices, covers, endpapers, visual metaphors and visual jokes (p. …

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