Exploring Challenging Picturebooks in Education

International Perspectives on Language and Literature Learning

Åse Ommundsen, Gunnar Haaland, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, Gunnar Haaland, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer Kümmerling-Meibauer, Åse Marie Ommundsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000413748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

What should children and students read? This volume explores challenging picturebooks as learning materials in early childhood education, primary and secondary school, and even universities. It addresses a wide range of thematic, cognitive, and aesthetic challenges and educational affordances of picturebooks in various languages and from different countries.

Written by leading and emerging scholars in the field of picturebook studies and literacy research, the book discusses the impact of challenging picturebooks in a comprehensive manner and combines theoretical considerations, picturebook analyses, and empirical studies with children and students. It introduces stimulating picturebooks from all continents and how they are used or may be used in educational settings and contexts. The chapters touch on subjects like reading promotion, second-language acquisition, art education, interdisciplinary learning, empathy development, minority issues, and intercultural competence. Moreover, they consider relevant aspects of the educational environments, such as the inclusion of picturebooks in the curriculum, the significance of school libraries, and the impact of publishers.

Exploring Challenging Picturebooks in Education sheds new light on the multiple dimensions relevant to investigating the impact of picturebooks on learning processes and the development of multimodal literacy competencies. It thus makes a significant contribution to the growing area of picturebook research and will be key reading for educators, researchers, and post-graduate students in the field of literacy studies, children's literature, and education research.

Part I
Theoretical perspectives on challenging picturebooks in education

1
Cognitive challenges of challenging picturebooks

Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Jörg Meibauer

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the cognitive challenges a picturebook may pose for children. We will proceed from the general assumption that a picturebook is challenging for a child reader when she cannot easily understand its content and aesthetic form. A picturebook like Anthony Browne’s Voices in the Park (1998), e.g., may be hard to understand because it confronts the child reader with the task to relate four substories (and associated perspectives of the protagonists), which all recount the same event, namely a walk in the park. In contrast, a picturebook like Miffy (1964) by Dick Bruna may also be challenging for a child who is not yet acquainted with non-realistic drawings.

Arguably, from the perspective of education and learning, challenging picture-books may foster children’s cognitive development in a specific way. This assumption implies that being a challenge for understanding and learning is relational, since we consider the relationship between a book or a book type and a child or a group of children at a certain developmental stage with certain skills. Therefore, our chapter ties in with approaches to picturebooks that stress these books’ functions in the cognitive development of children (e.g., Arizpe, Farrar, and McAdam 2018; Kümmerling-Meibauer and Meibauer 2013; Kümmerling-Meibauer et al. 2015; Reese and Riordan 2018).

In this chapter, we argue that two concepts are crucial in order to understand the notion of a challenging picturebook, namely the concept of skill and the concept of markedness. Skill relates to certain abilities that the child possesses, while markedness relates to certain properties that a picturebook has. After demonstrating that the intuitively fruitful notion of a challenging picturebook is still lacking in precision, we will sketch both concepts and show how they relate to the understanding of challenging picturebooks. This discussion is guided by three hypotheses which we will put forward. The chapter then engages with selected picturebooks, thus giving an insight into three types of markedness, i.e., markedness on the verbal level, on the visual level, and in text–picture combinations. Finally, we will discuss the multiple cognitive capacities children need to acquire in order to recognize the marked messages in the text and the pictures as well as to comprehend their meaning in relation to the storyline.

The category of challenging picturebook

Since Janet Evans edited the seminal collection Challenging and Controversial Picturebooks in 2015, the term challenging picturebook seems to have gained some influence in scholarly discussions.¹ Typically, those who use this term share the intuition that this term categorizes a set of picturebooks that depart from our expectations about what a normal or prototypical picturebook looks like. However, on closer consideration, it seems unclear how this term can be defined in a precise manner. In this chapter, we will contribute to the task of making the notion more precise.²

In addition to the notions of challenging picturebook and controversial picturebook, the volume by Evans (2015a) contains chapters referring to “strange picturebooks” and Evans (2015c) even introduces the category of “fusion text” as a subcategory of challenging picturebooks. In relation to the notion of a challenging and controversial picturebook, Evans (2015b) relates to a set of picturebooks that can be described as “strange, unusual, controversial, disturbing, challenging, shocking, troubling, curious, demanding and philosophical” (5). According to her, these words “are all suitable for describing some of these books but not all of them.” Thus, while the label of a “challenging and controversial” picturebook seems to be a compromise, Evans remains skeptical about a unique characterization: “Increasingly it seems there is no single word that is suitable to identify and label these books” (5). We contend that “challenging picturebook” might be an appropriate descriptive label, yet it has to be explicated in a reliable manner.

Whether something is evaluated as “disturbing,” “shocking,” or “troubling” can widely differ between those doing the judging. Perry Nodelman (2015) has clearly seen this point and maintains that picturebooks usually being regarded as non-challenging can be seen as challenging under a certain evaluative perspective. The essential thing thus seems to be to what norms people are referring to when they judge something to be “challenging.” Moreover, if one looks at the above characterization given by Evans (2015b) and takes it as a proper definition, one must admit that it is circular. The circularity is evident in the application of the predicates “challenging” and “controversial” in the definiens.

If the challenging picturebook and the controversial picturebook are separate, autonomous categories, we can state that there are four cases to distinguish: (1) there are challenging picturebooks that are also controversial (probably because of their challenging potential); (2) there are challenging but not controversial picturebooks (no controversy is triggered, see Evans 2015b: 18–20); (3) there are controversial picturebooks that are not challenging (the controversy is triggered for other reasons); and (4) there are picturebooks that are neither challenging nor controversial.

Here are some examples: Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter (Slovenly Peter, 1845) is both challenging, due to its content and at that time innovative caricaturist technique, and controversial, as it sparked fierce debates on behalf of caretakers and pedagogues.³ Voices in the Park by Anthony Browne is challenging owing to the use of multi-perspective narration, but not controversial. We Shall Never Forget 9/11 (2011) by Wayne Bell is challenging neither content-wise nor aesthetic-wise, but it is highly controversial because of its propagandistic messages which are based on nationalist ideology and anti-Muslim racism. Tana Hoban’s Red, Blue, Yellow Shoe (1986) is a concept book designed for small children and as such neither challenging nor controversial. Obviously, the category of controversial picturebook relates to public discussions of the value of picturebooks for certain purposes. Typically, controversies are fought out by adults, not by children. A caveat is in order, for it should be noted that (prototypically) non-challenging picturebooks may be challenging for some audiences depending on their cognitive development, as explained earlier.

Admittedly, an associative characterization like the one given by Evans (2015b) may have its advantages. It allows people to discuss a number of picturebooks as books that they believe or propose to fall under the category. It collects a number of prototypical instances of the category (“challenging picturebooks are: Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are; Browne, Voices in the Park”) and a number of book types, e.g., pop-up books, toy books, or wordless picturebooks (Kümmerling-Meibauer and Meibauer 2018). These picturebook types are thought to possess some inherent “challenging” properties. However, the notion then has only little descriptive value. It merely suggests the distinction between traditional, prototypical picturebooks, and picturebooks (or book-like media) with special features.

One could object that the above characterization by Evans (2015b: 5) is not meant as a definition but merely as a prototype concept.⁴ To the extent that some of the predicates included in the characterization can be successfully applied to a certain picturebook, it is a safe member of the prototype category. Thus, the historical picturebook Struwwelpeter by Hoffmann certainly belongs to the prototype category, because it may be evaluated as “strange,” “unusual,” and so on. These predicates may be even ranked in a manner such that the notion of “disturbing” has more weight than “unusual.” For example, a picturebook like David Macaulay’s Cathedral (1973) may be “unusual” (for its time) but not “disturbing.”

Still another approach would be to simply enumerate challenging picture-books. If someone thinks a picturebook is “challenging,” then it is admitted as a candidate for the inclusion into the prototypical core category. Collections such as that of Evans (2015a) typically have the effect that readers think that the assembled picturebooks analyzed therein are bona fide cases of challenging picturebooks. As with the parallel case of the children’s literature canon, it could be that the criteria for putting someone into the prototype category may wildly differ, even to the point that there is no agreement possible. Indeed, certain picture-books may be rejected as challenging picturebooks for children and placed into another category, namely that of picturebooks addressed to adults (Ommundsen 2014, 2015, 2018).⁵

Yet another idea is put forward in the ongoing discourse on so-called challenging picturebooks. A picturebook might be called “challenging” when it displays content that deviates from certain expectations of what is a normal or adequate topic for children, e.g., picturebooks dealing with taboo topics, such as death, drugs, depression, pornography, sexual abuse, violence, and war (see Evans 2015a and the examples given therein). If a picturebook deals with one of these topics, then it is a good candidate for being included in the category of a challenging picturebook. However, this content should not be considered as challenging per se. When one does not know where babies come from, it is no challenge to learn how they are made. Books about sexuality may be controversial, but they are not necessarily challenging.⁶ Therefore, we conclude that it is not mere content that is challenging but rather the way this content is presented to a certain audience. In the same vein, a picturebook may also be challenging with respect to the aesthetic design in relation to the verbal text, the visuals, and the text–picture combination.

It goes without saying that the category of challenging picturebook should be applied not only to narrative picturebooks but also to descriptive picturebooks. For instance, picturebooks on sexuality may not contain challenging descriptions of sexuality but can display these descriptions in both a text-based and picture-based challenging aesthetics.

Challenge and skills

In pursuing the question of what is “challenging” in challenging picturebooks, we proceed from our first hypothesis.

Hypothesis 1

A picturebook is challenging for a child at a certain developmental stage if it can enhance her interpretative skills.

This generalization applies to the whole spectrum of picturebooks and all children who are confronted with picturebooks. In particular, it does not presuppose risky, uncozy, or provocative content. For instance, reading Miffy (1964) by Dick Bruna may be challenging for a two-year-old child who is not used to interpreting simple texts and abstract pictures. By the same token, reading Fox (2000) by Margaret Wild and Ron Brooks may pose a challenge for a child who does not know much about the relationship between jealousy and deception (see Kümmerling-Meibauer and Meibauer 2015). Children may learn something from reading these books and they may enhance their interpretative skills.

Skill is a prominent topic in relation to sports, handicrafts, and the arts. However, this notion has a far broader meaning. It encompasses “hard skills,” such as skillfully playing tennis, constructing a machine, or creating a sculpture, as well as “soft skills,” such as communication, interpersonal relations, and emotional and social understanding, not to mention intellectual reasoning and an analytic mindset (Stanley and Williams 2017). Skills improve with training and are closely related to knowledge; i.e., one has to know exactly what, when, where, and why to do something in a proper way. For instance, a person with perceptual skills – which is relevant for the interpretation of visuals in picturebooks – knows what to look for, where and why to look to get specific information. That said, it is clear that these skills are linked to intelligent actions and cannot be understood as intuitively learned behaviors only. Therefore, psychologists argue that skill learning constitutes a necessary stage of cognitive development (VanLehn 1996). Moreover, skill learning is considered to be a prerequisite for conceptual thought (Delamire Le Deist and Winterton 2005; Stanley 2011).

Experimental tasks have shown that skill learning stretches over several years. Consider the skill of drawing. The developmental psychologist Annette Karmiloff-Smith developed a study in 1990 where she asked children aged 3–10 to draw an “impossible person,” i.e., a person who does not exist in reality. The differences in the drawings were striking. Younger children showed a preference for the changes of size and shape but did not add any elements or objects from other conceptual classes, such as clothes and toys. Four- to six-year-old children showed some flexibility, but in a very limited manner and by keeping quite close to the sequential order of their drawing procedure. By contrast, eight-to ten-year-old children added features from other conceptual classes, changed their drawing procedure whenever feasible, interrupted their drawing pattern, and even changed orientation (Karmiloff-Smith 1990: 57ff; see Fridland 2014: 86f.).

These findings demonstrate that the older children’s superior flexibility is not simply a matter of considering the number of changes but rather observing the kinds of changes they ar...