The family house is a distinct and recurrent context for child protagonists in picturebooks by Gro Dahle and Svein Nyhus. Based on Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope, which denotes the unity ...of time and space in a literary work, this article explores how concepts of time and space are depicted in three picturebooks by Dahle and Nyhus that are set within the family house context. The books were all published around the year 2000. Following Bakhtin's understanding that the literary chronotope emerges from real historical time and space, the article illustrates how the family house chronotope in the work of Dahle and Nyhus sheds light on the condition of being a child at the turn of the century. Furthermore, it is suggested that what I will term the Dahle and Nyhus' family house chronotope frames and enables both a vulnerable and strong child, thus reflecting an understanding of childhood in a Scandinavian postmodern context around the year 2000.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, the picturebook market has been flooded with books about children's emotions and psychological reactions to traumatic events. This psychological turn has been ...connected with the notion of the competent child. The Nordic countries in particular have become famous for viewing the child as a competent actor, a view that is substantially integrated into early years education legislation and curriculums for early childhood education. This article discusses the idea of the competent child in relation to an ever-growing discourse on children's citizenship. A thorough analysis of Lisa Aisato's picturebook Fugl (Bird 2013) will lie at the center of this discussion.
A multifaceted, classroom-based research project explored how developing Grade 7 students' knowledge of literary and illustrative elements affects their understanding, interpretation and analysis of ...picturebooks and graphic novels, and their subsequent creation of their own print texts. Analysis of two sources of data, the students' written responses to Amulet (
Kibuishi 2008
), one of the graphic novels read and discussed during the study, and the students' opinions about the knowledge that is required to read and understand a graphic novel, indicated how the instruction about various graphic novel conventions had impacted the students' awareness of and knowledge about the structural design of these multimodal texts.
This article analyses a specific number of picture book reviews on prize-winning Norwegian picture books from 1998-2008. The subject for the analysis is to examine what kind of aesthetic thinking ...that is expressed in the reviewer’s judgement of the book. I found that it was possible to relate the reviews to two well established concepts in classic aesthetic theory, namely the concept of the beauty and the sublime. To illustrate this I have studied more exhaustive a smaller number of reviews on two different books
The purpose of this study was to investigate what experts in the use of picturebooks in mathematics education consider powerful characteristics of such books in the support of young children's ...learning of mathematics. The study started by investigating experts' views of such characteristics, as reflected in academic and professional publications on the use of picturebooks in mathematics education. This resulted in a first version of a framework of learning-supportive characteristics of picturebooks. In the second part of the study the framework was refined, and its tenability was tested through a four-round Delphi method, in which seven experts were asked to comment on, and work with, the framework when evaluating three picturebooks. The experts' evaluations of these books showed that a larger number of learning-supportive characteristics were identified when using the framework than when not using it.
The classroom-based research discussed in this article explored developing elementary students' visual meaning-making skills and competencies. The study's instructional unit focused on a selection of ...visual elements of art and design in picturebooks, graphic novels, and magazines. As well as reading, responding in writing to, and discussing the focus texts, the 8- and 9 year-old children created their own multimodal texts during the research. Focusing specifically on the visual element of typography, this article presents the findings from the analysis of the students' small group discussions about Don't Read This Book! (J. Lewis and Allwright 2009). Data analysis revealed the students' genuine appreciation for and interest in the visuality of the verbal language in Don't Read This Book!, as well as their multifaceted understanding and interpretation of the typography in the picturebook.
Approximately 1.4 million school-aged children entered their families through adoption. As such, adoption represents a real and complex social issue with which young children—adopted or not—can ...grapple. Adoption picturebooks provide a medium by which children can explore this complicated concept. This manuscript analyzes a standard library collection of adoption picturebooks to explore the salient themes that arise throughout this body of children’s literature. Four major, yet overlapping themes emerged: the adopted child as “precious”, the search for identity, the pursuit of adoption, and the need to establish a sense of belonging. This study shows that the themes located within this subset of children’s literature are broad, fluid and often intricately woven together; a complexity that is mirrored through the same qualities in life. Through adoption picturebooks, children are provided with a terrain in which to explore the conceptual components that frame their identities and are presented with a space to examine the realities of adoption.
In Astrid Lindgren’s authorship, there are many bodies in motion, and one of her most movable and energetic characters is Pippi Longstocking. In the illustrated novels about Pippi (Lindgren and Nyman ...1945, 1946, and 1948) there are relatively few pictures, and as a result, Lindgren's words carry most of the story. In the novels, her words have a greater functional load (Kress 2003, 46 ) than Nyman’s pictures. Naturally then, the words convey most of the information about Pippi and the other characters' movements. But how does the portrayal of bodies in motion change when Pippi is portrayed in picturebooks where the pictures have a lot more space, ie, a greater functional load than in the illustrated novels? The aim of this article is to study bodies in motion in Astrid Lindgren’s and Ingrid Nyman’s picturebook Do you Know Pippi Longstocking? (1947). My main focus will be how words and illustrations – together and separately – provide the reader with information about Pippi’s movements in this picturebook. Keywords: Astrid Lindgren; Ingrid Nyman; picturebooks; bodies in motion; word-picture-relationship; iconotext (word-picture-reader-relationship); modal affordance; functional load
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