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More on the Whole Book Approach and Visual Literacy
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From: Megan Lambert <lambertmegan_at_yahoo.com>
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 08:19:05 -0700
Thanks for the kudos on my ALSC pre-conference talk, Megan. It was actually published in Children & Libraries, so here's the citation for anyone who'd like to look it up: Lambert, Megan. "Gutter Talk and More: Picturebook Paratexts, Illustration and Design at Storytime" Children & Libraries: The Journal of the Association for Library Service to Children , Winter2010, Vol. 8 Issue 3, p36-46, 8p.
K.T.--I love your storytime story about "rewinding" The Blushful Hippopotamus! It makes me think of another storytime model I developed for work in toddler and preschool classrooms while I was at The Carle, called A Book in Hand. (Perhaps this will be my next professional book project? I'll have to put a bug in Charlesbridge's ear...). I'd give every child a board book copy of the book I was reading aloud and we'd go through it together. I admit, sometimes A Book in Hand got out of hand, so to speak, but the programs also generated some amazing experiences. In particular (this is where the rewinding bit comes in), at the end of the storytime we'd often line up our copies on the floor, end to end, and open to successive pages so that kids could see the entire book laid out before them. When we did this with Carle's Very Busy Spider, it allowed children (and me) to think about sequencing and to notice how the animals on the verso pages get progressively
smaller, while the web on the recto pages gets progressively more intricate and filled in. Children wanted to track the movement of the fly from page to page and used great prepositional phrases to describe where it was in relation to the animals. This experience also worked well with Donald Crews's Freight Train and many other books.
But back to Raschka's work: I cited this quotation from a Booklinks essay he wrote when we were on a panel together at ALA Annual in 2013 called Calde-Totts, amd I think it really speaks to Megan's questions about what we mean when we refer to visual literacy:
"Beyond appealing art, there is the art that advances, in the words of Rudolf Arnheim, “the child’s intelligence of seeing.” We’re comfortable with the idea of a child’s verbal intelligence growing with and by means of literature. But we tend to take visual intelligence for granted. Or we dismiss it as simply the routine camera-like function of the eye. But eyes are much more than this. They think. They learn. We know there is value in the intelligence of the eye, we have big museums dedicated to it, but we’re not sure how to teach it. How do you teach color, form, line? You do it the same way you do words and sentences and ideas, by slowly increasing the level of complexity, depth and multi-layeredness. When the same care is taken in the use of formal elements of art—color and composition, for instance—as is demanded in art for adults, a child will inevitably become more visually intelligent, just as is the case in reading when care is
taken in shaping the text of a story." From: Chris Raschka, “32 Pages and a Chipmunk; Or, What Is Appropriate Art for Children?” Book Links 7, no. 4 (March 1998): 36.
Isn't that marvelous? I've always loved Chris's art, and his thoughtful way of talking about his own work and the place of art in children's lives and learning makes me an even bigger admirer of his contributions to the field.
I actually had a graduate student who did an independent study on using the WBA in her preschool classroom with a focus on his books. She documented some great work with The Blushful Hippopotamus in particular, and if she's on this list I hope she'll chime in to share her experiences. I recall, in particular that she noted how she resisted pointing out the changing sizes of the characters in order to let the conversation emerge from the children's observations. They ended up moving the discussion in a different way, commenting on the ice cream cone in the pictures and how eating too much ice cream can be unhealthy and perhaps that's why the sister wasn't growing like her brother was. I may be getting the details wrong here, but the children were basically not seeing the expressive or metaphoric reasons for the characters' changing sizes, and were instead puzzling out other reasons.
Even if this doesn't get to the precise "teachable moment" a teacher or librarian or parent might have in mind (in this case getting kids to see the expressive power of the characters' changing sizes), I really like the idea of allowing kids to make meaning of what the see on their own terms. So I try (and sometimes fail) to guide children to attend to a certain part of a book but then to back off and let them interpret it how they will. For example, when I read Brown Bear, I might identify the endpapers and ask children to talk about what they see, but I resist layering on my own interpretation. This allows kids to not only come to their own articulations of their observations, but to say things I never would have thought of. One of the reasons I made the picturebook such a big part of my professional life is that I am not a strong visual thinker, and I love how pushing myself to think with my eyes, and more so to listen to others doing so, has given me
so many moments of wonder and delight in realizing new ideas and possibilities.
Megan
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Received on Thu 11 Sep 2014 10:19:43 AM CDT
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 08:19:05 -0700
Thanks for the kudos on my ALSC pre-conference talk, Megan. It was actually published in Children & Libraries, so here's the citation for anyone who'd like to look it up: Lambert, Megan. "Gutter Talk and More: Picturebook Paratexts, Illustration and Design at Storytime" Children & Libraries: The Journal of the Association for Library Service to Children , Winter2010, Vol. 8 Issue 3, p36-46, 8p.
K.T.--I love your storytime story about "rewinding" The Blushful Hippopotamus! It makes me think of another storytime model I developed for work in toddler and preschool classrooms while I was at The Carle, called A Book in Hand. (Perhaps this will be my next professional book project? I'll have to put a bug in Charlesbridge's ear...). I'd give every child a board book copy of the book I was reading aloud and we'd go through it together. I admit, sometimes A Book in Hand got out of hand, so to speak, but the programs also generated some amazing experiences. In particular (this is where the rewinding bit comes in), at the end of the storytime we'd often line up our copies on the floor, end to end, and open to successive pages so that kids could see the entire book laid out before them. When we did this with Carle's Very Busy Spider, it allowed children (and me) to think about sequencing and to notice how the animals on the verso pages get progressively
smaller, while the web on the recto pages gets progressively more intricate and filled in. Children wanted to track the movement of the fly from page to page and used great prepositional phrases to describe where it was in relation to the animals. This experience also worked well with Donald Crews's Freight Train and many other books.
But back to Raschka's work: I cited this quotation from a Booklinks essay he wrote when we were on a panel together at ALA Annual in 2013 called Calde-Totts, amd I think it really speaks to Megan's questions about what we mean when we refer to visual literacy:
"Beyond appealing art, there is the art that advances, in the words of Rudolf Arnheim, “the child’s intelligence of seeing.” We’re comfortable with the idea of a child’s verbal intelligence growing with and by means of literature. But we tend to take visual intelligence for granted. Or we dismiss it as simply the routine camera-like function of the eye. But eyes are much more than this. They think. They learn. We know there is value in the intelligence of the eye, we have big museums dedicated to it, but we’re not sure how to teach it. How do you teach color, form, line? You do it the same way you do words and sentences and ideas, by slowly increasing the level of complexity, depth and multi-layeredness. When the same care is taken in the use of formal elements of art—color and composition, for instance—as is demanded in art for adults, a child will inevitably become more visually intelligent, just as is the case in reading when care is
taken in shaping the text of a story." From: Chris Raschka, “32 Pages and a Chipmunk; Or, What Is Appropriate Art for Children?” Book Links 7, no. 4 (March 1998): 36.
Isn't that marvelous? I've always loved Chris's art, and his thoughtful way of talking about his own work and the place of art in children's lives and learning makes me an even bigger admirer of his contributions to the field.
I actually had a graduate student who did an independent study on using the WBA in her preschool classroom with a focus on his books. She documented some great work with The Blushful Hippopotamus in particular, and if she's on this list I hope she'll chime in to share her experiences. I recall, in particular that she noted how she resisted pointing out the changing sizes of the characters in order to let the conversation emerge from the children's observations. They ended up moving the discussion in a different way, commenting on the ice cream cone in the pictures and how eating too much ice cream can be unhealthy and perhaps that's why the sister wasn't growing like her brother was. I may be getting the details wrong here, but the children were basically not seeing the expressive or metaphoric reasons for the characters' changing sizes, and were instead puzzling out other reasons.
Even if this doesn't get to the precise "teachable moment" a teacher or librarian or parent might have in mind (in this case getting kids to see the expressive power of the characters' changing sizes), I really like the idea of allowing kids to make meaning of what the see on their own terms. So I try (and sometimes fail) to guide children to attend to a certain part of a book but then to back off and let them interpret it how they will. For example, when I read Brown Bear, I might identify the endpapers and ask children to talk about what they see, but I resist layering on my own interpretation. This allows kids to not only come to their own articulations of their observations, but to say things I never would have thought of. One of the reasons I made the picturebook such a big part of my professional life is that I am not a strong visual thinker, and I love how pushing myself to think with my eyes, and more so to listen to others doing so, has given me
so many moments of wonder and delight in realizing new ideas and possibilities.
Megan
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Received on Thu 11 Sep 2014 10:19:43 AM CDT
