Teaching Advanced Visual Literacy
…people now unblushingly use the term ‘visual literacy’ when a few decades ago the concept, never mind the term, was undreamed of. Such an enormous shift in our ways of understanding the world and ourselves will undoubtedly have had an impact upon a form of text like the picturebook that self-consciously exploits the pictorial as […]
What Is Interanimation in Literacy?
Header painting: Eastman Johnson – The Lesson. An excellent example of red and blue as a colour palette.
Symbolic Annihilation and Symbolic Glorification
Symbolic annihilation is used to highlight the erasure of peoples in popular communication, including in children’s books, of course. I only heard of this term this week, thanks to an article at Jezebel, but I’ve been aware of the concept for a while. Once you start noticing how few non-white characters exist in modern picturebooks,…
Censorship of Children’s Books
App stores add an extra layer of ‘censorship’ when it comes to creating content for children.
Reading Pictures Is A Skill In Its Own Right
Any sort of close reading of a picture book turns the reader into a semiotician. What does this mean?
The Opposite Of Beer Brewed By Monks
Episode 55 of the 99% Invisible podcast goes into the strange psychological phenomenon whereby certain consumers will pay huge amounts for a scarce commodity. Alcohol and handbags seem especially open to this marketing manipulation, and in this case beer, not because beer connoisseurs are being manipulated per se, but because there is a monastery in Germany whose…
Glossary of Picturebook Terminology For Review and Analysis
Is it picture book or picturebook? When commentators put the two words together, they do so mindfully: The terminology we apply to books, texts and reading do not seem to attach to the picturebook so readily. For example, if we speak of ‘the text’ of a picturebook, do we mean the words or the words-and-pictures…
Decisions To Make When Storyboarding For Interactive Books
First things first: Does this story require an active and alert reader, and do the interactions reward interactivity and alertness? 1. Should interactions be user-initiated or autoplay? A mixture? I prefer narration to autoplay, with the option of turning it off completely from the main menu. When I have to press a button to start…
Why So Many Animals In Picture Books?
There are many reasons why storytellers sometimes use anthropomorphised animals as characters in very human stories. Here’s a list.
Do You Look Like Your Dog?
There are some researchers, who’ve been very lucky with their funding, who have studied the ways in which pets resemble their owners. If you’ve ever been to a dog show you’ll probably have noticed the phenomenon yourself. Sure enough, it’s been noted that when shown a random mixture of owner/pet photos, people are able to match…
Children’s Literature: How scary is TOO scary?
Writing scary tales for children is difficult, because it has to be interesting without being too scary. How is it done? Where’s the line?
