Art, pain, children: utopian and dystopian discourses in picture books

It is often assumed that picture books are intended for young children and that they are therefore mainly concerned with safe and reassuring stories, say, about home and family, friends and starting school. There are many picture books which fit within this category, but the form itself, a 32-page format which developed during the 1960s from illustrated books, has always been peculiarly open to experimentation and has enlarged its audience to include older children and adults. Unlike the novel, the picture book is not weighed down by the practices and conventions of the past; and the combination of verbal and visual texts makes for a particularly complex genre as it constructs ideas through dialogical relations between words and pictures.

They went home: racialised spaces in contemporary picture books

This paper discusses Michel de Certeau’s theories of spatialised power and of resistance, especially his characterisation of what he describes as ‘tactics’ by which marginalised groups resist the strategies by which those in power gain and maintain control, in relation to a group of settler society picture books: Edna Tantjingu Williams, Eileen Wani Wingfield and Kunyi June-Anne McInerney’s Down the hole (2000); the Papunya School Book of Country and History (2001); Chiori Santiago and Judith Lowry’s Home to Medicine Mountain (1998); George Littlechild’s This Land Is My Land (1993); and Allen Say’s Home of the Brave (2002). These texts thematise colonial and assimilationist policies in Australia, Canada and the United States which required that racialised groups of children should be removed from their homes and families and placed in institutions. I argue that the first four of these texts position child readers both to understand the dislocation and pain caused by government policies such as those which enforced the removal of the Stolen Generation in Australia, and to appreciate the tactics of resistance by which children evaded or subverted institutional power. Home of the Brave deploys the symbolism of an adult’s journey into the past to show how strategies of repression serve to protect individuals and nations from shame and guilt, and demonstrates the transformative effects which result when the past is scrutinized.

There's no place like home : unhomely moments in three postcolonial picture books

One of the principal strands of postcolonial theory and critical practice is the interrogation of received versions of colonial history. This paper investigates the extent to which three contemporary picture books, Gavin Bishop's The House that Jack Built, John Marsden and Shaun Tan's The Rabbits, and Thomas King and William Kent Monkman's A Coyote Columbus Story, mobilise postcolonial strategies in their representations of place. In particular, it focuses on how postcolonial textuality unsettles and transgresses notions of "homeliness" in narratives involving the displacement of colonised and colonising peoples. As the shifting power relations of colonialism render unhomely what has previously been homely (especially for colonised peoples), so they involve a contrary move in which unhomely spaces are changed into simulacra of lost or abandoned homes. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin's formulation of materialist historiography, Homi Bhabha describes what he terms 'the unhomely moment' as that in which personal and psychic histories intersect with the violent dislocations of colonialism. This paper will argue that such unhomely moments shape the visual and verbal narratives of The House that Jack Built, The Rabbits and A Coyote Columbus Story, all of which deal with the trauma which occurs when cultures previously geographically and psychically distant are brought into close contact with each other. Written to and for children who are citizens of postcolonial cultures, these texts disclose the unease which persists in contemporary societies where colonial histories are rehearsed and revisioned. However, the paper will argue that the three texts position readers in quite different ways; for instance, while the verbal text of The Rabbits constructs an implied author capable of speaking for the colonised and offering readers a very circumscribed subject position, Thomas King's narrative in A Coyote Columbus Story engages in a dialogic playfulness which allows readers to adopt a variety of reading positions. For each text, some key representations of unhomely moments will be considered, and the paper will explore the extent to which they construct forms of temporality which negotiate the space between history and its significances within crosscultural and intercultural formations.

Picture books stimulate the learning of mathematics

In this article we describe our experiences using picture books to provide young children (five- to six-year-olds) with a learning environment where they can explore and extend preliminary notions of mathematics-related concepts, without being taught these concepts explicitly. We gained these experiences in the PICO-ma project, which aimed to generate more knowledge about the effect of picture books on young children's learning of mathematics. The project's goal is to investigate how picture books can contribute to the development of mathematical concepts in young children, and how the actions of the teacher can strengthen the characteristics of picture books that support learning. The reading sessions described in this article were not intended to be mathematics 'lessons'. Instead, the reading sessions were intended to tell the children a pleasant story and, at the same time, give them something to think about. Based on our research we provide reasons for using picture books to develop mathematical thinking, and include recommendations for practitioners interested in using picture books for mathematics learning.

Visual narratives in the children's picture story book : an investigation of the extent to which the formal structuring of a visual narrative retrieves a pastiche of past experiences and images which in turn shapes and redirects the story

Throughout this research, the notion that illustrators of children's books embark on two types of activity has been reinforced at every turn. On one hand the artist acknowledges the external world by organising images of actions and events in the contexts of place and time. This process involves bringing ideas into a physical form and demands the structuring of characters, settings, and story development. Planning and decisions are informed by imperatives that recognise the need for conventions of articulation and communication to a particular target audience. These then become a mayor priority of bookmaking and are constantly impacted on by publishers1 demands and ethical constraints. The other perspective sees the illustrator as expresser where the core of visual narratives for children celebrates the potency of imagination. Here dreams, fantasies, memories and the unconscious become the conduits to shaping sequential images. The artist is engaged not simply in visually telling a story, but rather telling facets of his or her own story. This exegesis traces the evolution of my own picture story book Eddie's Fantastic Fortnight published by Five Mile Press Publishers in tandem with the insights and reflections of five of Australia's most prominent illustrators. It examines whether the structure invested in a visual narrative liberates expressive response, ascribing to the premise that bookmaking plays an informing role to imagination. Equally it adopts the alternative position which asserts that the essence of children's books is indeed fantasy, memory and dreams. This proposition views imagination and inspiration as the primary catalyst around which illustrators build their narrative. In the often lengthy processes of bookmaking, these considerations constantly shift. I have attempted to explore and reveal these mobile and ever changing priorities, not only in my own work, but also through leading exponents in the field.

Dual audiences, double pedagogies : representing family literacy as parental work in picture books

Narrative for a dual audience of children and adults is a field of expanding interest among children’s literature scholars. A great deal of the extant research is implicitly or explicitly informed by longstanding anxieties about the status of children’s fiction, a context that shifts the parameters of the analysis to questions of literary sophistication. Whilst some attention is paid to the readersubject position of the child reader, rather less is given to the positioning of the adult reader in relation to the pedagogical agendas of such texts. This article examines picture books featuring parents reading to preschool children. In the context of family literacy, it is an instance in which the pedagogical address to the adult reader is as significant as the address to the child. Drawing on distinctions between double and dual address, the article examines the ways in which representations of parents.

Identity territory: Pamela Allen's picture books in the Australian psyche

Parsons examines the dialogic space of the picture book reading, and its co-opting of the authority of the "significant other" in relation to Pamela Allen's picture books. Mapping Australian identity theory in Allen's picture books involves recognizing Australian-ness as both formed and performed at a point of intersection between colonial, migrant, and patriarchal tropes. Each of these tropes is readable through the dynamics of theater semiotics, and each is mirrored by child maturation as embodied by a movement toward adult authority.

Picturing Australian history: visual texts in nonfiction for children

Time is one of the most prominent themes in the relatively young genre of children's literature, for the young, like adults, want to know about the past. The historical novel of the West grew out of Romanticism, with its exploration of the inner world of feeling, and it grew to full vigor in the era of imperialism and the exploration of the physical world. From the end of the 18th century, children's books flourished, partly in response to these cultural and political influences. After Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, literary works began to grapple with skepticism about the nature of time itself. This book explores how children's writers have presented the theme and concept of time past. While the book looks primarily at literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, it considers a broad range of historical material treated in works from that period. Included are discussions of such topics as Joan of Arc in children's literature, the legacy of Robinson Crusoe, colonial and postcolonial children's literature, the Holocaust, and the supernatural. International in scope, the volume examines history and collective memory in Portuguese children's fiction, Australian history in picture books, Norwegian children's literature, and literary treatments of the great Irish famine. So too, the expert contributors are from diverse countries and backgrounds.