DR. C’s MEDIA LITERACY:
PICTURE THIS:
Media Literacy & Children’s Picture Books.
In 1993 after the publication of the first edition of Visual Messages, I began to look at how to connect media literacy to the elementary school curriculum, in ways that would help teachers build on activities and resources they already were familiar with, at the same time that they embarked upon the new area of media literacy. Children’s picture books seemed like an excellent primer for media literacy since they were a commercially created art form that fused image and text, which could be read and interpreted in many different ways.
The initial work for this had been an article about picture books and visual literacy that I wrote for School Library Journal to coincide with the 1986 conference of the International Visual Literacy Association, that I chaired in Madison, Wisconsin.
The theme of that conference was, ‘Visible & Viable: The Role of Images in Communication and Instruction”.
Two of the featured speakers at that event were Morton Schindel, the head of the award-winning Weston Woods studios, which transformed children’s books into audiovisual versions] and Caldecott and Kate Greenaway medal winner, Gail E. Haley.
Haley would be the principal inspiration for the textbook. Imagine That: Developing Critical Viewing and Thinking Through Children’s Literature. Our other partner in the writing process would be Lyn Lacy, a library media specialist in the Minneapolis public school system. While Gail and I focused on the relationship between words and images in the design and layout of picture books.
Lyn Lacy would explore the representation of race, gender and nationality in children’s books and the increasingly complex and sophisticated world of pop-up books- or if you prefer, paper engineering. Today’s complex pop up books, deal with classic stories like Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz, as well as taking children on scientific tours of everything from the human body to sharks and dinosaurs. They all owe much to the pioneering spirit of Lothar Meggendorfer who developed moveable toy books in the 19th century.
In writing IMAGINE THAT we were struck by the number of times we located interviews with artists who made compared illustrating books to creating movies or working in other media. In fact some of the illustrators came from these related professions. Jerry Pinkney worked in advertising and Alice and Martin Provensen worked as illustrators for Disney.
George Shannon in his biography of Arnold Lobel tells us that “from his childhood he saw, story, film and theater as one”. Don Wood has stated that the picture book is “as close to a drama or 32 page movie as it is to either literature or art”.
Fred Marcellino said, “I was faced with creating characters and bringing them to life. It was so much fun, like making a movie –dressing them and posing them and moving them around”.
Gail Haley connected illustrating stories to puppetry. In developing her characters she often created 2 dimensional figures with movable limbs. These in turn often ended up on an overhead projector as part of shadow puppetry presentations –a field she became more enamored of after visiting Bali, which has an ancient tradition of shadow puppetry.
With a collection of puppets from Asia, Haley’s classroom visits often provoke empathy and engagement from immigrant children who see projected images that look like them not like their Caucasian classmates.
In 2006 Haley took the technique a step further creating My Father’s Beast using paper cut and developing die-cut figures as part of a therapeutic storytelling workshop to help children living in substance abuse to articulate their feelings.
Another illustrator with ties to media is Charles Mikolaycak. He has acknowledged the role mass media, particularly movies played in stimulating his childhood imagination: “I could observe details about clothing, faces and house furniture through movies”.
Movies also served as a source of inspiration for an intriguing 2007 book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznik. Part picture book, part graphic novel, this 533 page extravaganza uses visual devices that imitate cinematic techniques. Set in Paris in the early 19th century, the story involves a 12 year-old boy, automata [or clockwork/mechanical figures] and of all people, Georges Meilies, creator of the silent film, A Trip to the Moon.
If you find this book engaging and it’s hard to resist, and you are fortunate enough to get to the United Kingdom, head to York and spend half a day at the Museum of Automata. It’s stunning. Then go to the cathedral!
Looking for other books that use cinematic techniques? Try ZOOM by animator Istvan Banyai, or explore the opening frames of David Weisner’s, "Tuesday" to see the illustrator experiment with an establishing shot that slowly moves in on its subject.
Despite the fact that today’s picture books are increasingly sophisticated visually and are full of detail to be read and responded to, our research a decade ago, suggested that teachers received little training or education in the area of children’s literature, especially when it came to understanding the artistic technique and medium utilized by illustrators.
At the time this was further compounded by the tendency of reviewers to focus on words, text, genre and literary tradition, with scant attention paid to the role of images in conveying mood, representing cultures or providing information about characters, locations that were not addressed in words.
During her distinguished career, Gail Haley has attempted to take children, teachers and librarians behind scenes in the creation of her books, many of which employ strikingly different techniques. She documented some of her work in a series of programs for Weston Woods which included, “Tracing a Legend: The Story of the Green Man”, ‘Wood and Linoleum Illustration”, and “Tradition and Technique: Creating Jack and the Beantree”.
She would heartily concur with David Macaulay’s words at the start of Black & White: “careful inspection of words and pictures is recommended”. |
