Exploring Student Response to Contemporary Picturebooks

'Sylvia Pantaleo is incredibly well versed in multiple intersecting literatures including literary theory, children's literature, as well as language and literacy pedagogy and curriculum. Exploring Student Response to Contemporary Picturebooks is a pleasure to read and its methodology is solid and significant. For these reasons, the book has the potential to become a classic.' -- Rachel Heydon, Faculty of Education, University of Western Ontario 'Exploring Student Response to Contemporary Picturebooks provides a significant and interesting contribution in its presentation of a medium that has been little explored as a potential source for elementary student learning. Sylvia Pantaleo's research shows the sophistication with which young children and elementary level students can approach such texts, and the sophisticated analysis of student work involving complex reading materials is also refreshing.' -- Linda Laidlaw, Faculty of Education, University of Alberta

Sylvia Pantaleo seeks to show the ways in which literature teaches artistic codes and conventions, critical thinking skills, visual literacy skills, and interpretative strategies.

Despite being a source of continuing interest to educational scholars, research into the literary understanding of elementary school students has emphasized written materials over multimodal mediums such as picturebooks. Focusing on students in Grades one and five, this book describes children's interpretations of and responses to a variety of contemporary picturebooks, specifically those books that employ Radical Change characteristics and metafictive devices. In dealing with picturebooks, Sylvia Pantaleo seeks to show the ways in which literature teaches artistic codes and conventions, critical thinking skills, visual literacy skills, and interpretative strategies.

Aside from investigating specific picturebooks, Pantaleo discusses the broader implications of reading, viewing, and creating print and digital texts in schools. These exercises, she argues, reflect the changing nature of communication and representation in the world of elementary school students. Incorporating postmodernism, social constructivism, and other theoretical frameworks, Pantaleo contextualizes her research and examines ways in which literature highlights broader social and cultural characteristics. An extensively researched look at the pedagogical value of literature in the classroom, this book introduces new dimensions to discussions of contemporary picturebooks in elementary education and the social nature of intertextuality.