The Art of the Picturebook

Catalog description

The Art of the Picturebook explores a wide range of picturebooks with the idea that illustrations are visual art evoking thoughts and feelings. Because picturebooks provide aesthetic experiences and contribute to aesthetic development, they are rich and important sources for literacy education. This course provides opportunities to extend students' repertoire of strategies for making sense of picturebooks, to deepen knowledge about picturebooks and the artists who create them, and to consider ways to help children become more sophisticated readers of picturebooks. While picturebooks are often emphasized as integral to the literacy development of young children, they can be engaging and desirable for older children as well. Course topics include picturebooks for the very young, as well as picturebooks that could appeal to elementary and middle school children. Whether picturebooks appear relatively simple and straightforward or contain innovatively complex or metafictive design elements, close readings of them with an understanding of terminology offer opportunities to express and discuss reactions and interpretations. The Art of the Picturebook provides students a forum for exploring preferences, ideas, insights, and questions about selected picturebooks, along with curricular and pedagogical considerations. Course readings include interviews with illustrators, selections about creating picture compositions, and scholarly essays presenting theoretical perspectives and ideas about picturebooks as literature and art for children's literacy development. This course emphasizes that reading and interpreting picturebooks is an active, creative process that is socially, culturally, and historically situated. Authors and illustrators are influenced by culture, so their art reflects values of that culture, consciously or unconsciously. A reader's experience with a picturebook is also influenced by cultural and social contexts in a given moment. Because engaging in aesthetic experiences is an active, creative process, reading picturebooks is, as Jane Doonan (1993), author of Looking at Pictures in Picture Books, asserts, a form of play. The Art of the Picturebook approaches picturebooks as sources of deep play. The course also provides opportunities to research selected illustrators, both for class discussions and an illustrator study project (e.g., a Wiki page). The culminating illustrator study project involves an in-depth investigation of a key children's book illustrator and a process of sharing works-in-progress with classmates for collaborative editing.