by Janine Schall, University of Texas-Pan American, Edinburg, TX
The world has changed. What it means to be literate has changed.
Ok, so that’s a little portentous and possibly even cliché. It’s still true. Yet, if you look into many of today’s K-12 literacy classrooms you will see lessons, engagements and room arrangements that look almost identical to what you would have seen 50 and even 100 years ago. This is a problem.
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by Marilyn Carpenter, Eastern Washington University
One of the benefits of attending the IBBY conference was discovering new friends. It was a special delight to meet authors from other countries. The conversations we had during breaks, at lunch, at evening receptions and at dinner offered enriching ideas to take back to share with my students and colleagues. Devika Rangachari is an author from India who became a new friend. Attending her session and learning about her research regarding the role of women in Indian history was informative. She gave me one of her books, Harsha Vardhana.
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by Carmen M. Martínez-Roldán, University of Texas, Austin, TX
The IBBY Congress offered multiple opportunities for learning about the reading experiences offered to children in different parts of the world. One of those experiences that was the focus of lively discussions involved children reading wordless texts in the project, “Visual journeys: Understanding immigrant children’s responses to the visual image in contemporary picture books.” Dr. Evelyn Arizpe, from the University of Glasgow, coordinator of the project, Dr Cecilia Silva-Díaz and Brenda Bellorín, from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, and myself from The University of Texas at Austin, shared the power of the visual image in the graphic novel The Arrival by Shaun Tan (2006) with linguistically different audiences in two workshops. We engaged the participants in reading and responding to the images of The Arrival and shared what we have learned about children’s responses to the text.
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by Janelle Mathis, University of North Texas, Denton, TX
The realization that other young citizens of the global community have messages of empowerment, or agency, to share with children of the western world is perhaps one of the most important roles of international literature. The literature, in which the main characters reveal agency through identity, voice, decision-making, and taking action according to their learned perceptions of a situation, is one way to accomplish that exchange of ideas. That was one of the outcomes for individuals who attended the IBBY Congress last month as active participants in IBBY’s role of building bridges across global cultures. Continue reading
by Kathy Short, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ
Every two years, the International Board of Books for Young People holds a World Congress in different locations around the globe. The congresses are excellent occasions to make contacts, exchange ideas, and open horizons to global perspectives. In September, 600 people from around the world gathered in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, for panel discussions, lectures, seminars, and workshops around the theme of the strength of minorities. I have found that many so-called “world” conferences are actually primarily composed of Americans who use the conference as an excuse to travel abroad. This was not the case in Santiago—the attendees came from over 63 countries with only 40 of the 600 from the United States. The sessions focused on a wide range of issues related to minority languages and issues of inequity related to children’s books within various cultures and countries. Continue reading
by Prisca Martens, Towson University, Towson, MD
During September we have explored how learning to read mulitmodally by integrating the pictorial text with the written text in picturebooks relates to young children’s reading development. We’ve examined children’s responses to picturebooks when they learn to read multimodally and also discussed classroom experiences that support that learning/reading.
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by Prisca Martens, Towson University, Towson, MD
This week I’ll provide an example of the kinds of curricular experiences my co-researchers and I designed for the first graders to help them learn to read the pictorial text in picturebooks. As I shared last week, at the end of the school year most of the children were making sophisticated observations and reading meanings in the illustrations, in addition to the written text, which enhanced their understandings.
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by Prisca Martens, Towson University, Towson, MD
In last week’s blog we reflected on the various modes or semiotic systems through which our culture communicates meaning. These include visual (i.e., art, moving images), linguistic (i.e., language), auditory (i.e., sound, music), gestural (i.e., movement, dance), and spatial (i.e., layout, design). Picturebooks are multimodal, drawing on the linguistic, visual, spatial, and gestural systems. Schools and society, though, tend to emphasize the written text for constructing meaning at the expense of the others.
My colleagues and I are in the second year of a three year study exploring how, in picturebooks, learning to read meanings through a variety of modes relates to beginning readers’ reading development. We worked with 37 first graders in two classrooms last year. At the beginning and end of the year we asked the children to read a picturebook and retell it and then respond to questions about the illustrations without the book in front of them.
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by Prisca Martens, Towson University, Towson, MD
In our ever changing world it is not surprising that the concepts of literacy and what it means to be literate continue to evolve. The traditional definition that associates reading and writing with print on paper no longer encompasses the range of texts literate persons encounter on a daily basis. These texts can be printed on paper or transmitted electronically, sometimes even in real time. They come in a range of representational forms. Today’s communication systems can be multimodal, linear or nonlinear, and even depart from the traditional left to right or top to bottom orientation.
Semiotic systems are systems of signs through which societies or cultures share meaning. These sign systems may be language based, visual (i.e., art, moving images), auditory (i.e., sound, music), gestural (i.e., movement, dance), or spatial (i.e., layout, design). Each sign system conveys understanding in unique ways and offers its own exclusive perspective on a particular cultural meaning. Texts are one way of communicating meaning in a social context. Multimodal texts employ more than one semiotic system, with each system contributing in a different way to how the text is comprehended.
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Sandy Kaser, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona
Francisco Jimenez’s homepage:
This site has some general biographical information, a list of all his publications, his educational and professional background, study guides specifically helpful for students and educators in reading his books and information on the best way to contact Professor Jiménez at Santa Clara University.
www.scu.edu/cas/modernlanguages/facultystaff/jimenezhomepage.cfm
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