[NIFL-WOMENLIT:3044] picture books

From: Daphne Greenberg (alcdgg@langate.gsu.edu)
Date: Thu Oct 14 2004 - 18:33:56 EDT


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Subject: [NIFL-WOMENLIT:3044] picture books
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Some of you may be interested in the following:

Picture books for children can deal with themes of oppression
and resistance in ways that are distinct from other types of
literature, say Roger Clark, a professor of sociology at Rhode
Island College, and Heather Fink, a preschool teacher at the New
England Center for Children.

"The visual dimension of these books," they write, "gives
authors and illustrators additional ways to express their own
resistance to oppression as well as to advocate other modes of
resistance."

Authors and illustrators may resist oppression by depicting it
graphically, for instance, showing the lower decks of a slave
ship or the aftermath of the nuclear bomb at Hiroshima.

They may also resist oppression, the authors say, by celebrating
difference, in an effort to "prevent children from turning
difference into internalized versions of oppression." Because
picture books, unlike books for older children, can be
essentially plotless and can simply focus on celebrating
variety, they are well suited to that form of resistance, the
authors say.

Many of the books the authors discuss are not ones that parents
or teachers would be likely to share with children unless they
felt it was important to remember and understand "how
constraining and painful particular kinds of oppression have
been," they write. But the books could be uniquely useful in
that context, they say, because "picture books have ways of
authenticating the experience of 'silenced' others that novels
lack."

The article, "Picture This: A Multicultural Feminist Analysis
of Picture Books for Children," is online at
http://yas.sagepub.com/current.dtl 



Daphne Greenberg
Assistant Professor
Educational Psych. & Special Ed.
Georgia State University
P.O. Box 3679
Atlanta, Georgia 30302-3979
phone: 404-651-0127
fax:404-651-4901
dgreenberg@gsu.edu

Daphne Greenberg
Associate Director
Center for the Study of Adult Literacy
Georgia State University
P.O. Box 3977
Atlanta, Georgia 30302-3977
phone: 404-651-0127
fax:404-651-4901
dgreenberg@gsu.edu



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