Exploring the Artwork in Picturebooks with Middle Years Students.

Content analysis of middle years students' written responses reveal their understanding, appreciation, and interpretation of the artwork in The Wolf's Story: What Really Happened to Little Red Riding Hood.A PICTUREBOOK IS an aesthetic object, an art form (Bader, 1976) worthy of study by readers of all ages. In picturebooks, the total effect depends on the text, the illustrations, and the reciprocity between these two sign systems, where "we adjust our interpretation of the pictures in terms of the words and our interpretation of the words in terms of the pictures" (Sipe, 1998, p. 103). Many scholars have theorized about the relationship between the modes of image and writing in picturebooks, proposing terms, schemes, metaphors, and taxonomies to describe the associations between the visual and verbal texts. As well, the findings of several studies have revealed elementary and middle school students' articulate and complex interpretative responses to picturebooks (e.g., Pantaleo, 2008, 2010, 2012; Roser, Martinez, & Fowler-Amato, 2011; Sipe, 2008c). Picturebooks were one format of multimodal text used during the classroom-based research that is featured in this article. Although the research conducted with a class of grade 7 students had several overarching purposes, the two most relevant to this article were to investigate student development of visual meaning-making skills and competencies by focusing on specific visual elements of art and design in a selection of multimodal texts and to explore student comprehension, interpretation, and analysis of multimodal texts. This article focuses solely on the students' responses to and interpretations of some of the artwork in the picturebook The Wolf's Story: What Really Happened to Little Red Riding Hood by Toby Forward (2005). As a result of the content analysis of the students' written responses to this particular picturebook, point of view, framing, and color are the three semiotic resources of image featured in the discussions below.Brief overviews of relevant literature and the theoretical frameworks that guided the exploratory study with the grade 7 students are followed by descriptions of the research context, the instructional unit, and the procedures used for analyzing the students' written responses. Excerpts from the students' work reveal their observations and interpretations of particular images in The Wolf's Story. The article concludes with a consider - ation of various teaching and learning issues pertinent to the exploration of artwork in picturebooks in middle years classrooms.The Artwork of PicturebooksAccording to Sipe (2008b), "the literary understanding of picturebooks includes learning to read the visual text of the illustrational sequence" (p. 18). As art objects, picturebooks are invaluable sources "for developing [students'] visual aesthetic understanding" (Sipe, 2008a, p. 131). As well as understanding the role of visual images in the narrative of a picturebook, the art medium, the art style, the elements and principles of design, and the peritextual features can be considered when examining the images in picturebooks. However, critical exploration of picturebooks in relation to these features requires a process of close looking, where readers "go into the pictures in a systematic way" (Doonan, 1993, p. 19). The findings of numerous studies have revealed how students, regardless of their cultural or linguistic background, academic ability, or age, have articulated insightful interpretations of the artwork in picturebooks (e.g., Arizpe & Styles, 2003; Martens, Martens, Doyle, Loomis, & Aghalarov, 2012; O'Neil, 2011; Pantaleo, 2012; Sipe, 2008a; Walsh, 2003; Youngs, 2012). For example, the analysis of data gathered during a multifaceted study by Arizpe and Styles showed how capably the children, ages 4-11, "read colours, borders, body language, framing devices, covers, endpapers, visual metaphors and visual jokes" (p. …