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Purpose: The paper shows the interpretive impact of different constructions of the point of view available to the reader/viewer in book and animated movie versions of a children's picture book, a novel for pre-adolescents/early teenagers, and a graphic novel for adolescents and adults. Design/Approach/Methods: Excerpts from book and animated movie versions of the same story are compared using multimodal analysis of interpersonal meaning to show how the reader/viewer is positioned in relation to the characters in each version, complemented by analyses of ideational meaning to show the effect of point of view on interpretive possibilities. Findings: Focusing mainly on multimodal construction of point of view, the analyses show how interpretive possibilities of ostensibly the same story are significantly reconfigured in animated adaptations compared with book versions even when the verbal narrative remains substantially unchanged. Originality/Value: The study shows that it is crucial to students' critical appreciation of, and their creative contribution to, their evolving digital literary culture that in this new era of educational technology, attention in literacy and literary education focuses on developing understandings of digital multimodal narrative art, and that animated movie adaptations are not presented pedagogically as isomorphic with, or simply adjunct to, corresponding book versions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies Rudine Sims Bishop's multicultural framework of children's literature to environmental picturebooks. The paper provides an analysis of nearly 150 picturebooks paired with preservice teachers' responses to the texts to highlight the importance of diverse narratives and storytelling in environmentalism. The paper argues for the necessity for reading broadly and prioritizing diverse representations of which stories are told regarding environmentalism. Bishop's framework prioritizes the depth and breadth of who can be protagonists in environmentalism narratives, real and imagined, as well as how those protagonists enact responses to climate crises and the range of environmental issues that they respond to. The paper underscores the role of educators in fostering critical perspectives on environmentalism, advocating for disrupting single stories, and ensuring that a collection of texts that includes justice‐oriented and intersectional narratives is used with young readers. The article challenges dominant cultural narratives and promotes inclusivity in environmental activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Early childhood and early elementary are key times when children develop internal and external antifat attitudes; thus, it is necessary to better understand the available children's literature around fatness.This paper aims to examine children's picture books with fat protagonists to better understand the current landscape of children's literature. Drawing on relevant literature around fat characters and the fat studies movement, this critical content analysis considers five children's books featuring fat protagonists. Design/methodology/approach: This study uses critical content analysis to analyze texts featuring fat protagonists, including two rounds of initial reading and analysis. Using lenses of critical literacy and critical multicultural analysis, the author looks for common themes, silences and absences in the texts, images and peritext. Findings: This paper identifies themes of characters initially internalizing antifatness, then pushing back against antifat bias toward existing with joy and without stigma. Several of these texts even draw on the history of fat activism, highlighting societal critique and a potential activist component of children's literature with fat protagonists. Research limitations/implications: The study has a small number of books, due to the limited number of texts that fit the study parameters. Practical implications: The paper concludes with examples of scaffolding for teachers and parents to have conversations with young children about antifat bias while also acknowledging notable absences, particularly boy protagonists. Social implications: These themes illustrate the power of young children to push back against antifat bias and critique oppressive social structures. Originality/value: There have been very few studies looking at antifatness in children's picture books. With more books with fat protagonists coming out in the 2020s, this study offers an understanding of the themes present, while also emphasizing the need for an intersectional approach to literature with fat protagonists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, it is aimed to examine the knowledge levels of parents with children aged 0-3 regarding the criteria they consider when choosing a children's picture book. The study was carried out with a qualitative research approach. The study group consists of 69 parents with children aged 0-3, and the data of the study were collected through a semi-structured interview form developed by the researchers. After the data were subjected to content analysis, they were presented in tables. As a result of the research, it has been revealed that parents with 0-3 year old children should have quality children's books and the features they pay attention to when choosing children's books, the child's interest, internal structure and external structure. It has been found that when choosing a children's picture book, parents pay particular attention to its suitability for the age and development of the child, its plain language, the presence of vivid colors and its nonviolence. The content of the images is thick cardboard and the book is neatly bound with the appropriate font and image size. By looking at the outer coating and quality of quality paper, they think about whether it is educational, entertaining, creative and contains a concept of value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we aim to explore the interconnection between Children's Literature and contemporary technologies, though not from the perspective of technology as a didactic tool or as a media to produce or reproduce literary texts. Instead, we examine how technology is present in books for children and picture books. This approach is based on the concepts of children's literature, and childhood and technologies. We also present an initial corpus of stories and picture books either about technology or in which technology structures the book or the narrative. Our conclusion is that in some texts the encounter of both worlds produces significant literary experiences. However, there is a literary core that cannot be integrated with technology. This tension is also part of the cultural representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although gender-role stereotypes in children's literature have been widely explored, the study of the role of mothers and their representation in picturebooks has not received much attention from the academic world, especially as far as Spain is concerned. This paper analyses a sample of seven picturebooks published in Spain over the last 7 years -all by awarded authors and widely reviewed in some of the most popular Spanish blogs on Children's and Youth Literature (CYL)-and focused on the maternal figure. It aims to provide a panoramic view of the representations of the role of the mother as a paradigm of the changes seen in Spanish society, studying the representation of her voice, emotions, and ties to other members of her family through a systemic functional-multimodal discourse analysis applied to picturebooks. The results reveal that, for the first time, the mother's voice and her right to explore her own feelings are included in her characterisation, and also, that her relationship with the rest of the family includes different aspects—children, society, work, partner, and self-care. In conclusion, the conception of motherhood as proposed to Spanish families through picturebooks seems to be finally changing, evolving from fixed stereotypes and allowing the expression of contradictory feelings related to maternity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's picture books contribute to children's development of gender identity and can impact aspirations and expectations of roles in families and society. However, the world represented in children's books reflects predominantly middle class, heterosexual, male heroes and characters. This paper reports on a cross-cultural study investigating gender representation in frequently read picture books across eight early learning centres in the United States and Australia. Forty-four educators working with 271 children participated. Data were collected from book audits and observations. Unique to this study is the presentation of a new data analysis instrument, Harper's Framework of Gender Stereotypes Contained in Children's Literature. The majority of the books shared by educators in this study promoted traditional, binary and stereotypical viewpoints of gender and gender roles. These findings are concerning as the evidence shows that gender development is a critical part of the earliest and most important learning experience of young children and a requirement of educational policies rooted in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to reflect on the parallelism between traditional and digital literature while analyzing the offer available on electronic market platforms. Taking into consideration adaptations of children's literature classics and original productions, such as enhanced books and apps, the paper purpose is to focus on interactivity and on the various degrees of involvement of the "digital reader" increasingly direct towards a prefigured visual narration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Magistra Iadertina is the property of University of Zadar, Department of Teacher & Preschool Teacher Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how the contemporary "refugee crisis" is being presented to children through picture books and teaching materials. It uses the concept of refugeedom as an approach that takes into account the multiple facets involved in the forced movement of people in the past and present and seeks to show the value of historical understandings in educational contexts when framing resources for teachers and students. Design/methodology/approach: The paper examines a sample of high-profile English language picture books about children's stories of forced displacement and the most prominent freely available teaching materials connected to the books. A critical discursive analysis of the books and educative guides considers the ways in which ideas and information about forced displacement is framed for child readers and children in primary school classrooms. The context for the authors' interest in exploring these books and educational resources is that in response to the numbers of children who are part of the current "refugee crisis" alongside a public call for the "crisis" to be explained to children. Findings: The paper argues that picture books open up spaces for children to explore refugeedom through experiences of forced movement and various factors involved in the contemporary "refugee crisis". In contrast, in the teaching resources and some peritextual materials, the child in the classroom is addressed as entirely disconnected from children who are forcibly displaced, students in classrooms are positioned to learn from the refugee "other". When links are made between students in classroom and children who have been forcibly displaced it is through activities that position students in classrooms to imagine themselves as forcibly displaced, or to suggest they act within a humanitarian framework of welcoming or helping refugees. The authors believe that if teaching resources were more directly informed by discipline specific tools of historical concepts, more nuanced approaches to past and present histories of forced movement could be considered and from that more fruitful learning opportunities created for all students. Practical implications: This research provides ideas about how materials to support the use of picture books in educational settings could be developed to promote historical thinking and contextualisation around key social and political issues in the world today. It also makes the case for historians to be involved in the creation of teaching materials in a collaborative way so that academic insights can be brought to teachers and students at all levels of education. Originality/value: The value of this research is to understand how children are positioned in reading and learning about forced displacement and query the impact of decontextualised approaches to learning. It argues for the critical interpretative value that historical understanding can bring to present day issues which are history in the making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's literature invariably reflects the views of adults. Likewise, what they think is desirable or not for children is also reflected in children's literature translations. Yet adult assumptions, or ideology, may not always be in line with how children actually respond. This paper delves into this issue of ideology in terms of character name translation in Japanese picturebooks translated into Korean. While the majority of source text names are retained in English-to-Korean translations through transliteration, they are often changed into Korean names in Japanese-to-Korean translations. Interviews and an online questionnaire survey were conducted with Korean adult readers to find out how they respond to such differences, followed by an experiment with Korean children to see whether what adults think, revealed through the interviews and a survey, is consistent with how children actually respond. This paper hopes to shed light on how adult ideology affects children's book translation, and how this can sometimes be misleading to children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By ending her first book with this memorable instruction, to play with her research, Field once again reminds readers that books are meant to be material objects and experienced both physically and ephemerally. Hannah Field's interdisciplinary expertise shines in her first book, Playing with the Book: Victorian Movable Picture Books and the Child Reader. By acknowledging how pop-up books transcend the physical confines of their pages, Field pushes bibliographers to reconsider dimensionality (such as page size or width) as one of their primary categorization tools when dealing with picture books. [Extracted from the article]

This paper centres on children's books in which the polyphonic technique of counterpoint has been successfully adopted. It is assumed by the author that the examples discussed in this essay show an intentional lack of coherence of the verbal and visual storylines, thus addressing the dual audience and opening the books up to multiple interpretations. The paper mentions intertextuality, which places Potter's and Janosch's work in children's literature tradition. Through a comparative study of Beatrix Potter's selected tales and two children's books by Janosch, the concept of a ‘book as game’ clearly emerges, in which the text and illustrations play equally essential roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines representations of heteronormativity (and its influence) across several kinds of literature aimed at a child (and sometimes adult) audience, and does so by examining relationships between language and sexuality. The study firstly focuses on the study of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks, giving an overview of research from the literature. The authors look at heteronormativity in these overtly pedagogical texts and consider some implications for textbook writers and analysts when challenging predominantly heteronormative representations of sexuality in these texts. The authors then consider representations of sexuality in children's fiction. The prevalence of heteronormativity in the Harry Potter series is considered in relation to broad aspects of identity (gender, sexuality, class). Heteronormativity vis à vis homonormativity is then discussed in relation to the analysis of a large collection of picturebooks featuring same-sex parents, the results of which suggest that, although gay and lesbian parents feature as central characters, the manner of representation largely reflects heteronormative relationships and parenting discourses. The paper concludes by identifying challenges, in particular for EFL textbook writers and publishers. Producers of these texts have to consider a global audience part of whom is likely to reject material that offers alternatives to heteronormativity. The authors suggest strategies that could be used to offer representations of heteronormativity of a 'lesser' degree (such as same-sex friend scenes) that allow for alternative readings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite primarily catering to a U.S. audience for whom religion exerts a greater influence than anywhere else in the Western world, children's picture books dealing with the first landing on the moon in 1969 are reticent to conceptualise it in religious terms. Significantly, this is the same approach that NASA adopted when seeking to communicate their understanding of space exploration (Bellah, 1967; Tribbe, 2014; Wilson, 1984). The authors and illustrators of When We Walked on the Moon (Long and Kalda, 2019), Hidden Figures: The True Story of Four Black Women and the Space Race (Shetterly and Freeman, 2018), My Little Golden Book About the First Moon Landing (Lovitt and Sims, 2019), One Giant Leap (Burleigh and Wimmer, 2014), The First Men who went to the Moon (Gowler Green and Brundage, 2019) and Where once we Stood (Riley and Impey, 2019) employ the nationalistic "rhetoric and belief and the ritual and symbolism of the American space program" and celebrate the international scientific-technical achievement which enabled its success (Wilson, 1984, p. 210). By positioning their work within the parameters of a civil religion, which by its nature is a fluid belief system, and only implying a religious dimension, the authors and illustrators avoid polarising the reading public. In the U.S. context this is a vital commercial consideration, for research has consistently shown that religious belief is associated with less positive explicit and implicit attitudes to science and lower levels of science knowledge. This has its counterpoint in a greater interest in science on the part of people from non-religious backgrounds. The analysis of these picture books is framed by four of the 'secular' tenets of civil religion identified by Anthony Squiers. The findings reveal that the authors and illustrators have used civil religion as a means of engaging with the moon landing without adopting a solely scientific or religious perspective, a strategy that enables a wide cross section of readers to derive an understanding of the landing consistent with their world view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Field uses "movable" in the subtitle of her book as an umbrella term that includes novelty books. (Why Field chose this particular diagram is unclear, but a satisfying link can be made to the White Rabbit in the first of the Alice books that Field mentions on page 1.). [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the concept of biophilia and its potential role in education, particularly in relation to children's literature and school gardens. The authors use personal narratives and reflections to highlight the importance of personal experiences and memories in understanding and connecting with biophilia. They emphasize the need for educators to encourage and foster biophilia connections in their students. The article also discusses the impact of certain books on readers' understanding of their environment and their evolving literate identity. It emphasizes the potential for change and reflection that reading offers. The authors highlight the diverse and multifaceted nature of the natural world and the importance of exploring and understanding it through literature. They also discuss the concept of "autobibliography" and its potential for bringing biophilia into the classroom. The article concludes by emphasizing the awe-inspiring qualities of nature and the impact of such experiences on our understanding of the natural world. The hope is that these experiences can inspire teachers in their work and encourage them to incorporate nature into their teaching. [Extracted from the article]

This is a preliminary study of the aesthetics of Philippine children's literature. It also discusses the challenges of children's literature in the country as a legacy of our colonial history. Using socio-historical criticism as framework, this study also explores the problems and challenges of a mainstream, capitalist, and colonial production of children's literature. This paper also discusses the representation of childhood and the corresponding role of children's texts and texts for children. In the end, the paper presents concrete recommendations regarding aesthetics of children's literature according to the needs of the nation and the readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's literatures presently are produced widely through media production either as remediation of printed stories or originally produced in digital form. The current most sought after digitized communicative practice of the media is the digital children's picture book app due to its multimediality and interactivity. This quality of the picture book app paves the path for an aesthetic and cultural transformative exchange. However, these digital children's picture book apps have been found to contain diversity and multicultural gaps. Furthermore, the noncognitive/affective quality of these interactive digital book apps that is evoked through senses like touch, hearing and sight needs further investigation. Hence, through a qualitative approach, the digital children's picture book app version of the Malaysian animated series Upin and Ipin: Storybook: The Rain and The Sea Part 1 was selected as case study for this paper. Selection criteria consisted of three aspects; narration being in English and contained Semiotic Technology i.e. digitized meaning-making modes, the contents reflect characters, symbols and narratives that portray Malaysian culture, history and identity. The research reveals a postcolonial aesthetic that extensively operates based on the ideologies of the dominant class or culture through the representations of ethnic nationalism. This shows a builtin intrinsic value according to the context of the dominant culture that can be found in the aesthetic engagement in the transcultural space of this picture book app. This article contributes to scholarship cross-cultural engagement in the affective space of postcolonial digital picture books. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children's literature can serve as mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors. They are mirrors for marginalized groups to see themselves represented, windows for dominant cultures to learn about marginalized groups, and sliding glass doors to develop empathy. In this study, I examined Middle East Picture Book Award to address what books are available about Middle Eastern Muslims who experience xenophobia and Islamophobia; and identify the books that serve as mirrors-windows-sliding glass doors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shares findings from part of a larger project exploring students' interpretations of children's literature during independent reading time. Examined in this paper are interpretations by students in Grade 4 (aged 9-10 years) about the messages conveyed in the almost wordless picture book Mirror by author and artist Jeannie Baker. Mirror shares a multicultural perspective on life through its portrayal through collage of the lives of two families living in different countries. Data were collected as semi-structured interviews and observations recorded as field notes. Chambers' (1994) 'Tell Me' framework informed the question schedule of the semi-structured interviews, which were designed to promote opportunities for students to share their interpretations following independent reading time. Emerging themes from data analysis are considered through critical literacy lens (Janks, 2010). Further, implications for the use of almost wordless picture books in classroom reading experiences are identified in connection with the development of children's cultural awareness and sensitivity (Short, 2003). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim. School segregation is a common theme of children's books on minority groups living in the United States. Although it is primarily associated with black-white racial divisions, currently it also concerns white-Latino or rich-poor disparities. The aim of this paper is to analyse children's picture books featuring Latino and African American characters who participate in the struggle against school segregation. The authors of the books, being members of racial minorities themselves, offer differing perspectives on the problem. Although they criticise school segregation, they also focus on the white perspective and the reasons why integrating schools has always been hard to achieve. Methods. The study analyses the visual and verbal narratives of selected picture books using a variety of methods for examining this literary format. Among others, it applies the theory of picture book analysis by Martin Painter, William Moebius, Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott. Results. The article shows that despite the existing scholarship on race-related problems in American schools, children's literature seems to be the medium which tries to explain the problem to youngsters being directly involved in the system of segregation. Conclusions. The results can be useful to educators who cope with the issue of racial diversity in American schools. They may consider using selected titles of children's literature as teaching aids assisting students from minority groups in the process of self-development and empowerment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Picture books are an important and accessible form of visual art for children because they offer, among other things, opportunities for making connections to personal experiences and to the values and beliefs of families and communities. This paper reports on the use of a picture book to promote Year 4 students' making of text-to-self connections, which they expressed through visual art. A funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) lens was used to analyse the representation of students' out-of-school lives and experiences within the artworks. In this paper, we argue for a pedagogical approach that creates opportunities for children to respond to picture books through visual art, identifying artworks as powerful avenues of insight into children's funds of knowledge that can inform literacy pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of OCNOS: Journal of Reading Research / Revista de Estudios sobre Lectura is the property of Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, Facultad de Ciencias de la Educacion y Humanidades and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Journal of Elementary Education / Revija za Elementarno Izobraževanje is the property of University of Maribor, Faculty of Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper explores the textual-linguistic norms evident in the translation of culturally specific material in a sample of translated South African children's books in Afrikaans and English, with a view to investigating the tensions between domestication and foreignisation, particularly as related to different types of books, such as primers, local picture books, and international picture books. A detailed qualitative textual analysis of micro-level translation choices relating to cultural orientation is presented, comparing the 21 translations in the sample with their source texts, and comparing subsamples of different types of books with one another. The analysis suggests the prevalence of hybrid translation strategies that orient translated texts in multiple cultural directions, but also indicates potentially significant differences in this regard between different types of books, with translations of international picture books tending towards greater use of domesticating strategies, despite their generally culturally generic background. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores children's picturebooks about death and grieving by considering both psychological and literary aspects. Two questions frame this analysis: How can picturebooks, particularly written for young children, support children's grief when someone dies? How do the illustrations and text of picture books express and convey the aesthetic and emotional experience of loss? Using both psychological research on children's grief reactions and literary analysis of picturebooks, this paper reviews picturebooks that have been published on the topic of death from 2001 to 2011 and then closely analyzes three books that span a range of topics and approaches to death. Findings indicate that children's picturebooks convey important psychological and cultural issues through text and illustrations. Furthermore, understanding some of the psychological and literary features of children's picturebooks that address death and grieving can help educators to provide support and understanding for children when they experience loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

lthough gender-role stereotyping in children's books is a consistent focus of research, the study of the gender role stereotyping of parenting in particular is less common, despite a developing academic interest in the changing social meanings of fathering and mothering in contemporary societies. Previous analysis has suggested that fathers are under-represented in children's books and when present, are less likely than mothers to be featured expressing affection towards, or caring for, children. This paper reports the results of a content analysis of a sample of best-selling young children's picturebooks in the UK which feature representations of parents. It was predicted that fathers would feature less often, particularly at home, and be less likely to be depicted sharing physical contact with other family members, involved in domestic chores or childcare activity, or expressing emotion. The results upheld a number of the hypotheses, indicating that fathers remain 'invisible' in an important sense. However scenes featuring fathers with children, some forms of physical contact, or caring for children were not significantly less likely to feature in these picturebooks than equivalent scenes featuring mothers; perhaps reflecting a more progressive portrayal of 'involved' fatherhood. The findings are discussed in terms of their methodological, social, and political implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization makes living in the world more complex. Many children live as social cyborgs attached to the digital spaces of the virtual play worlds of television, video and computer games rather than connected to their own local places. The impact of this change may well be that children lack acquaintance with their local places and may never develop the ecological literacy or the positive attitudes toward place that is so crucial to its sustainability. This paper presents an autoethnographic study of a third grade class engaged in reading picture story books that featured place-based settings in partnership with embodied learning textually and visually through art, photography, poetry, story writing and environmental journals of class field experiences along their local river valley. Combining place-based education with social constructivist pedagogy fostered places for learning for children to create a knowing that they, too, can take action for places where they live throughout their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'creativity' is often used as though it's meaning is obvious. However, we repeatedly mistake "part of the phenomenon...as the whole phenomenon" (Sternberg, 1999: 12) and consider the final product as separate from the process undertaken to produce it. Moving past traditional notions of creativity as the singular product of divine inspiration, genius or madness, we should then be able to move towards a more empirical and rational examination of this phenomenon. With this in mind it is proposed that, drawn from the accumulated research into creativity over the last sixty years, the theory used to consider creativity for this paper is a confluence approach, that is, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's systems model of creativity (1988, 1996 & 1999). Using this model as a basis for research, instead of ascribing creativity to one singular force, it becomes clear that creative producers operate within a system of circular causality whereby they are influenced and affected by multiple factors including the cultural and social contexts in which they exist. Through a small case study of 5 producers of Australian Children's Literature it can be seen that individual writers engage with a domain of knowledge and a field or social structure that regulates that knowledge in order to produce 'novelty' (Csikszentmihalyi 1999, Boden 2004, Sternberg & Lubart 1995, Weisberg 2006). With this evidence in place it can be argued that the implications for reconsidering creativity in a rational context are therefore important in influencing the way creativity is taught and learnt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cumhuriyet International Journal of Education is the property of Cumhuriyet University, Faculty of Education and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

While touch is the first sense to develop in the fetus, it has often been overlooked as the effective base of aesthetics and poetics in baby books. Likewise, while haptic prosody is a concept deployed in discussions of advanced poetic form, it generally only signifies touch rather than literally inviting it. The rhythm and theme of many baby books, in contrast, actively encourage (and even demand) touch—and this touch is not incidental to the books' prosody but a haptic means of realizing the biological realities on which poetic rhythm is arguably founded: the tension and release of the heartbeat and the breath. Both of these phenomena are uniquely tangible to the unborn child and are organized and elaborated in the haptic prosody of the baby book. If, as Derek Attridge has written, it is not possible "to discuss [poetic] rhythm without relating it to the movements of the human body," baby book prosody is of particular interest, given its themes and rubrics that dictate and imply human movement and touch. This article offers an early-stage analysis of surprisingly concretized touch-based prosody in a wide range of popular board books, soft books, and touch-and-feel books. While not unique to baby books, this tactile focus is distinct from the more virtuosic prosody of later-childhood picture books where rhythm functions in the abstract. Metered baby books assume a prior rhythmic competence in the baby, something already present which they intend to arrange and refine—per Stephen Blackwood's balancing "patterns in sense experience... [as] deep, innate structures" with the essentiality of aesthetic intervention and development. They also offer a vision of prosody, not as an arbitrary set of rules but as an organization of something endogenous to human biology. Far from exercises in affirming uniqueness or autonomy/defiance, these books instead induct the child into the rules-based environment of formal poetic prosody as well as the rule-breaking inherent in this prosody. In so doing, they provide innovative methods to not only better understand baby lit through poetic theory, but also to showcase the tremendous potential of baby lit to better understand the haptic origins of poetic rhythm at all levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Findings: Shared-picture book reading can stimulate children's mathematical development. Evidence of learning-supportive characteristics in picture books is limited in this domain. A first step is systematically analyzing the occurrence of domain-specific features in publicly available picture books. We analyzed the occurrence of general book features, features of numbers and quantitative language, and features of sets in 100 mathematical and 45 matched non-mathematical picture books written in Dutch. The results indicated variety among picture books, but more than 50% of the mathematical picture books focused on the 1–10 number range and ascending counting, and less than 20% paid attention to the counting principles and other numeracy skills. Quantitative language was included in 75% of the mathematical picture books, but infrequently across pages and with little variety in wording. Mathematical picture books with a story hardly differed from picture books without a story regarding the presence of domain-specific features. Finally, fewer non-mathematical picture books included mathematical content and generally on less pages compared to mathematical picture books. Practice or Policy: These findings stress the importance for picture book developers and teachers and parents to, respectively, design and select picture books in view of literature regarding children's mathematical development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Contextos Educativos is the property of Universidad de la Rioja, Servicio de Publicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article focuses on Emmaline Ellis, the recipient of the 2022 CLA Research Award, for her study "The Role of Print Salience in Book-Related Interactions in Preschool Settings." It study explores how print salience, defined as prominent and compelling print elements in book design, impacts discussions about books in early childhood settings.

The work of the French illustrator and writer Gilles Bachelet has been recognised through numerous awards, but he is not yet sufficiently well known in the critical community. In this article, the multilevel humour that constructs his work is studied, both from an iconic and a textual perspective, as well as the situational humour and the humour of characters that emerge through metafiction, self-referentiality and heteroreferentiality. For this purpose, the theories of humour in children's literature and the classifications of types of humour offered by different researchers are used as a starting point, and a mixed model of analysis applicable to Bachelet's work as a whole is proposed. In addition, the analysis of each of the picturebooks is based on the most recent studies on the components of the current picturebook, such as its narrative construction, type of reading, characteristics and organisation of text and image. In this way, the postmodern features of Gilles Bachelet's works, which make him a crossover author, are revealed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]