Abstract
This poster presentation uncovers the orientations to the world that are privileged in Australian early childhood literature. At age zero-six, a child’s reading experience is usually comprised of picture books, where images are a key component of storytelling and meaning making (Nodelman 1988; Doonan 1993; Painter, Martin and Unsworth 2013). Who and what children see in picture books impacts significantly on the impressions they have of the world, its shared values and even shapes their understanding of their own role and position in that world (Sims Bishop 1990; Sipe 1998; Styles and Arzipe 2001; Flannery Quinn 2006; Koss 2015). Despite calls from Australian authors, academics and advocacy groups (e.g. Lim 2019, @AnitaHeiss 2019, Sullivan 2019) to address diversity and inclusion in Australian children’s literature, there is little research investigating the transformational role of images in Australian picture books. Our research investigates which worlds are re-presented in Australian early childhood literature, including the extent to which marginalized communities in Australia (including Indigenous communities, migrants and refugees, LGBTIQ and gender-diverse people, people with disabilities, people of colour, etc.) are visually represented. The poster focuses on the results of our visual content analysis (Rose 2016; Boyle and Schmierbach 2015) of the 109 early childhood picture books (zero to six years old) that have been shortlisted for the Children’s Book Council of Australia awards since the inception of the Early Childhood Award in 2001. Our poster invites discussion of the design, production, and consumption of images in society.
Presenters
Helen CapleThe University of New South Wales, Kensington, Australia Ping Tian
Linguistics, The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
Details
Presentation Type
Theme
KEYWORDS
Visualization, Text, Perception, Multimodality
