Picturebooks and aesthetic literacy in early childhood education

In their everyday lives, children are immersed in a world of images. They grow up interacting with images and visual screens long before they learn to read. In toddlers, visual precedes verbal alphabetization. They learn to look at and recognize people, animals, and objects long before they learn to name them. What is more, their assiduous use of digital devices forges their way of looking at the world – a way in which the main route via which they receive information relies on images, certainly not words. If this awareness is combined with a literary, iconographic, aesthetic, and sociocultural expertise, this way of gaining knowledge in childhood can generate effective educational outcomes. Children’s literature can contribute to the training of this expertise, particularly as regards iconic narration and aesthetic sensitivity. Aesthetic sensitivity is “present when people begin to engage in sustained questioning about art, particularly in terms of different sorts of awareness regarding qualities of the objects being considered” (Rostankowski 1994: 117). A promising field in children’s literature research concerns the study of the nature and elements of aesthetic experiences in picturebooks. Which reading experiences are aesthetic and why? When do children have them? There is ample evidence that children have aesthetic experiences (Muelder Eaton 1994). Reading different kinds of picturebooks enables young readers to develop a sophisticated visual competence and aesthetic literacy, as shown by several recent studies (Arizpe and Style 2003; Beckett 2018; Campagnaro and Dallari 2013; Druker and Kümmerling-Meibauer 2015; Evans 2015; Kümmerling-Meibauer 2014). Seen from this point of view, picturebooks can be a relevant resource in the design of aesthetic education schemes, they can help to reflect upon aesthetic experiences, and they can be “instrumental in drawing students into more rewarding productive activity” (Muelder Eaton 1994: 20). The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate how a more articulate and critical relationship with aesthetics through picturebooks may foster a highly-formative educational experience and to present a working model that attempts to develop aesthetic literacy in early childhood. This chapter is divided into five parts. The first part deals with the topic of visual prejudice in education and some of the reasons why visual narratives are penalized at school. The second part describes a study, “Come and Meet Bruno Munari,” conducted at a nursery school with children from 27 to 39 months old. It focuses on the importance of promoting projects of aesthetic literacy right from early infancy, drawing on the materiality of books, and book-objects in particular. The third part presents an educational and methodological proposal that could prove useful for constructing pathways of aesthetic sensitivity with young readers. This involves using picturebooks that emphasize both the aesthetic and pleasurable experience of reading and the status of the picturebook as an aesthetic object. The fourth part discusses a case study on the picturebook Emilia Mirabilia (2016), intended for children ages 7 and 8, in which this approach is undertaken with more mature readers. Finally, the last part of the chapter underscores how important it is for teachers and educators to develop the expertise they need for fostering the aesthetic literacy of young children. Consequently, this chapter places an emphasis on the semantic complexity and the educational potential which can emerge from a reading of picturebooks and which is crucial in the literary, visual, and aesthetically-oriented sense. It can be compared to a unique constellation of textual and visual features “which can be described as a coherent pattern or gestalt, contributing, in the particular work of art, towards the overall artistic design or vision. This uniqueness is, so to speak, part of the logical makeup of the concept of an aesthetic feature” (Haugom Olsen 1981: 525).