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Picturebooks represent a unique visual and literary art form that engages young readers and older readers in many levels of learning and pleasure. This form, however, is changing rapidly and in turn generating new possibilities for teaching and research. Knowledge of recent developments in picturebooks, ways of reading these books, and bridging picturebook forms and innovations with reader response will enable practitioners to initiate fruitful conversations about the importance of picturebooks in the curriculum and inspire new directions in research.
WHAT IS A PICTUREBOOK?
We begin by analyzing the terms in the book that identify this familiar object. One may find several spellings: picture book, picture-book, or picturebook. We find, however, that the compound word, "picturebook" (Marantz, 1977; Lewis, 2001), recognizes the union of text and art that results in something beyond what each form separately contributes. Sipe (in press) makes the argument that, "'Picturebook' emphasize[s] the inextricable connection of words and pictures and the unique qualities of the form: a picturebook is not simply a book that happens to have pictures." Further, as Arizpe and Styles (2003) point out, a picturebook is a "book in which the story depends on the interaction between written text and image and where both have been created with a conscious aesthetic intention" (p. 22). Sipe (1998) also argues that the actual reading event is part of a synergy created when text and art come together in the form of a picture-book; some new entity is revealed that is more than the sum of its parts. As the event of reading a picturebook evolves, readers integrate their responses to each element of the book into a complete experience. For example, Dresang (1999) describes the graphic synergy in Macaulay's Black and White (1990), the 1991 Caldecott winning picturebook in which the words that tell the story appear as the text of a newspaper article held by a character. At some point, Dresang suggests, "[the pictures] are so interrelated [with the text] that the reader sometimes cannot distinguish one from the other" (p. 90). Scholars of children's literature concur that in many ways it would be possible to call the object a picturebook text (Lewis, 2001, p. xiv) because the images and text work so tightly together to convey temporal and...