Some short thoughts on why picture books are so important

The young child hearing the words of a picture book being read, and looking at the pictures all the while, 'knows more' than the voice only saying the words! The child 'sees' what the text is not saying. This is great for a child's self-awareness and confidence.




Parents who share hundreds of picture books with their under-5s enable their children to make cognitive leaps through trying to interpret the logic and meanings suggested by the unstated differences between the pictures and the text.




I think it's much more than 'inference'. It's interpretation, cognition, logic, symbolism, holding several ideas in the head at the same time, the germs of abstract thought through analogy etc etc.




Curriculum which narrows responses to books to ‘retrieval’, ‘inference’, ‘chronology’ and ‘presentation’ cut off the ‘interpreting response’ which explores logic, cognition, emotion, empathy and ideas.Irony: this disadvantages those who didn’t have hundreds of picture books!




Tweeter: “...early reading books must include words which may be hard to decode to keep a child's interest.”




(My reply) ...or ideas, mysteries, excitements, tensions, fears, loss, hope, yearnings, wishes, dreams, reveries, boasts, downfalls, musicality...




Let’s not get trapped by the word ‘vocabulary’. Language is much more than vocab. What helps children is providing processes (books, games, experiments,outings) that are conceptually rich and which encourage leaps of interpretation.




Every time a child tells a story in response to a story they’ve read or heard, they’re selecting a common element from both and creating or affirming a schema. It’s the first step in abstract thought. We should aid this and not cut it off with a plethora of ‘retrieval’ questions.




Prediction is one of the pleasures of reading. Authors embed deliberate prediction-potential situations in their writing as if to say, ‘I hope you do some predicting now!’




Literature can’t be dismissed or patronised as ‘pure imagination’. It’s the mix of feelings and ideas attached to beings we recognise and care about. So literature can enable us to grapple with abstractions while we think we’re dealing with emotion. Or vice versa.




Starting from speech bubbles on murals at Pompeii, picture books, cartoons and graphic novels have evolved to tell multimodal stories in ways that ask readers to make leaps of understanding as they hop between text and image.



Picture books enable children to make cognitive leaps between text and picture as they figure out the relationship between word and image. This advances logic, perception, reason...and much more.

Why Tell Stories on YouTube?

Just in case anyone was wondering, there is a logic and rationale to what I do, even in cases where I seem to be 'just' telling jokes, or 'just' telling stories. 

For example, my son Joe has filmed me telling the stories of 'Till Owlyglass' (Till Eulenspiegel). These originate as short tales first written down in a cycle of tales in 1515 probably authored by someone called Herman Bote. I had an English adaptation of these when I was a child, loved them, and wrote my own adaptation of them as 'The Wicked Tricks of Till Owlyglass' published by Walker Books, illustrated by Fritz Wegener. 

I believe the stories are powerful, funny, subversive tales which defy the 'natural' social order, in much the same way as the Robin Hood tales. When he is a child, he defies adults, when he's a peasant, he defies the artisans, and when he's a full adult on the move across central Europe, he defies Lords, Dukes, university professors and, in his own way, ends up defying death. Though the great Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin doesn't refer to him, Eulenspiegel is the perfect fit for what Bakhtin called the 'carnivalesque' and one who produces 'subversive laughter', often through turning the world upside down, and indeed turning the human body upside down, making it 'talk' through its backside. Bakhtin's prototype was the works of the French writer, Rabelais.

In telling the stories direct to camera, I wanted to do several things: use the popular medium of the day, the internet, to show that story-telling still works, is still a great way to give people events, scenes, the interaction of characters through the use of our faces and bodies. It's what we all do every day telling each other about things that have happened to us. Story-telling is like a distilled or concentrated way of doing something that belongs to nearly every single one of us. 

I also wanted to do something else. In truth, it may look from the videos as if I'm telling the stories, but I am in fact reading an autocue. I am reading word for word what I wrote in my book. Of course, I wrote it with an ear to the sound, so that parents, teachers and children reading the book would get a sense of that oral storytelling world. In the present day world, then, I am offering what I hope is a 'bridge' between the oral and the written, via new technology. As part of that, we're putting the stories up 'day by day',  just as I've written the book, each chapter representing a 'day' when my brother and I (according to the book) hear the stories. 

It's the job of us adults - whether as parents, carers, teachers - to help children become familiar with the written way of saying things. It's a bit like learning another dialect or even another language: familiarity is crucial for getting the flow of sentences, plots, events, consequences, imagined possibilities. It's hard to do this if you're not familiar with the written way of doing this. I think of these stories (and indeed my own poems and stories) as half-way houses between the oral and the written. As I say, they are in a way 'bridges'. 

These re-tellings, then, as I see them bring together several interests of mine: the history of stories, the 'carnivalesque' and 'subversive laughter', and the role of the 'bridge' in language, literacy and learning. 

Here's the wiki entry on Till Eulenspiegel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Till_Eulenspiegel

Here's the wiki entry on Bakhtin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakhtin

Here's our video channel on YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/user/artificedesign/videos

Applying media methods of talking about Russian Revolution to Luther and the Reformation

Media analysis of the Russian Revolution is hardly getting beyond the idea that
a) it happened
b) some bad stuff happened later
c) QED the RR was bad.
d) PS Lenin had bad breath. And shaved his beard off.


I think we should apply this method to some other areas of history. How about Luther and the Reformation?
a) it happened
b) some bad stuff happened later (wars, famine, persecution, tyrannical regimes)
c)QED it was bad.
d) sorted.
e) PS Luther talked a lot about farting.

Unethical TV programme: Channel 4 'Secret Life of 4,5 and 6 year olds

I watched episode 1 of this series of the 'Secret Life of 4, 5 and 6 Year Olds' on Channel 4 and since seeing it have become increasingly disturbed.

Some context: when our students (most of whom are teachers), doing the MA in Children's Literature at Goldsmiths, conduct research with a class of children they have to fill in a rigorous ethics form, which is intended to ensure that children are not in any way endangered or distressed by the research. The guidelines are in 'Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research' published by the British Educational Research Association.

The programme claimed from its title that it was revealing the 'secret life'. In fact, it was a series of experiments on the children, in which situations were set up, sometimes putting the children in conflict with each other and on one occasion creating a situation in which it was likely that some of the children would be scared.

Needless to say, the contests or competitions were presented to the children as fixed and rule-bound according to the rules set by the adults - a mixture of the people running the nursery and the academics who watched what happened on video, making comments. Remember - the claim being made here is that these contests showed the 'secret life' of these children. In fact, it showed the children responding to fixed rule contests devised by adults in order to show that one or more children would be distressed by losing. In fact, it emerged that the child in question was probably more distressed that he didn't win the prize than actually losing. Educationally speaking, what is a TV programme doing telling children that if you answer some questions right, you win chocolates? Or, worse, if you answer them wrong, you don't get chocolates! In the aftermath of the contest, the child in question cried and seemed to be uncomforted for a while. Then we watched while the experts discussed why and how the child was distressed without any commentary on the fact that the whole situation had been engineered - unethically - by the researchers. 

Later in the programme, they set up another experiment which caused the same child distress. They showed that the boy knew a lot about dinosaurs. They asked him if he was scared of dinosaurs. No he wasn't. Then a man dressed as a 'keeper' brought in on a leash, a 6-7 foot tyrannosaurus rex (with someone inside). The boy was clearly scared. This was presented to us as revealing that in some way or another the boy was dishonest about his real state of fear. This again was clearly unethical and at the same time absurd. The more we know about T-Rex the more scared we should be, especially if grown-ups surround us with nonsense of notions that dinosaurs co-existed or still co-exist with humans! So the little boy cowered and - again - was distressed.  

What was all this for? What did it prove? Who benefitted from this 'research'? All it did was assert the right of adults to limit the choices of children, set up situations in which it could be predicted that one or more children would be distressed. This was done for our entertainment, showing us...what precisely? That grown-up researchers are clever people who know how to make 4 year olds cry? 

Of course there are programmes that can be made about the 'secret life' of young children. All you have to do is set up situations in which young children can discuss things, make things, play with things, plan things. To be fair to the programme, we did see scenes where children played in the home corner a couple of times, but these seemed to be interludes between the real 'knowledge' of the programme in these adult-led experiments, with predictable outcomes of conflict and distress. 

What is particularly worrying is that two academics were involved in this, sitting as it were to one side, commenting on and laughing at what the children were doing. 

Excuse me while I say something extreme. On many occasions in the history of psychological testing over the last 120 years there have been experiments conducted on children and adults. Some of these have been unethical and at a distance, we can easily see how monstrous they've been, with terrible consequences for the participants. Sometimes we scratch our heads and wonder how could people calling themselves psychologists have done such things? I think the answer to that question lies precisely in the way this programme was set up and carried out: the children were treated as if they were fodder for experiments, with no volition, sanctity of the person, no sense of their potential, no sense that an experiment could open up new possibilities, new educational insights. In fact, the educational value of the dinosaur experiment was precisely the opposite: it was educational rubbish from several perspectives at the same time.

If anyone reading this runs an education or psychology course, could I please recommend using this 'documentary' as a perfect example of how not to run educational or psychological research? 

"Common sense" or how we learn what they want us to learn

1. British diplomat comes on the radio and talks about countries in the middle east and complains that some of them show what he calls 'bad behaviour'. The interviewer accepts the terms of this conversation that someone representing a country that has meddled in the middle east for 200 years, setting up countries, knocking others down, siding with this or that group and then switch allegiances, leading up to the final and most terrible intervention of all, the Iraq War - all this is 'below the line', out of view, apparently not part of the equation in which this diplomat talks 'reasonably' about other people behaving badly!


2. In another interview, Lord 'Two brains' Willetts, now a supposedly important person in some quango or other 'explains' on the radio how perhaps it's OK for 'older workers' to subsidise 'younger workers' pay. The terms of this discussion are that the only money in the kitty of a country is that earned by workers. Profits, inherited wealth, the trillions sitting in tax havens - it's all out of view, not in the equation, not 'relevant'. Again, totally unchallenged by the interviewer. What Willetts was suggesting is apparently one reasonable 'solution' on the table.

Capitalism discovers something about low wages...

Capitalism discovers that low wages don't buy the stuff that capitalism sells. So capitalism lends money so that people can buy stuff that capitalism sells. Capitalism discovers that high debt is fine so long as people can afford to pay the interest on the debt. Capitalism finds that things might get tricky if people can't afford to pay the interest....

Young people are borrowing to cover basic living costs, warns City watchdog

FCA boss expresses fears over growing debt burden of young people saying more and more are being forced to borrow simply to pay day-to-day expenses

THEGUARDIAN.COM

Ed Balls on 'This Week'.

Just been watching This Week. Ed Balls has become an endangered species - not because he’s been hunted down but because the climate’s changed. He sits in the corner like a rhino that can’t stand up and issues long plaintive mutters that no one understands or even tries to understand. There must be a comfortable but useless stable for him somewhere: like becoming the chair of a small charity that deals with people who wish they were cats.